Jamal Khashoggi — House of Lords, 2018-10-23
Topic: International Affairs
William John Lawrence Wallace (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I join in the condemnation of what has happened and the way it has been covered up by the Saudis for the first two weeks. I congratulate the Government on the withdrawal of Liam Fox’s participation in the forthcoming investment conference—although it seemed unfortunate that it was not announced earlier. We waited until a number of other Governments and companies had announced their withdrawal before finally we withdrew too We on these Benches recognise the importance of our relationship with Saudi Arabia and with the other Gulf states, although I recall that one of the many tensions inside the coalition was that many of us on the Liberal Democrat side felt that some of our Conservative colleagues were too close, personally and politically, to the Gulf autocracies and the Saudi royal family, and too hostile to Iran. We need as a Government to maintain a balance in Middle East politics which does not entirely follow the hard Saudi line and cut the Iranian Government out, complicated although that is I join the Lord, Lord Collins, in remarking that indirect involvement in the Yemen war by supporting Saudi armed forces and supplying weapons for delivery in Yemen has to some extent compromised our position in international relations. We talk about the importance of our economic relationship, but that relationship is overwhelmingly dependent on arms sales. The long-term question hanging over that is: who is dependent on whom when you have that sort of one-sided relationship I welcome and support the Government’s announcement of their joint position with the French and German Governments. Clearly, British influence is maximised when we work with others. I see from the Financial Times this morning that the German Government have announced a suspension of arms sales. Have we discussed parallel action with them, and have the British Government yet considered whether they should join the Germans in suspending arms sales until this is sorted out There is a slightly surreal element in hearing day by day, as we did yesterday in the Prime Minister’s Statement, the Government reporting with strong approval that we have achieved a joint agreement with our French and German allies on this, that or the other—the Prime Minister’s Statement did that in two places—while at the same time the Foreign Secretary describes the European Union as like the Soviet Union, from which we must escape, and a number of Conservative Ministers, and more Conservative MPs, regard the European Union as fundamentally hostile to Britain How one has a foreign policy with any degree of coherence when such contradictions are deeply embedded is a little beyond my understanding. The incoherence of British policy on the Middle East is only part of the incoherence of British foreign policy as a whole. The alternative—following the US lead, rather than co-operating with our European partners—seems to us on these Benches even more doubtful under President Trump, in particular given some of the close links between the Trump family and the Saudi Arabian royal family This was an attack on a journalist, as the Minister said. There are many other attacks on journalists in the world and, sadly, there have been three murderous attacks on journalists that I can think of in three different European Union member countries in the past two years. I hope that the Government, in their commitment to a free media and a free press, will attempt to maintain our standards on issues arising from other attacks on journalists around the world. I remind the Minister—I am sure that he is aware—that in a campaign speech in the west of the United States last week, President Trump praised a Congressman who had violently assaulted a British Guardian journalist at one of his meetings. Encouragement of violence against journalists by the American President is extremely dangerous to democracy. Are the British Government considering making that point at the highest possible level in the US Administration?