argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Engagements — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: Labor
Questions: On a day when significant questions have been levelled at the collective decision making of politicians, military leaders and intelligence services, many of our constituents will be seeking reassurance that the lives of their loved ones were not given in vain, and that the mistakes that were made will never happen again. Will the Prime Minister ensure that the lessons learned will be fully examined and acted upon so that the tragic mistakes made over a decade ago can never be repeated?; Will my right hon. Friend join me in congratulating Southend Council, which is once again under the control of the Conservative party, on swiftly acting to sort out the mess left by the previous, hopeless administration? Does he agree that Southend-on-Sea being the alternative city of culture next year will produce a considerable boost to the local economy?; Is the Prime Minister aware that, two miles north of Shirebrook, which has already been mentioned, is a town called Bolsover and that, at the same time as local people were seeing notices on the bus saying, “£350 million for the NHS”, the Government decided, with the help of the local people, to close the hospital at Bolsover? We need the beds—I am sure that he understands that. When the hospital is closed, it is gone forever. I want him today to use a little bit of that money—not very much—to save the Bolsover hospital, save the beds and save the jobs. The press might have a headline saying, “The Prime Minister—Dodgy Dave—assists the Beast to save the Bolsover hospital.” What a temptation! Save it!; Last week, I held my first apprenticeships fair in my constituency. Does my right hon. Friend agree that apprenticeships are an absolutely vital part of economic development in our proud northern towns and cities?
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and that is why we have set the target of 3 million apprentices during this Parliament. I think that is achievable, just as we achieved the 2 million apprentices trained during the last Parliament. I wish her well with what I hope is the first of many apprenticeship fairs in her constituency.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: Government Operations
Kenneth Clarke (Conservative, Centre-right): We will all need time to study the many damning conclusions in this report about how this catastrophic decision was reached in 2003, but the Prime Minister says that we should read it with an eye to future lessons for the machinery of government. Although I know from my own experience that the introduction of the National Security Council was a very valuable innovation, does my right hon. Friend agree that his successor should be recommended to look at whether we should return to the pre-Blair era of full collective Cabinet responsibility with proper time for meetings, proper information and studied conclusions? Does he agree that we should also look at whether proper parliamentary accountability for these things should be reconsidered so that there are full and properly informed debates here held in good time before, in cases such as this, the military are deployed, everything is set in hand and the position is irreversible? We really do need to go back to a much more collective and accountable form of government.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his remarks. He rightly said that it is a sombre day—he is absolutely correct. He highlighted a number of the very serious mistakes that were made, not least on planning for the aftermath. He asked specifically why I did not mention the specific Tony Blair note to President Bush. I was trying to be very careful in my statement to accurately summarise what Sir John Chilcot has said. There was a whole section in my statement about the processes, and I said that Sir John had found that at crucial points Mr Blair sent personal notes and made important commitments to Mr Bush that had not been discussed or agreed with Cabinet colleagues. It is worth reading Sir John Chilcot’s statement from this morning about that The right hon. Gentleman rightly focused on paragraph 630 of the executive summary. It is a powerful paragraph that says that "when Mr Blair set out the UK’s vision for the future of Iraq in the House of Commons on 18 March 2003, no assessment had been made of whether that vision was achievable, no agreement had been reached with the US on a workable post-conflict plan, UN authorisation had not yet been secured" and so on. That is one of the most powerful passages in the report, and he is right to draw attention to it. I do not accept that all the same failures are in some way apparent when it comes to planning in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan there was a very clear connection as a Taliban regime was playing host to al-Qaeda. The goal of Government policy, which I supported at the time and indeed put in place when I became Prime Minister, was to make sure that that country could not become a safe haven for al-Qaeda. There was some considerable success in pursuing that aim. There was a huge amount of planning on the post-conflict situation in Afghanistan, and we are still engaged in that. It is not right to say that there was no plan; there is a plan. There is a UK-run officer training academy to strengthen the Afghan army. But as I said earlier, you can have all the plans in the world, but these are still extremely difficult things to get right If the right hon. Gentleman is somehow saying that there is no point in ever taking part in any intervention or trying to help any of these countries, that is a different position, and he should be honest and say that. But I would argue that with Afghanistan and Libya—and indeed with Brexit—we have set out the alternatives. That does not mean they are easy.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
Crispin Jeremy Rupert Blunt (Conservative, Centre-right): The Foreign Affairs Committee has stayed its inquiry into our intervention in Libya in order to take into account the conclusions of the Iraq inquiry. Given that it could be claimed that the inquiry’s central conclusions apply to some degree or other to Libya—not least as stabilisation planning for Libya was described by my right hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Sir Alan Duncan) at the time as "fanciful rot" and has been described to us since in evidence as "an unrealistic desktop exercise"—will the Prime Minister reconsider his understandable decision not to give oral evidence to us during the referendum campaign, so that the reach of the changes to the machinery of Government that he outlined earlier to the right hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson) can be properly assessed by the Committee?
