Julian Lewis MP: speeches

Speeches

• 16 Dec 2025 · Electoral Resilience · Hansard source

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  I hope that the Rycroft review will take account of the fact that the giving of money is by no means the worst aspect, or the main aspect, of treacherous behaviour, because very often these people do what they do out of a genuine belief in a potential enemy’s point of view. It would be interesting to know whether the crime would have attracted such a large sentence as it did if, instead of just money being given, it had been a matter of clandestine contact because the person was willing to spout the Russian line anyway. Let us not be overconcerned with the giving of the bribe, which is often a bonus to people who want to betray us to a potential enemy in any case.

• 16 Dec 2025 · Africa: New Approach · Hansard source

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  Following on directly from that, what can the Minister tell us about any military advice or assistance that our experts in counter-insurgency are giving to the Governments of friendly Commonwealth countries like Nigeria that face vicious jihadist extremist attack from organisations such as Boko Haram?

• 16 Dec 2025 · Chagossians: Trust Fund and Resettlement · Hansard source

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  Is, in the Government’s opinion, Mauritius a free society, and what is the Government’s assessment of the nature of its relationship with communist China?

• 15 Dec 2025 · NHS: Winter Preparedness · Hansard source

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  I hope that the Secretary of State will give a little more consideration to the rather important point raised by the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) about 16 and 17-year-olds not being able to be vaccinated. If any junior doctor—whether or not a member of the BMA, but particularly if a member of the BMA—decides on ethical grounds to go into work during the period of the strike, and then faces sanctions from the BMA, will the Government protect them?

• 15 Dec 2025 · Violence against Women and Girls Strategy · Hansard source

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  Is the strategy going to emphasise in any way the role of parents in trying to protect their sons from a torrent of online violent abuse of women, which inevitably is going to distort their attitude to relationships? Schools can do some things, but some things, surely, have to be done within the family?

• 15 Dec 2025 · Jimmy Lai Conviction · Hansard source

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  Like every other communist regime that has ever existed, the Chinese Government behave with ruthlessness, impunity and unmitigated mendacity. I therefore welcome the strong words in the statement from the Foreign Secretary, but what Members on both sides of the House wish to see is stronger actions. It is not so much a case of one country, two systems, as of one Government and two faces. If our Government cannot even say that a country that poses so many strategic threats is itself a threat, we have an awfully long way to go.

• 15 Dec 2025 · NATO: European Security · Hansard source

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  Having sat through the debate on Ukraine on 4 December, has the Minister taken on board the important message for our NATO colleagues that if there is a forced division of Ukraine, just as there was of occupied Germany at the end of the war, it will be essential that unoccupied western Ukraine is fully manned with deterrent allied troops? Nothing could be more destabilising than a vacuum in western Ukraine, with a heavily militarised occupied eastern Ukraine under the control of the killer in the Kremlin.

• 15 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I welcome the Government’s commitment ultimately to spend 5% of GDP on defence—as we used to do in the cold war years of the 1980s—but not the target date of 2035. Do the Government really believe that there is no threat of attack from Russia on a NATO country for the next 10 years?

• 10 Dec 2025 · Resident Doctors: Industrial Action · Hansard source

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  I find it rather shocking that when the Secretary of State for Health has offered the BMA leadership an opportunity to strike a few weeks later, they have turned it down, presumably because they prefer to strike at Christmas, when, frankly, lives will be lost as a result. Am I missing something here? Why is it, according to the Secretary of State, that the BMA leaders seem to be so determinedly militant? Does he think that in reality, they simply do not represent the views of their own membership?

• 9 Dec 2025 · Northern Ireland Troubles: Operation Kenova · Hansard source

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  I am sure the Secretary of State will agree that running any double agent inside a murderous organisation is bound to be a moral nightmare. The justification for such action is always—as it should be—that many more lives will be saved as a result, even if the agent is implicated in illegal and, indeed, murderous activities. What is unusual about this case is that it appears that more lives were not saved by this particular operation. Can the Secretary of State say whether the agencies accept that this particular operation was counterproductive, even in its own terms, and if he cannot share that with us openly, could it at least be shared confidentially with the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament?

• 9 Dec 2025 · Grooming Gangs: Independent Inquiry · Hansard source

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  Few of us here today were present in 2003 when the then MP for Keighley, Mrs Ann Cryer—a courageous Labour Member on the left of her party—spoke out about the grooming gangs. For her troubles, she was smeared as a racist, she was shunned and she was threatened to the point at which she had to have safety devices and emergency alarms installed in her home. Will the Home Secretary join me in paying tribute to her courage belatedly—it has never received any recognition, of which I am aware? Does she not think that Ann Cryer might even now have some insights to share with an inquiry as to what it is like when those who are supposed to be protecting people close ranks to protect the offenders instead?

