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Mr. George Osborne (Tatton): Has my right hon. Friend seen the interview with Paul Wolfowitz, which reveals that WMD became a sort of bureaucratic reason to bring together the different agencies in Washington to make the case for war against Iraq? That supports my right hon. Friend's argument.
Mr. Portillo: I have not seen it, but it does indeed support what I have been saying. We now have two sources for this view, which makes it relatively quite reliable as a view! It was under those circumstances that tremendous pressure was applied to officials.
I do not want to overstate the case against the Prime Minister. It appears from what we know now—it will be supplemented by further reports from the Intelligence and Security Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee—that the Prime Minister put more weight on to the intelligence than it could properly bear. That has done immense damage to the Prime Minister, to his Government and, I fear, to the intelligence services because it puts a question mark over their work. It will be much more difficult for people to take intelligence seriously when it is presented to them in future. That is the really serious point: there will be circumstances in
the future in which a Government or a Prime Minister will need to persuade this country to do something very unpalatable in order to defend our best interests. Such an action could be of a pre-emptive nature that is judged, on the basis of intelligence, to be important and necessary. The appalling debacle in which the Prime Minister and Mr. Campbell have been involved will mean that it will be much more difficult for a future Prime Minister to make a case for such action, even though it might be very urgent and important for this country.4 pm
Mr. Kevin Barron (Rother Valley): First, I want to echo the words of my right hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Ann Taylor), who chairs the Intelligence and Security Committee, of which I am a member. She praised the staff who work in the different agencies, both in the UK and elsewhere in the world, under circumstances that are sometimes incredible, and I echo those sentiments.
I shall not speculate about what the Committee will find out in the next few weeks and months in respect of the matters that have dominated the debate so far. We issued a press release a few weeks ago, in which we stated that we would not give a running commentary on our work. I intend to stick to that, and I am sure that other members of the Committee will do the same.
However, the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) suggested at the end of his speech that there was a difference between our Committee and its counterparts elsewhere in the world, especially the US. I want to point out that the Committee recently met both of the US oversight committees to discuss how they have conducted their inquiries. Hon. Members will know how our Committee works, and will be aware that our inquiries are not held in the open. The idea has been around in the media for quite a while that the US committees will hold their inquiries in the open, but that is not true. They will take the vast bulk of their evidence—if not all of it—in very much the same way that the UK Committee does.
It is true that public hearings are sometimes held as the US committees near the end of their inquiries. I believe that that is more of a bit of grandstanding for the benefit of television cameras, the public and possibly even the egos of the politicians involved. In the six years that I have been on the Committee, that has never happened. My instinct is that we should not follow the US example, but in the end it will be a matter for members of the Committee to decide. It is up to us to determine how to take evidence, what witnesses to call, and what conclusions we reach in the next few weeks.
I want to raise two matters that have not been mentioned so far. If they are not of interest to the House, they certainly are of importance to the public at large. The Committee does not exist merely to draw up an annual report that is published and debated in the House. It is a parliamentary oversight Committee, but it looks after another major interest—how intelligence may or may not affect the British public.
In each of the six years that I have been a member of the Committee, our interest in the use of intelligence in law enforcement has grown. It has been very much a moving picture. We have argued in earlier reports that more resources ought to be devoted to that area, as there are large gains to be made in relation to serious crime. We have worked with national law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community helps them in all sorts of ways to protect the interests of the British public.
In the past 12 months, for the first time since I became a member of the Committee, we have looked beyond Customs and Excise and the National Criminal Intelligence Service and extended our consideration to the work of special branch. We make no recommendations in that regard. I was pleased that we decided to inquire into special branch activities, and that we received the necessary co-operation. As the report makes clear, we had meetings with the special branch of the Metropolitan police. We also visited my local special branch in south Yorkshire, and we took evidence from the chief constable. I was reassured about the work of the special branch and its co-operation with the intelligence services, especially MI5, which does not always share locally everything that it finds.
We also looked at the structure of the special branch, which is not coterminous with Government regions. The report noted that Yorkshire and Humberside shares its special branch with the north-east region. We made no recommendation about that, but it is something that could be examined in future.
I think that the House and the public would be happy to know that we had examined other aspects of intelligence work.
Simon Hughes: I note that the report includes no recommendation on the special branch. Does the right hon. Gentleman think that we would do better with fewer special branches, possibly organised as they are in London, on a regional rather than a local police force basis?
Mr. Barron: The hon. Gentleman answered his question when he said that the Committee had made no recommendations. I think that there are issues arising from special branch funding, as currently constituted, because it comes from the chief constable's budget. There are many pressures on such budgets and that may affect the efficiency of the local special branch. In our discussions with special branches, we were assured that resources were found if necessary. The Committee was happy with what it found, but it is for other people to decide whether the special branch is properly resourced. We made no recommendations; we stated the facts.