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his remarks. The Foreign Secretary will be giving evidence to his Committee. The Prime Minister is always asked to give evidence to every Select Committee of the House. I try to stick to answering questions here in the Chamber, and at the Liaison Committee and the National Security Committee, which bring together members of a number of different Committees. I do not think what he asks will be possible but I always consider any request.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend makes an important point. I have had longer than anyone else to read the report, but I accept that trying to get to the bottom of that particular issue is difficult. Sir John Chilcot seems to be saying that the British Government had a policy of sort of coercive diplomacy—they wanted to use the pressure of the threat of military action to get Saddam to comprehensively disarm. Look, everyone is going to have to read the report and come to their own conclusions. From my reading of it, Sir John Chilcot is not accusing anyone of deliberate explicit deceit, but people will have to read the report and come to their own conclusions.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
Caroline Alice Spelman (Conservative, Centre-right): I was shadow International Development Secretary at the time, and I asked 91 written questions of the Government, culminating in an Opposition day debate on 30 January 2003 because I had not received any satisfactory answers. For the sake of the many, many victims, will the Prime Minister please assure the House that we have truly learned the lessons of failure to plan for contingency?
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): I well remember that when I was on the Opposition Benches and the right hon. Lady was on the Government Benches, she made very powerful speeches about the appalling things that Saddam Hussein did to his own people and the practices in that country, which is a fair point. I also think that when the case was made, people were acting on the knowledge in front of them. It was not just about weapons of mass destruction; there was a sense that we were trying to uphold the position of the United Nations, and the massive danger that Saddam Hussein posed to the region and to his own people. However, those of us who voted for the war must be frank that the consequences of what followed have been truly very poor. That is what Sir John finds, in the section of his report in which he writes about the Government’s objectives not being met, and he states that far from dealing with the problem of regimes potentially linking up with terrorists, which Tony Blair talked about from this Dispatch Box, this action ended up creating a space for al-Qaeda. We must learn all those lessons, including the more painful ones.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: Law and Crime
Dominic Charles Roberts Grieve (Conservative, Centre-right): Human institutions will never be perfect, and neither are they perfectible. The conclusions of the Chilcot inquiry into the way that legal advice and intelligence was processed, and intelligence used to inform policy, are pretty damning. My right hon. Friend has rightly highlighted that much has changed since then. I can certainly vouch for the fact that the processes by which legal advice is obtained—which I hope have been continued—are rather different from those that Sir John identified. The collation of intelligence is an extremely difficult skill. Is my right hon. Friend satisfied that it is subject to enough scrutiny and subsequent review to ensure that lessons can be learned when mistakes in intelligence assessment are made? That seems to be one of the key areas in which future decision making is capable of continuing improvement.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend and I are not always on the same side of every argument, but on this I think he is absolutely right. There is a difference between deterrence and containment in some cases, and pre-emptive action when there is a direct threat to one’s country. That is a very good framework on which to think of these sorts of interventions. I would also add that there is a third: when we think we need to act to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe, which was the reason I stood at this Dispatch Box and said we should take action with regard to Libya. That is a very good framework for thinking about these matters.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): As so often, the right hon. Gentleman speaks with great clarity on these matters. Of course, we need a UN that can do that. That is why we sometimes end up in the situation of being absolutely certain that it is right to take a particular action, but because of a veto on the United Nations Security Council, it somehow becomes legally wrong. There is a question sometimes about how can something be morally right but legally wrong. We therefore need to make sure we keep looking at reforming the United Nations, so we can bring those two things together.