• 8 Dec 2025 · Ajax Armoured Vehicle · Hansard source

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  It is hard to think of a comparable disaster without going back to perhaps the early 1960s and the cancellation successively of Blue Streak and Skybolt. I worry that if and when the decision has to be taken that this platform is not fit to be issued to our armed forces, there will be a huge legal stand-off between the MOD and the company as to who is responsible for picking up the bill. Has thought been given to sharpening the pencils of the MOD lawyers?

• 8 Dec 2025 · Restriction of Jury Trials · Hansard source

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  I am afraid that the Minister’s treatment of the 60% figure only tends to confirm my belief that one is better off with the common sense of 12 ordinary people than with one legal professional. [ Laughter. ] Even she is smiling—good for her. Can she look again at this point? Yes, it is disastrous if 60% of women who allege rape drop the case before it proceeds to a conclusion, but if only 9% drop the case after the alleged criminal has been charged, the overwhelming reason for their dropping the case is not the length of the trial by jury, but the slowness between the reporting of the allegation and the criminal being charged. Will she accept that, in this case, she is looking at the wrong target?

• 8 Dec 2025 · Maccabi Tel Aviv FC: Away Fans Ban · Hansard source

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  It is fairly clear that my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) is right that this was a predetermined decision, and that the evidence was something for which West Midlands police scrabbled about later, but whatever the outcome of the Minister’s inquiries, whether it turns out, heaven forbid, that there was an antisemitic element to this or—in my view, more probably—that the police thought they would have a quieter life if they went down this road, will she guarantee to the House that whatever lessons are learned will be communicated in the strongest terms to the chief constables of all the other police forces so that they do not follow a bad example?

• 4 Dec 2025 · Dawn Sturgess Inquiry · Hansard source

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  Have the Government formed a view as to why President Putin—the killer in the Kremlin—chose to target Sergei Skripal after he had been pardoned and exchanged? Nothing that I am saying now derives from my time chairing the Intelligence and Security Committee, but I recall speculation in the press that it was because Mr Skripal had been actively involved with either the British state or the military, or had in some way been, shall we say, active in opposing the Government of the country from which he had been exchanged. If that is the case, surely the conclusion in paragraph 8.18—that the only measures that could have prevented the attack “would have been such as to hide him completely with an entirely new identity”— should have been considered. It is rather surprising that it was not. Was Skripal engaged in anything that made him a target?

• 4 Dec 2025 · Northern Ireland: Legacy of the Past · Hansard source

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  I agree entirely with the Chairman of the Committee that reconciliation depends upon uncovering the truth. Does her Committee’s report go into the incompatibility of that aim with the reinstatement of trials that the previous legacy Act would have prevented, given that when people face the prospect of being put on trial, they are less likely, rather than more likely, to say what actually happened?

• 4 Dec 2025 · War in Ukraine · Hansard source

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  Has the hon. Gentleman noticed that point 26 of the 28-point Witkoff plan is a general amnesty for everyone? That would mean that whoever committed the most atrocious war crimes would never be held accountable at all.