My other major point is about imagery intelligence, and it, too, relates to budgets. Paragraph 61 refers to our report last year and expresses our concern that imagery intelligence purchasing and decision making come under Ministry of Defence resources. Last year, we concluded that that should be reconsidered. Although the armed services are the main users of imagery intelligence, there are many other uses for such systems. Their use is growing in other fields. We were concerned that budgeting was through the MOD rather than through the JIC or the single intelligence account.
- "Last year, the Government response to our report stated that 'the necessary levels of finance will be made available to meet this important national requirement'. We are concerned that the MoD has only been able to provide limited funding—'what we could afford'—to buy into"—
- "the necessary levels of finance will be made available to meet this important national requirement".
Before I finish my speech on our annual report—I hope that more Back Benchers will be able to make speeches—I wish to say that I am satisfied, as a Member of the House, that nothing is hidden from us and that the duty on us, now and in the not-to-distant future, will be to report everything to the House, as we did on the Bali issue, so that it can be debated and the public can judge whether or not intelligence is used properly by our agencies and the Government.
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Mr. Michael Mates (East Hampshire): I start by echoing the words of my fellow members of the Committee in our praise for the security services—all of them—on the way that they do their job. I should like to add one point, which we mention in the report: so much of what they do successfully can never be told. We have heard of amazing intelligence successes that cannot be reported to anyone, but when they do make mistakes—they are humans, so they do err—we hear about their failures; they tend to be rather more spectacular. We must understand that so much of what they do is so vital to our security that, when we do criticise them, it must be read in that context.
I wish briefly to try—I doubt whether I shall succeed—to help the House over the vexed question of the asterisks, the deletions. Every year since such debates started, we have had to take a fair amount of ridicule on the subject, and we do so with very good nature. Every year, when we have a press conference, we get a cynical reaction from the members of the press, which we have to bear as well as we can. However, it is very important that we should be able to report in full to the Prime Minister on the conclusions and the intelligence that we have received, because we are different in that regard from a Select Committee. Therefore, because of the nature of our work, there should be no cynicism about the fact that people outside the House are not told things. They cannot be told about them because of their very nature.
Some years ago, I had the good fortune to be the Chairman of the Select Committee on Defence. Every year, because the Trident programme was being developed, we had to report on that and, every year, quite a lot of what we reported was not allowed to be
published and had to appear as asterisks, but because it came under the heading of Trident and the replacement of our ballistic warhead, nobody minded; they understood that that was secret.By the same token, I believe that it would be fair if people did not take quite so much mickey out of us over the asterisks, but remembered that almost everything that we hear comes in the same category as Trident, and that therefore we have to be very careful. Let it be said, however, that the asterisks are the Government's, not ours. They are the people who say that disclosure of the information would be damaging. As the right hon. Member for Newport, East (Alan Howarth) said, we robustly challenge such things, and I can tell the House that quite a number of suggested deletions have been overturned, after discussion, which is why we are able to say that nothing has been deleted without our consent. Perhaps, next year and in the coming years, we can be excused the ritual humour about the things that we have to leave out, although I very much doubt it.
I want to make one point only about the report because the right hon. Member for Dewsbury (Ann Taylor) covered the main points excellently, and my other colleagues have done the same. There is one item that I feel particularly strongly about for reasons that I shall tell the House. In paragraph 89, we report very briefly on our concerns about the possible threat to us from the ability to transmit firearms, drugs and other dangerous goods through the post.
I happened to come upon that issue in the other job that I do, which is chairing the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs. During our inquiry into the financing of terrorism, we discovered a most appalling breach, which came out in the court case of the three IRA people who were arrested in Florida. They had sent firearms through the post to the IRA in the Republic of Ireland. That channel was chanced on, and within three days more than 100 weapons and weapons parts were found to be going through it. I know that the Committee, as we say in the report, is concerned about that, and we are looking into it in much more detail. From further work that I have been doing with the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, which is in the public domain, I know that we have not got this right. I hope that the House will be reassured to know that the Committee will look at this as soon as we have dealt with the question of the intelligence and the Iraqi situation, which is what concerns us now.
I believe that it was said on "Newsnight" last night that those in our Committee were on rather light duties. May I say, therefore, that we are meeting eight times in the next two weeks and at least three times in the recess? I do not say that to receive a wave of sympathy from the rest of the House but to state the fact that we are working all the hours that we can to report on this matter as soon as possible.
In response to the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Portillo), both of whom made very thoughtful comments and asked extremely pertinent questions, I am sure that every single one of their questions will be addressed by us and that we will want to provide answers that will convince the House as to all the reasoning. Unlike the Foreign Affairs Committee, we will not be grandstanding or making public statements
while we have our inquiry. We will be able to report objectively on the facts as they have been shown to us, and as they will be shown to us over the weeks to come. When the House has had a chance to see all of that, I hope that it will realise that we are nobody's poodle and nobody's puppet. The fact that we are on the Prime Minister's Committee is irrelevant to that, but will help us enormously in the work that we have to do.
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