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): I think people should read the report and come to their own conclusions. Clearly, the aftermath of the conflict was profoundly disastrous in so many ways. I do not move away from that at all. I just take the view that if we voted in a particular way, we cannot turn the clock back. We have to take our share of responsibility, but we learn the lessons of what clearly went wrong.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Gentleman reads out some very important parts of the report. It is significant that Sir John Chilcot finds that this undermined the United Nations. Some of us felt at the time that the United Nations was being undermined by the actions of Saddam Hussein and the fact that he was not complying with so many resolutions, but we need to study that and take that into account. As for how people should account for themselves, it is for them to read the report and explain why they did what they did. My role here, on the publication of the report, is to allow the House to discuss it and set out the lessons I think we should learn. I am far more concerned about the future, and how we learn what is in here, rather than rerun the whole Iraq debate all over again.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Gentleman asks a question that it is impossible to answer. I can say only that just as there are consequences of intervention, there are consequences of non-intervention. We have discovered that with Syria, where there have been appalling numbers of deaths and displacements of people, along with the booming industry of terrorism. One could argue in many ways that that is the consequence of non-intervention rather than intervention, but I cannot answer his question.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): The right hon. Gentleman is right to highlight those important aspects of the report. The war was not a last resort; we were not at that stage. According to Sir John Chilcot, the UN was undermined and a fundamental lack of planning led to so many of the subsequent problems. The right hon. Gentleman is also right that the people who took those decisions should be held accountable—in this House and in the court of public opinion. They should be accountable, too, to those who might want to take action through the courts, as has happened, with respect to equipment failures and all the rest of it in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Clearly, the Government of the day and the Prime Minister of the day have to account for themselves. I understand that Mr Blair is doing that right now.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): I am happy to make both those points. I am sure everyone, like me, came here, listened to the arguments, wrestled with the difficult decision and then took it. We can look back now and see how we feel about all the things that happened subsequently. I am sure that everyone made their decision in good faith. The consequences of non-intervention can been seen clearly in Syria, as I said in response to the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes). This is true, and it is worth mentioning other humanitarian issues, as I did in my statement with respect to Srebrenica and Rwanda.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
Alexander John Gervase Chalk (Conservative, Centre-right): The decision not to give Hans Blix more time to conclude his UN weapons inspections is surely one of the principal misjudgments of the pre-war period. Does my right hon. Friend feel that in the light of the changes he alludes to in the culture and practice of government, the scope for ignoring the UN in this way has been reduced
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): I do not always agree with the hon. Gentleman, but I think he has put it very well. Saddam Hussein had an appalling record. He had gassed the Kurds, he had murdered his own people, and he had invaded his neighbour. He had used weapons of mass destruction in the past, we were being told that he was developing them again for the future, and we were being asked, on the basis of that, whether we could really risk leaving him in place and leaving those programmes in place, given the heightened risk post 9/11. Those were all very strong arguments, and I think it is worth recalling that It is also worth taking account of the hon. Gentleman’s other point. Who knows what would have happened if Saddam had still been in place at the time of the Arab spring, but it is quite possible to believe that his reactions to his own people would have been rather like the reactions of President Assad to his own people, which, I would argue, have perhaps done more to foment terrorism and cause extremism than anything else in the last decade.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): I do agree with the right hon. Gentleman. I said in my statement that I thought there were lessons to learn but also lessons not to learn, and the lesson not to learn is that intervention is always wrong. There are occasions when it is right to intervene, because it is in the interests of our national security or because we are trying to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. We should be very clear about the fact that there have been occasions when we have not intervened and when we have seen almost as much chaos and difficulty as we are seeing in Syria.