• 4 Dec 2025 · War in Ukraine · Hansard source

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  One of the advantages of being called at a late stage of the debate is that I can put my hand on my heart and truthfully say that every single speech in this debate so far has been outstandingly good. I have agreed with virtually every word of every one of them, and looking at the calibre of the remaining people, including all three Front-Bench representatives, I have every confidence that the standard will be maintained till the end. A former occupant of your chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, used to give courses in good public speaking technique. He always said, “If you wish your speech to have any useful impact after the event, it should not contain more than one, or at most two—and that is stretching it—key points.” So here is my one key point, which, I am delighted to say, has been touched on very effectively by the hon. Member for Llanelli (Dame Nia Griffith), among others: any settlement that does not have a military presence on the ground of unoccupied Ukraine from the country or countries offering a security guarantee will be a disaster. I ask the House to consider Europe at the end of the second world war, when the tripartite alliance had largely broken down, and Stalin was in occupation of eastern Europe and, of course, the eastern half of Germany, which his troops had conquered. The west was in occupation of the remainder of the European continent—literally, in the case of West Germany. What would have happened—knowing what we know now about the nature of Soviet communism—if, instead of the victorious western allies maintaining a very large military presence in occupied western Germany, they had said, “Right, we’ll demilitarise this and clear out, but we’re going to give the West German politicians who follow a security guarantee that if any trouble happens, we will stand by them”? The only thing that stopped a conflict breaking out between the Soviet occupying forces and the western world was the fact that, right up against the dividing line between Soviet-dominated East Germany and the rest of Germany, there were western allied troops, and it would have been impossible for the Soviet forces to move against West Germany without immediately triggering a major military counter-action. I have often said—and I make no apology for saying it again—that it is worth looking at the two halves of the 20th century. In the first half, we had two global conflicts—two world wars. In the second half, despite the intense ideological and military rivalry between the communist world and the democratic western world, we had no global conflicts—no third world war. I put that down to two factors. One was unprecedented: the nuclear balance of terror. But it was not enough to stop all forms of conflict, because it is possible for conventional conflicts to go ahead under the threshold of the nuclear balance without necessarily triggering Armageddon. That is why we have to have strong conventional deterrent forces, too. So, what was the other factor preventing the cold war from becoming the third world war? It is quite clear that it was the most successful alliance in history: the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. It grieves me to say that because of some of the occupants of high office in the capital of our ally the United States, the future of the NATO alliance—and therefore the future of world peace, frankly—is hanging by a thread. It was the chief staff officer and representative on the war time chiefs of staff committee of Winston Churchill, General Sir Hastings Ismay, who became the first Secretary-General of NATO. He is credited with having made the rather pithy but nevertheless very accurate observation that the purpose of the alliance at the time it was founded was threefold: to keep the Americans in, to keep the Russians out, and to keep the Germans down. That third element fortunately became redundant as West Germany developed into a democracy—so quickly, in fact, that in May 1955, 10 years virtually to the day from the surrender on Lüneburg heath of the Nazis to General Montgomery, Germany itself was admitted to the NATO alliance. I ask people to take another counterfactual look at history. If the Kaiser had known in 1914 that if he invaded neutral Belgium, he would immediately be at war with the United States of America, would he have done it? I think the answer is no. If Hitler had known in 1939 that if he invaded Poland, he would immediately be at war with the United States of America, would he have done it? I think the answer very probably is no to that as well. Therefore, the secret to keeping the peace in the world is to keep America engaged with the security of Europe. America is going through a phase at the moment—which seems to hinge on a number of personalities who hold power in that great democracy, apparently with the approval of a majority of the electorate—in which its commitment to European and thus world security is in doubt. This is the chance for Europeans, whether inside the EU or, like us, outside it, to show that we can do our bit. We have to keep the show on the road until America once again stands up for the policy of the second half of the 20th century, which stopped the third world war, rather than it reverting to its policy of isolationism from the first half of the 20th century, and standing by, which caused two global conflicts that could have been prevented.

• 4 Dec 2025 · War in Ukraine · Hansard source

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  One way in which we could continue to lead would be by giving a very firm commitment that if the frontlines are indeed frozen, a coalition of the willing would have military assets on the ground, at the invitation of unoccupied Ukraine, so that there could be no question but that a future attack would trigger a response from that coalition. Otherwise, any security guarantee is not worth the paper on which it is printed.

• 3 Dec 2025 · Pension Schemes Bill · Hansard source

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  I applaud what the hon. Gentleman has said about the AEAT pensioners’ difficulties. It is quite shocking that, despite the fact that a previous Conservative pensions Minister, Paul Maynard, said that he would instruct his civil servants to work on a redress scheme, changes of Minister and Government have meant that the machine has carried on as before, even though a parliamentary Committee did an investigation, found in favour of the pensioners and said that they should get redress.

• 3 Dec 2025 · Pension Schemes Bill · Hansard source

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  The problem, as the Minister knows from our meeting, is that the trustees are rather hemmed in by not having the leverage or the freedom to act if the company itself—particularly if it is headquartered abroad—is disinclined to pass on any surpluses that it might have available.

• 3 Dec 2025 · Pension Schemes Bill · Hansard source

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  The Minister has indeed been most accessible, and I am extremely grateful to him for the meeting he held with members of the ExxonMobil pensioners group. I am still being lobbied very hard by ExxonMobil pensioners who are concerned that whereas changes introduced in the Budget will benefit members of the FAS and PPF schemes, private defined-benefit scheme members will not benefit. He knows far more about the subject than I do, but can he not see that there is a feeling that they are being discriminated against? Is there nothing he can offer to make them feel somewhat more included in the beneficial steps being taken for members of other schemes?

• 3 Dec 2025 · Pension Schemes Bill · Hansard source

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  May I applaud the hon. Lady’s speech? That is exactly what has happened to so many ExxonMobil pensioners in my constituency and beyond.

• 3 Dec 2025 · Official Secrets Act and Espionage · Hansard source

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  Having previously read out in this Chamber the relevant section of the Official Secrets Act 1911, I am pleased that the report concludes that the decision not to prosecute under the terms of that Act flies in the face of common sense. What also flies in the face of common sense is the Government’s previous position that China poses a range of serious threats but does not constitute a threat itself. Is that still the Government’s position?

• 3 Dec 2025 · Venezuela: US Military · Hansard source

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  President Trump would no doubt argue that there is a parallel between this situation and George Bush senior’s invasion of Panama in late 1989, but does the Minister agree with me that it will be interesting to see, if something like this goes ahead, what sort of outcry there is from either Russia or China? If there is no sort of outcry, would that not suggest that there is some sort of understanding between these three major powers that they each leave each other to get on with, shall we say, unilateral actions within what they regard as their own spheres of influence?