Arms Exports (Iraq)

Part of Orders of the Day — Opposition Day – in the House of Commons at 6:11 pm on 23 November 1992.

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Photo of Mr David Steel Mr David Steel , Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale 6:11, 23 November 1992

I congratulate the President of the Board of Trade on a very good speech to the Conservative party conference. The problem is that this House is not the Conservative party conference, and I suspect that Opposition Members are not the only people to resent being treated as though it were. There are serious issues to be addressed, relating to the conduct of Government; the motion attempts to address them, but a number of them were not addressed by the right hon. Gentleman.

I shall begin by asking some questions about the nature of the inquiry, and I intend to quote from documents, but I shall not name any civil servant in relation to those documents, because I am old-fashioned enough to believe in ministerial responsibility. Ministers will know the documents from which I intend to quote.

My first point concerns the nature of the inquiry. At the time of the internal Government inquiry into the Westland affair—in which the President of the Board of Trade had more than a passing interest—I complained to the then Prime Minister that, had she been living in the real world, she would have been charged with wasting police time. I am now concerned that we should not waste Lord Justice Scott's time.

I believe that the terms of reference that he has been given are drawn too narrowly. In my view, it is not a question of inviting Lord Justice Scott to report on whether the relevant Departments, Agencies, and responsible Ministers operated in accordance with the policies of Her Majesty's Government. I am prepared to accept for the sake of argument that they may well have done that, in relation to the terms of reference. The question is: why was an overt policy relating to supplies to Iraq declared to the House and the public while a covert policy was pursued by Ministers over quite a long period?

A letter written today by the Prime Minister to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Liberal Democrats referred to the reasons for holding an inquiry of this kind, rather than a tribunal. According to the Prime Minister, a tribunal would have suppressed all questions in the meantime". That brings me to my first question. I know that the Secretary of State for Defence is to reply to the debate, and that the matters that I intend to raise are not strictly within his departmental responsibility, but I hope that we shall receive answers none the less.

My first question relates to the current police inquiries about the conduct of Mr. Alan Clark. Like the Secretary of State for Defence, I am just a humble graduate in Scots law, and I do not entirely follow English legal proceedings, but the Attorney-General will correct me if I am wrong.

Am I right in believing that the current police inquiries into the conflict between the written and oral evidence of Mr. Alan Clark are pretty routine and have nothing to do with Ministers? Am I also right in believing that, if a decision were made to prosecute Mr. Clark because of that conflict, the prosecution could be stopped by the Attorney-Gerneral? If I am right, I believe that the Attorney-General should stop the prosecution. Not only would prosecuting Mr. Clark make him a scapegoat, as the hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook) suggested earlier, but it would also do exactly what the Prime Minister said that a tribunal hearing would do—that is, render the whole matter sub judice—and thus hamper Lord Justice Scott's inquiry.

The House wants the truth, not the prosecution of a former Minister. The Government appeared to be fairly easy in their mind about whether business men would go to gaol, and they will not lose any sleep over whether Mr. Alan Clark resides in one of the more salubrious open prisons. That, however, is not the issue. The question is whether Mr. Alan Clark will be available to give evidence to the inquiry, and whether the inquiry will get at the truth.

That brings me to my second question about the inquiry and the terms of reference. There is an extraordinary provision allowing Lord Justice Scott, if need be, to come back and ask for more powerful terms. I do not understand why it should he anticipated that Lord Justice Scott will be obstructed in any way; however, I wish to raise a specific point, which I have raised before but to which I have so far received no answer.

Do the instructions given by the Prime Minister to Ministers and civil servants to co-operate with the inquiry apply to former Ministers? Do they apply to Mr. Alan Clark himself, to Lord Ridley, to Lord Trefgarne, to the right hon. and learned Member for Putney (Mr. Mellor) —who had a walk-on part in the proceedings—and, indeed, to Lady Thatcher?

That last question is particularly important. Information in the documents made available to the court makes it clear that in two ministerial meetings—in November 1988 and in July 1990—what Ministers were discussing required the Prime Minister's personal approval. I do not see how the inquiry can proceed effectively without the active participation of Lady Thatcher. I assume that, before drawing up the guidelines the Prime Minister received an assurance that she would co-operate; in any event, I think that the House should know about it.

My third question relates to something mentioned by the President of the Board of Trade: the work of the United Nations Verification Commission for Iraq. Two days ago, in New York, I met Ambassador Ekeus, the chairman of the commission. The commission has done some remarkably effective work, and has been able to compile a list of all the supplies that went to the Saddam Hessein regime—not just from this country, but from others—before the invasion of Kuwait.

The list contains some equipment from this country for which Ministers could not possibly be held responsible, because it did not go directly to munitions factories or other places that have been mentioned in newspapers. It went under the guise of hospital contracts, schools contracts and so forth. Nevertheless, the list is now in the Government's hands. I well understand why it must remain secret: it is essential to the commission's work that it can compare what it knows from its own findings with what the present Iraqi regime is willing to own up to. I want to know whether the Government will make the list available to Lord Justice Scott. That is a specific question requiring a specific answer. Unless Lord Justice Scott can see the details of all the supplies sent by this country and others, I do not see how he can carry out his task properly.

My fourth and last question on the terms of reference is this. I interrupted the President of the Board of Trade on this subject, and I hope that we were not talking at cross purposes. So far as I can make out, the guidelines were changed twice—or, at any rate, preparations were being made to change them on the second occasion. I was referring to the earlier occasion when the memorandum on guidelines was changed in December 1988–January 1989. The documents reveal that the then Minister of State, Foreign Office—the right hon. Member for Bristol, West (Mr. Waldegrave)—made it quite clear to his fellow Ministers in October 1989 that he was willing to make the change public and that he had been willing to make the change public at the time the change was made. The House is entitled to know why it was not told of the slackening of the guidelines and why the House was misled in the opposite direction.

As we all know, the guidelines were announced in 1985. They were changed in December 1988. Yet the House was told in December 1990 by the then Minister for Trade—the right hon. Member for Hove (Mr. Sainsbury), who is in his place now—the following. The hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook) quoted only part of what he said; I shall give the quotation in full. This was in 1990, after the guidelines had been relaxed. In answer to Mr. Beaumont-Dark, then Member of Parliament for Birmingham, Selly Oak, the right hon. Gentleman said: The guidelines to which the hon. Member referred are clear. They were set out by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Surrey, East (Sir G. Howe) on 29 October 1985, and since then they have been scrupulously and carefully followed in the issuing of licences. No other country has such a careful method for scrutinising applications for export licences and for controlling exports. Later in the same exchanges in the House, the right hon. Member for Hove said: I assure him that we continually review our procedures for controlling defence exports. The procedures are applied most scrupulously and carefully. As he will see from recent events, we have further reviewed and improved those procedures, and we are open to further suggestions about anything that can be done to make them even better than they are."—[Official Report, 3 December 1990; Vol. 182, c. 29–35.] The answers, I quote are important, because they relate to specific allegations concerning Matrix Churchill at a time when Customs and Excise had already started proceedings against the company and its directors. They amount to the Government's official response to Matrix Churchill and make it clear that the 1985 guidelines were upheld—and even, it was hinted to the House, strengthened—when in fact the reverse was the case.