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): I am going to hesitate before replying to my hon. Friend, because there is not a huge amount about that in the executive summary of the Iraq inquiry. I think we will probably have to dive into the volumes to see exactly what Sir John has to say about advice from the MOD, advice from the Foreign Office, how much group-think there genuinely was, and all the rest of it. So I would hesitate. I think we need to study the report, and then we can discuss the matter during next week’s debate.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): I very much agree with the hon. Gentleman that we should recognise that what people in the middle east want is what we want, in terms of, as he says, respect, the right to decent government, the rule of law and decent standards It is worth reading the parts of the report about the weapons of mass destruction. It says in paragraph 496: "The ingrained belief that Saddam Hussein’s regime retained chemical and biological warfare capabilities, was determined to preserve and if possible enhance its capabilities, including at some point in the future a nuclear capability, and was pursuing an active policy of deception and concealment, had underpinned UK policy towards Iraq since the Gulf Conflict ended in 1991." It was wrong that he had weapons of mass destruction—we now know he did not—but it is worth recalling the sense that I think everyone in this House had that it was very deeply ingrained in policy makers and policy thinkers that he did. So, yes, it is right that Chilcot comes to the conclusion that Robin Cook—standing on the Benches over there—was right to say, "You could look at the evidence and come to a different conclusion," but it is important to remember just how many people and how many organisations were convinced that this was the basis of policy.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
Alec Shelbrooke (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend will attend the NATO Warsaw summit this weekend, and he will be acutely aware of the pressure that NATO and its member states feel from Russia right now. Is it not the case that President Putin will be examining very closely the action this Parliament takes moving forward? As Parliament knows, NATO can only act when its Security Council meets and decides to act, but article 5 says that an invasion of one country is an invasion of all. May I urge my right hon. Friend to make sure that this House does not move to a position whereby it has to approve that before we can take action, because otherwise we could find that the Iraq lessons, and Iraq as a whole, are used as another shield to never taking any military action?
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is right: we should not use this sobering moment of reflection, when we look at the mistakes that were made and the lessons to be learned, to think that somehow it is right for Britain to shrink away from international responsibilities and engagement. That would be the wrong lesson to learn from this.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: Law and Crime
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): I can certainly give the right hon. Gentleman that assurance. That was something specifically addressed in the coalition Government: that we should not rely on, or use in any way, evidence delivered by means of torture.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
Ben Howlett (Conservative, Centre-right): Given that the Chilcot report found that the UK Government undermined UN Security Council’s authority and given the result of the EU referendum, what plans do the Government have to reinforce the Foreign Office to restore our international reputation?
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
David William Donald Cameron (Conservative, Centre-right): The Foreign Office has been restored in many ways. The former Foreign Secretary William Hague restored the language school and opened a number of embassies around the world, and the Foreign Office is once again seen as a great place to work, so I do not think that that is the problem. We just have to go on recognising that the combination of our 2% of GDP spend on the military, our 0.7% spend on aid and our proper funding of the Foreign Office actually enhance our soft and hard powers in the world.
Report of the Iraq Inquiry — House of Commons, 2016-07-06
Topic: International Affairs
Kevin John Foster (Conservative, Centre-right): We have heard talk today about what a dreadful dictator Saddam was and how he had been ignoring UN rules, but the key question in 2003 was, "Why now?" That is why the intelligence around weapons of mass destruction was so crucial in trying to provide that "why now?" justification. Does the Prime Minister agree that the key thing about the special relationship is that it should be like any other relationship? The reason we are so close to some people is that they will tell us what we need to hear, not what we want to hear.