WPQ: UK military personnel in Pakistan
June 30, 2009
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence how many UK military personnel are deployed in Pakistan; and what duties they are undertaking.
Bill Rammell: I can confirm that there are currently 31 UK military personnel based in Pakistan undertaking a variety of roles including training, liaison and diplomatic duties. The number of military personnel based in Pakistan varies from time to time. This can be for a variety of reasons, including revised tasking and changes to previous roles.
Report May-June
June 30, 2009
The activity report for May-June covers the Iraq Inquiry, housing, transport, MP’s expenses, London Metropolitan University, the School Of Oriental and African Studies cleaners’ Living Wage Campaign, Amnesty International’s ‘Still Human Still Here’ campaign and updates of many of the organisations Jeremy is involved in.
WPQ: Primary and hospital care in Islington
June 30, 2009
To ask the Secretary of State for Health what estimate he has made of expenditure on (a) primary care and (b) hospital care in the London Borough of Islington in (i) 2009-10 and (ii) each of the next four years.
Mike O’Brien: The information requested is not held centrally. The London borough of Islington is covered by Islington primary care trust (PCT). PCTs fund primary care and hospital care services from their revenue allocations. The following table provides the funding allocated to Islington PCT for 2009-10 and 2010-11.
Allocation (£000) Two year increase
PCT 2009-10 2010-11 £000 Percentage
Islington PCT 412,126 433,316 41,655 10.6
Revenue allocations post 2010-11 have not yet been determined. Once the allocations have been made, it is for PCTs to commission the health care services they need to meet the needs of the populations they serve, taking into account both local priorities and the NHS operating framework.
OPQ: Sri Lanka
June 30, 2009
I thank the Minister for what he just said. Does he agree that the continued incarceration of large numbers of Tamil people in refugee camps is a form of imprisonment, and that denying the right to return home is illegal under international law? Will he make it clear to the Sri Lankan Government that they must not try to resettle the Tamil people outside their traditional homelands, villages and towns, in order to bring about some degree of stability in the future?
Ivan Lewis: My hon. Friend is right. The first test of the good intentions and political will of the Government of Sri Lanka is how they treat the displaced civilians. It is imperative that those people return home as soon as possible and that they are given the opportunity to begin to rebuild their lives. That will be the greatest evidence that things are changing for people on the ground in that country.
Brown’s departmental shopping list
June 30, 2009
On Monday morning the Radio 4 Today programme led with an enormous amount of detail of Gordon Brown’s impending statement on his plans to build a stronger, fairer and more prosperous Britain.
The Sunday papers were full of Mandelsonian predictions concerning the involvement of the private sector in the NHS and his claims that Labour would outspend the Tories in the run-up to the election.
When Brown finally got up to speak yesterday, his statement resembled a shopping list collected from each government department and its core message was a convoluted mixture of Blairite marketisation of the economy, Keynesian public spending to beat off a recession and some laudable objects of improving the lot of the worst off.
The Tories propose a return largely to the 1980s in their economic strategy, and Brown’s much-vaunted relaunch appears to be a compromise between recognition of the overwhelming social demand for job protection and decent housing, sprinkled with marketisation of services and running the government as a business, rather than a force for social good.
The Tories and the far-right are best defeated by a Labour strategy which unashamedly talks of the social good of public spending for social need, and instead of trying to raise £16 billion from asset sales, the government would be much better advised to save £76 billion over the next 20 years by cancelling Trident and welcoming the opportunity raised by the IPPR report on defence expenditure to cut the enormously expensive and unnecessary projects that the Ministry of Defence seems to love. As ever, it’s not possible to have weapons of mass destruction and meet the legitimate social needs of ordinary people. There is a choice.
Housing
The government quite rightly, though belatedly, understands that there is a housing crisis like no other and that it will therefore increase the extra housing investment from £600 million in the April Budget to £2.1 billion and this will build 110,000 properties in the next two years.
It is unclear but hoped that the majority of this will go into local authorities which will be able to rapidly develop council housing. Even if this aspiration is met, it will only be half the level of rented housing constructed in 1979, before the Thatcher onslaught of council home sales.
In an attempt at populism the PM announced that a greater priority would go to local people, whose names have been on the waiting list for far too long.
This seems to ignore the high levels of mobility within our society and the notion that housing priority should be based on the priority needs of children, age, infirmity or overcrowding, and could potentially become very discriminatory.
