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Al-Yamamah Arms Agreement

I have met those gentlemen and I have every sympathy with their terrible experience. [Interruption.] It is all very well for a Scottish National Member to say that a bit of sympathy is not very helpful, but we tried very hard to help those gentlemen. People such as the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr. MacNeil) should not speak in such an ignorant way about those situations. There has been too much flippancy about that. I remind the House that Saudi Arabia has its own problems with al-Qaeda—there is no question about that—yet much of the money for al-Qaeda also comes from Saudi Arabia. In a recent visit to Waziristan, I was told by a member of the frontier corps that when they had examined bodies after a battle, they discovered that the military leader of an al-Qaeda detachment had been a Chechen, that a Turkoman was the armourer and the quartermaster, and that the money bags, as always with these detachments, was a Saudi. We ignore that fact at our peril. It is extremely important to recognise that we need the co-operation of the Saudis in these matters. It must be a very important consideration. The madrassahs that we are worried about in Pakistan are almost entirely funded by Saudi money. The Saudis are worried about that, President Musharraf is certainly worried about it, and I will be open with the House and say that we are very worried about it. To pretend that this is some kind of fringe consideration is nonsense. The United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have a long history of friendship, understanding and co-operation. Saudi Arabia is a key ally in the region, and our co-operation covers regional and international issues, counter-terrorism, energy security, trade and investment. Many questions have been raised today. I was glad to hear the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey. His contribution was a great deal more measured than that of the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable)—it would have been difficult not to be. I sympathised with the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey when he asked why the National Audit Office report from the earlier period was not being published. He has been in the House for roughly the same length of time as I have. I thought that that report was produced before 1992. I remember being appointed to the Public Accounts Committee and feeling very chuffed about it. I turned up to my first sitting, only to be told by the Chairman, Sir Robert Sheldon, after he had welcomed me on to the Committee, that, like everyone else, I would have to leave the room because the only people who could read the report were the Comptroller and Auditor General, Sir John Bourn, who had written it, Sir Robert himself and the deputy Chairman. We never saw that report again. I do not think that anyone has. There could be many reasons for that, and some of them might be to do with the report putting members of the security services in danger. I meet a lot of our brave security services personnel abroad, and I know that they are frequently in great danger. However, the hon. Gentleman has asked a perfectly reasonable question about the publication of the report, and I think that the Comptroller and Auditor General and the Public Accounts Committee ought to take his request seriously. The Committee has dedicated debates in the House, and this would be a good subject for such a debate. At the time, we were told that the report would not be published—nobody tried to hide that fact—because there were 40,000 jobs riding on the al-Yamamah deal. That seemed to everyone a good reason not to publish it, at the time. I do not remember anyone—apart from my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams), who is always the star of the Public Accounts Committee—standing up in the House to say that it should be published and that we should know what was going on.