Comments made by Oliver Dowden, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, on 5 August 2020.
We must never forget the bravery and sacrifice of our greatest generation. On 15 August we will come together as a nation to remember, give thanks and pay tribute to the endurance of those who served around the world and finally secured peace for us. These commemorations will inspire a new generation to learn about them and ensure their stories of heroism and sacrifice live on.
The comments made by Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, on 5 August 2020.
When the Second World War ended 75 years ago with the surrender of Japan, British soldiers, sailors and airmen were serving in the Far East, fighting hard to achieve victory – and were among the last to come home.
On this anniversary I want to remember what we owe the veterans of the Far East campaign. They brought an end to the Second World War, they changed the course of history for the better, liberated South East Asia, and many paid the ultimate sacrifice.
That’s why on this remarkable anniversary – and every day hereafter – we will remember them.
The comments made by Alok Sharma, the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, on 20 July 2020.
We have an incredible aerospace industry right here in the UK that defines the way aircraft are manufactured globally.
This £400 million ATI investment will help secure our world-leading position in developing new flight technology to make air travel safer and greener into the future.
The text of the comments made by Amanda Solloway, the Science Minister, on 19 July 2020.
Space technology plays an important role in supporting our military and keeping us safe, while also boosting the UK’s economy and enabling world-leading science and research.
With this major investment in Skynet 6A, the development of the National Satellite Test Facility and the launch of a dedicated innovation programme, we are setting a bold new ambition for the UK in space.
The text of the comments made by Ben Wallace, the Secretary of State for Defence, on 19 July 2020.
To safeguard our military on operations around the world we need to ensure that we protect their communications on land, sea or in air. The newest contested frontier is space and so we need to provide resilience and better communications for our forces. SKYNET 6A is one of many solutions we shall be investing in over the next decade. This Government recognises the urgent need to defend and promote space capabilities.
The text of the comments made by Ben Wallace, the Secretary of State for Defence, on 17 July 2020.
Our Armed Forces work incredibly hard to keep our nation safe, and so it is only right that they have a place they feel proud to call home.
From introducing a generous Forces Help to Buy scheme to piloting a new rented accommodation model, we have made enormous steps in recent years to offer flexible housing for a modern workforce.
This latest investment will benefit thousands of our personnel and their families, providing the standard of living they deserve.
The text of the comments made by Julian Lewis on 16 July 2020, following his expulsion from the Conservative Party.
Because the ISC (Intelligence and Security Committee) is a special committee, I feel constrained in what I can say. However, the following points are relevant.
1 – The 2013 Justice and Security Act explicitly removed the right of the Prime Minister to choose the ISC chairman and gave it to the committee members. I remember this well, as I served on the committee from 2010 to 2015 and took part of the legislation through the Commons myself on behalf of the committee. There is no other Conservative MP in the House of Commons with any past experience of working on the ISC.
2 – It was only yesterday afternoon that I received a text asking me to confirm that I would be voting for the Prime Minister’s preferred candidate for the ISC chair. I did not reply as I considered it an improper request. At no earlier stage did I give any undertaking to vote for any particular candidate.
3 – In recent days, the official Number 10 spokesman explicitly denied that the Government was seeking to ‘parachute’ a preferred candidate in to the chair, stating that it was a matter for the senior parliamentarians on the committee to decide. It is therefore strange to have the whip removed for failing to vote for the Government’s preferred candidate.
The text of the speech made by Greg Hands, the Minister for Trade Policy, in the House of Commons on 13 July 2020.
The Secretary of State has retaken the licensing decisions, as required by the Court of Appeal. All existing and new applications for Saudi Arabia for possible use in the conflict in Yemen will be assessed against the revised methodology, which considers whether there is a clear risk that the equipment might be used in the commission of a serious violation of international humanitarian law.
The revised methodology was developed to address the Court of Appeal’s judgment. It considers all allegations that are assessed as likely to have occurred and that have been caused by fixed-wing aircraft, reflecting the factual circumstances that the court proceedings concerned. It remains the case, however, that it can be extremely difficult to reach firm conclusions as to whether specific incidents violate the principles of international humanitarian law. Therefore, where an incident is assessed as a possible breach, it is regarded for the purposes of the relevant analysis as if there were breaches of IHL. I emphasise that that analysis is just one part of the assessment.