Unemployment
The government plans that, from January, every unemployed young person under 25 will be guaranteed a job, training or work experience, and all school-leavers will be offered the same.
However, in a throwback to even deeper history than Blairism, Brown came up with the Tebbit-like statement that “if there is a job available (young people will be forced) to take this work up and have their benefits cut if they do not.”
Throughout the 1980s, as Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle pointed out, the Tories were obsessed with compelling people into low-paid jobs or increasingly dubious training schemes.
The compulsion aspect is usually unnecessary - the majority of young people are desperate to either work, study or train and do not need to be threatened.
Compulsion can have a way of protecting poor-quality employment, bad training schemes and potentially leads to total social isolation of some young people so that, instead of bringing society together, it drives us apart.
Health
The story regarding Brown’s health policy is that anyone who has not received treatment on the NHS within two weeks for cancer - or 18 weeks for anything else - will be automatically referred to the private sector.
This comes on top of the government review of long-term health spending plans including capital expenditure, which could become a passport to public funds going into private hospitals, rather than the health service being the primary provider of all health care in the country.
This marketisation is similar to the Tories’ plans and derives from the period when Alan Milburn was secretary of state.
The strange journey of Mr Speaker
June 24, 2009
Tory MP John Bercow finally made it as Speaker of the Commons on Monday night - a product of a secret ballot and a strange political journey with a promise of parliamentary reform.
Gordon Brown managed to give him quite a warm welcome, quipping that he noticed Bercow had “cast aside” his previous political views. David Cameron looked far less happy, and after a few perfunctory remarks he gave up and sat down. The po-faced BBC and parliamentary broadcasters, when stuck for anything to show, broadcast the clock above the speaker’s chair.
But the sight of ex-ministers, including recent resignees, walking round in threes is what ought to have been televised. The tea room or the arm-twisting as the ballot came down to Bercow, rather than the Bicycling Baronet Sir George Young, would have made television worthy of House Of Cards. A secret ballot with polling booths set up in the lobbies that MPs normally shuffle through was an innovation.
However, tradition had not been totally cast aside as the inkwells and dry pens to be dipped in them remained. Only one MP spoiled the ballot paper, which is about the same as the average in any other election. But one thing was very different. Past elections for speaker have been done in the open, and the whips and merchants of patronage have had a field day.
Every speaker has been a product of the whips’ offices of the main parties. The new speaker is not, and owes them nothing - it’s a slight move towards an independent House of Commons. However, in my enthusiasm for democracy and my great regard for Mr Speaker Lenthall and his famous 1662 declaration that he had “neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak other than this house directs me” as he firmly told King Charles I to leave his chamber, I am forgetting some crucial aspects of British democracy.
Procedural occasions such as the election of speaker are a great show but also are a graphic lesson in power and privilege.
Brown, Cameron and Nick Clegg all welcomed “Mr Speaker-elect.” “Strange,” the uninitiated may say, for John Bercow had clearly just been elected. His first duty was to await the summons to the House of Lords for “royal approbation,” and an hour later, Black Rod duly arrived to instruct the Commons to come to the Lords and hear if the Queen agreed to the decision. Bercow duly presented himself at the Bar of the Lords and bowed and scraped with protestations of allegiance to the Queen.
A strange crew including Jack Straw - in his other job as Lord Chancellor - sat with gold costumes and tricorn hats and told us that it was not “convenient” for her majesty to come herself so she had sent a commission to report in strange language owing more to Norman French than anything else that they could say she was happy with Bercow. Only after that could he become Mr Speaker Bercow. In other words, the crown can veto a speaker’s election, decide who the serjeant at arms should be, approve all Bills - or not - and decide who to invite to form a government after an election.
Bercow, like all candidates, promised change and reform and made some serious commitments in his election address. The real test will be his ability and the preparedness of Parliament to challenge the overwhelming executive power over Parliament.
Theoretically, the role of Parliament is to hold the government to account - prime ministerial patronage, appointments, programme of legislation and timetable mean that, in reality, most MPs are either irritants or supplicants at the door of the powerful.
Bercow promised a business committee and said in his letter to MPs to secure support that “worst of all, the government who will sit on the committees considering its work and decides how long they will be given to do so. This is quite unacceptable.”
If politics is to mean anything, MPs must be less craven to the power of patronage and their agents in the whips’ offices. As the debate on the Iraq inquiry intensifies, how many Labour MPs are privately ashamed of their role in not standing up for peace and honesty? How many really support the attacks on welfare in the ill-named Welfare Reform Bill?
Parliamentary reform, universal suffrage, national insurance and the NHS all happened because of public pressure and demands. Those who marched with the Chartists did so to achieve a representative democracy. Now, in the last 10 months of this Parliament it is time for MPs to show their mettle. A speaker independent of the whips’ offices is a good start.
The Iraq Inquiry
June 24, 2009
Jeremy’s interventions during the debate on the inquiry.
Jeremy Corbyn: I have been present at virtually every debate on Iraq for the past seven years. I never thought that, seven years on we would still be debating the legality of, and responsibility for, the war, and how to conduct a proper investigation into it. The image of Parliament has suffered enormously over the past few weeks - nay, the past few months. If we fudge this issue tonight and decline to hold the kind of open, public, legally based, oath-taking, subpoenaed inquiry that is required, yes, there will be a report - some kind of bowdlerised version of what happened will be produced by a group of Privy Counsellors, and everyone will go away and say, “That’s fine” - but the demand for an inquiry will still be there, culpability will still be sought and the responsibility will still rest on those people who took us into the conflict. Fudging the issue tonight will merely delay the debate until another day, and another day after that.
I was one of those who helped to organise the massive demonstration in 2003, and I have attended hundreds of meetings all over the country against the invasion of Iraq and the legality of the war. The one million and more people who came to London on that day in 2003 - and the millions more around the country who attended local demonstrations, wrote to their MPs, sent e-mails, signed petitions or simply expressed an opinion against the war - felt very let down by Parliament on that occasion. They also felt very let down by the political system, and a whole generation of young people have now been radicalised to question the effectiveness of this place and to wonder what is the point of a political system that can take us into a war that turns out to be illegal and then blinker its eyes to the consequences. We need to take some serious decisions tonight.
D Abbott: Like me, my hon. Friend was on that great march in 2003. Does he agree that part of the disillusion with the political system stems from people’s sadness and bitterness that so many people could have been out on the streets of London that day and yet be ignored by the political establishment?
Jeremy Corbyn: Absolutely. My Friend gets that message about Iraq in her constituency, as every Member does, and it simply will not go away. Many Members - on this side of the House and on the Opposition Benches - publicly regret the way they voted on that occasion, and many, many more do so privately. They know that they were told falsehoods in the lead-up to the war, and they have also seen the consequences and the costs of it.
The Prime Minister of the day, Tony Blair, said in terms in the House that this war was about removing the weapons of mass destruction from Iraq. A short time later, he, the then Foreign Secretary and others were involved in ensuring that Hans Blix and Mohamed el-Baradei were not allowed back into Iraq to continue the process of inspection and disarmament that they were so effectively carrying out at that time. The Prime Minister also said in a broadcast the day after the vote in Parliament that this war was about getting rid of Saddam Hussein and regime change. George Bush, on the other hand, was relatively straightforward in that he said it was always about regime change. They cannot have it all ways and there should have been honesty towards us in that respect.
I use the figures carefully, but well over 500,000 Iraqis have died since 2003. The living standards of many are no better. Instability in many cases is far worse, and I say that not as somebody who was ever an apologist for or defender of the Saddam Hussein regime. Indeed, there is plenty of recorded opposition from me and some other Members to arms sales to Iraq in the 1980s.
We have spent billions of pounds of UK public money on this war. We have lost 179 soldiers. Many more have been seriously injured and traumatised by the experience. During the activities of the Stop the War Coalition, I have had the good fortune to meet many military families who have joined Military Families Against the War. They tell in graphic detail what it was like to lose their son or daughter, how their son or daughter has been badly injured and traumatised by this event and how angry they feel at how they were led into this situation.
The legality of war is an interesting concept; the idea that going to war can be legalised is itself an interesting concept. Nevertheless, there is such a concept and it revolves around the UN charter, a real and credible threat to an individual country, and the UN itself. If resolution 1441, as we were told later, gave us the authority to go to war, why did the Foreign Secretary and others put such great effort into getting a second UN resolution that was then not possible? The Secretary-General of the United Nations said in terms at the end of the conflict that he believed the actions to be illegal.
We must look now to what an inquiry can do. A week ago, the Prime Minister announced in the wake of the famous parliamentary Labour Party meeting that there would be an inquiry on the war in Iraq. I thought, “Good news, at last a real change. Let’s have an inquiry.” We would have been better off having no inquiry whatever than what we were presented with a week ago - a private inquiry of Privy Counsellors sitting around together.