In retaking these decisions, the Secretary of State has considered the full range of information available to the Government. Some of that information is necessarily sensitive and confidential. I am therefore not able to go into detail about individual assessments. The crucial point is that we have assessed that there were a small number of incidents that have been treated, for the purposes of this analysis, as violations of international humanitarian law. However, these were isolated incidents and our analysis shows that Saudi Arabia has a genuine intent and the capacity to comply with international humanitarian law and the specific commitments it has made.
It is on that basis that the Secretary of State has assessed that there is not a clear risk that the export of arms and military equipment to Saudi Arabia might be used in the commission of a serious violation of international humanitarian law.
Below is the text of the comments made by Emily Thornberry, the Shadow International Trade Secretary, on 7 July 2020.
Even by this Government’s standards, their decision to resume the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen is morally indefensible, justified on the basis that the air strikes that have killed thousands of innocent men, women and children over the past five years somehow do not represent a ‘pattern of non-compliance’ with international law.
And announcing this decision the very day after 20 Saudi officials were rightly placed on the Foreign Office’s Magnitsky sanctions list for their part in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist killed in part for criticising Saudi conduct in the war in Yemen, is at the very least a case of mixed messages, undermining the government’s claim to be human rights defenders.
We have demanded that ministers come to Parliament to explain this decision, and we will continue to fight it over the coming months. Because at a time when millions of Yemeni children are facing the mortal threat of starvation and disease, Britain should be working flat out to bring this terrible war to an end, not selling the arms that continue to fuel it.
Below is the text of the speech made by Jonathan Gullis, the Conservative MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, in the House of Commons on 23 June 2020.
I beg to move
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to create the offence of desecrating a war memorial; and for connected purposes.
I find myself in the unique position of standing here presenting this Bill, with the Government in support of the cause and aims behind bringing such legislation before the House. It is the week of Armed Forces Day, and I say to all our servicemen and women: I salute you.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland) and I have had constructive discussions with our right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, and my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary about the potential for this Bill to be put into statute. Such a Bill should not be contentious, and I and my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell, my “co-sponsor” of the Bill, are delighted to have support from across the House for our ambitions.
I stress that this Bill should not be perceived as a knee-jerk reaction to recent events, as some in the media have suggested. Back in 2009-10, the former hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate, David Burrowes, introduced a similar Bill, with the same intention of protecting our war memorials. My hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell and I wish to place on record our thanks to him for his efforts, and for having reached out to us and thrown his full support behind our work. We also wish to thank Lewis Fielder and James Clark, members of Conservative Friends of the Armed Forces, for their efforts in researching, drafting and aiding my hon. Friend and I in putting this Bill to the House.
Every war memorial in every village, every town and every city across our country is sacred and serves to remind us of the immeasurable gratitude that we must afford to our armed forces, both past and present. The passage of time always presents the danger of dimmed collective recollections. Let us not forget the sacrifice and bravery of those who paid the ultimate price: young men and women who gave up their futures, loves, lives and dreams to ensure that the freedoms they once knew were protected from tyranny—for us, the unborn generations, who now sit idly by as monuments dedicated to their eternal memory are desecrated. I will not sit idly by, and neither will I be silent.
A lack of comprehensive reporting on vandalism of this nature means that it is difficult to ascertain the exact number of incidents each year, although the War Memorials Trust does an excellent job of documenting such incidents. It reports that seven memorials have suffered from criminal activity since April, including the Cenotaph in Whitehall which has been graffitied and climbed on, and recently the Union Flag was nearly set alight. In 2017, a woman was arrested for urinating on a war memorial in Essex for the second time. During her arrest she became abusive towards emergency workers, and was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment for the first count of outraging public decency, three months for the second count, and three months for assault and abusive language. How that punishment fits the crime, I do not know.
The Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park has been attacked four times since Her Majesty opened it in 2012. In 2013, it was desecrated with graffiti that referenced the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby. The perpetrator was sentenced to just 12 weeks’ imprisonment. Those who vandalise and abuse these monuments do not have the capacity to comprehend the strength, courage and bravery that it must have taken for, in this case, teenage boys to overcome the terror of midnight missions across occupied Europe in a tin can thousands of feet in the sky. More than 50,000 British, American, Canadian and Commonwealth young men lost their lives under Bomber Command to preserve and protect the liberties of democracy. Had the allied forces not been successful in their mission, let us make no mistake: we would be living under the tyranny of totalitarian, fascist insanity.
The price of war is immeasurably high. I saw that first hand when a young man from Stratford-upon-Avon, Private Conrad Lewis, lost his life in Afghanistan back in 2011. The pain felt by friends and the community stays with me to this day. Those of us who value freedom of thought, speech and expression know that we can never repay the debt we owe to these men and women; all we can do is immortalise their memory, and display our gratitude for their sacrifice.
Memorials stand in great, solemn, eternal remembrance of the glorious dead. We cannot bring back those lives, or erase the grief of families and communities, but the least we can do is ensure that memorials are adequately protected, and punish those who would deface, urinate on, spit on, defile, or graffiti them. Such actions, which have included swastikas spray-painted on statues, and Nazi salutes in 2020 before the Cenotaph, are the price we pay for ignorance and inaction.
A blessed bond is formed between our present and our past through memorials. We see ourselves in the names and images of our fallen heroes, and perhaps we pause to reflect whether we would have had their courage and their nerves of steel in the face of evil itself.
My great-great-uncle Allan Gullis, who still lives today, is a D-day veteran. I could not possibly speculate whether I would have had the sheer guts and bulldog spirit that he and his brothers in arms embody so fully, but the least that I can do is stand before the House today and try to secure the protection of their memory. My grandfather, Terrence Gullis, served in the Royal Marines during the Suez canal crisis, and my grandfather on my mother’s side, William Beacham, served in the RAF, undertaking his national service in Egypt. It is an honour to have such brave and committed men in my family. I would have liked to follow in the footsteps of those heroes but, alas, due to deafness in one ear, it was not my destiny.
I am delighted, however, to represent the great town of Kidsgrove, where the Royal British Legion, on its own initiative, has set up a beautiful war memorial garden that is used every November to lay wreaths and remember our fallen. It has been an undoubted pleasure to attend the veterans breakfast club in Smallthorne, run by Martyn Hunt and Paul Horton, which serves all veterans across Stoke-on-Trent as a way of bringing our heroes together to share their stories and lend support to one another. Dotted across this country are extraordinary examples of individuals and community groups banding together to honour the dead. Every year, as I don my poppy, it brings me a great sense of pride and joy to see so many others doing the same.
I am asking the House to do the respectable thing—the right thing—and back this Bill to create an explicit offence, distinguishable from damage to public property. Let us join our friends in Australia, the United States and Canada, and pay the respect that we owe to those who died in the freedom fight against tyranny. Although there is provision in existing legislation to hold criminals to account for damage to property, and offenders have been successfully prosecuted, relatively few are held to account for the severity of the aggravating circumstances that come with criminally damaging something as sacred to the nation as war memorials.
In addition to the designation of a specific offence relating to unlawful damage to a war memorial, the Bill proposes the exemption of damage to war memorials from the £5,000 damages threshold required under the Criminal Damage Act 1971; the removal of a maximum fine in favour of an unlimited fine; and the establishment of a maximum custodial sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment. Despite some media reports, we are not calling for all offences to be met with 10 years’ imprisonment; we are enabling our judiciary to use their discretion over whether the offence is worthy of being moved to a Crown court, without the £5,000 threshold barrier blocking its way.
Finally, I take the opportunity to praise my partner in this proposal, my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell. He has an outstanding record as a public servant, with 27 years of military service under his belt. In this House, he serves as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the armed forces covenant, and he remains unrivalled in his passion for veterans, the Commonwealth and remembrance. It is a privilege to know him and work with him as a fellow member of the 2019 intake. My hon. Friend will perhaps be blushing at such unreserved praise, but it is certain that he is cut from the same cloth as those whose memories I stand here advocating to protect and preserve. I thank him wholeheartedly for his service and for his help in laying the Bill before the House.
I want to see the deterrence of criminal damage to the memory of our glorious dead. I hope that the House will support me in that endeavour.