The Government have made concessions in saying that some of the inquiry will be held in public, but the idea that the chair of the inquiry should consult on the terms of the inquiry with people who themselves may be subject to that inquiry seems a little wide of serious and strong inquisitive action on the whole process and the war in Iraq.
Mr Durkan: My hon. Friend refers to the chair of the inquiry, who has form. In Northern Ireland, he was used to report on the security implications of the Castlereagh inquiry. Then we had a classic exercise in misdirection, because that report had nothing to do with the events of the break-in, what lay behind it or anything else. It was used as a vehicle for an ulterior agenda to change intelligence policing in Northern Ireland and break the Patten model for policing. Sir John Chilcot, if he was a business, would not be in “Yellow Pages” under headings such as “Independent” or “Challenging”.
Jeremy Corbyn: I think the Member for Foyle is telling us in the vernacular that the chairman of the inquiry has form in this matter.
Governments set up inquiries for two reasons: either to cover something up or to get to the truth. I suspect that this inquiry is all about diversion and ensuring that we do not get to the questions of culpability or the details of how this decision came about and why Parliament was presented with the information that it was.
I shall conclude with this point, as my time is almost up. Parliament can make a decision tonight to ask the Government to come back with a better proposal. That is all the Opposition motion says. I would support and welcome that, because it would give us the opportunity to have the kind of inquiry that Members on both sides and with all points of view on the war have asked for. I suspect that we might be getting the opposite, which is an inquiry with terms of reference that allow it to operate in secret and on Privy Council rules, that do not give it the power of subpoena or inquisition, and that do not give it the power to point to the legal responsibility for going to war.
As sure as night follows day, whatever decision we make, the demand for the truth will be there and the legal process will be there. Eminent lawyers such as Philippe Sands will not give up, and I suspect that many of the protagonists in the war will at some point end up in the International Court of Justice at The Hague - not because of a process of indiction, but because those of us who believe in international law believe in its protecting us from war, not taking us to war. That is why we must get to the truth, and I hope that we get there tonight.
WPQ: Western Saharawi refugees
June 24, 2009
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what aid his Department provides to people from Western Sahara in refugee camps in Algeria.
Gareth Thomas: The Department for International Development (DFID) supports Sahrawi refugees through its share of the budget of the European Community Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO) and its £19 million contributions to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), for its work with refugees across the world. In 2008, ECHO committed to provide €10 million to support Sahrawi refugees, while UNHCR spent $3.1 million in their support.
WPQ on Archway Tower
June 22, 2009
The text of a written parliamentary question (WPQ).
Jeremy Corbyn: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what recent discussions he has had with the Office of the Public Guardian on future employment at Archway Tower, London, N19; and if he will make a statement.
Bridget Prentice: The Chief Executive and Public Guardian continues to provide me with regular updates on the progress of the OPG’s change plans, including those for the Archway Tower office. Archway Tower currently has three occupiers: the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG), the Court of Protection (administered by Her Majesty’s Courts Service) and the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (CAFCASS). The OPG’s plans concerning its future operating model and structure are distinct from the ongoing activities of the Court and CAFCASS.It has become increasingly clear that the success of the Mental Capacity Act will continue to generate very significant future demand for the services of the OPG. As a result, the OPG has begun developing its strategy to ensure it is able to offer a high quality service to all of its customers: both now as well as in the future. To enable this strategy, it is planning to move OPG business progressively out of London in order to meet its customers’ needs on a more efficient, effective and sustainable footing in the medium to long term.OPG engages actively with staff and trade unions about its change plans as they develop, particularly where they have a direct impact on teams and individuals. All work force change will be managed in line with the Ministry of Justice work force change policies, as agreed with trade unions.
WPQ: Barking to Gospel Oak rail line
June 22, 2009
To ask the Minister of State, Department for Transport what funding his Department is planning to provide for the electrification of the Barking to Gospel Oak rail line; and if he will make a statement.
Chris Mole: [holding answer 22 June 2009]: In January 2009 the Department for Transport made an offer to contribute a capital sum towards the cost of the electrification of the Gospel Oak to Barking line conditional on Transport for London (TfL) taking forward the project, including working up a business case, finding the balance of the cost and bearing all risks.The Department’s contribution could be up to £25 million, the amount depending on as yet undefined savings against the budget for the North London Line Camden Road freight scheme announced last year.TfL has now indicated that there is now little likelihood that it could undertake to fund and bear the risks of the electrification scheme.
