---

Global Security (Iran)

Mr. Benton, I apologise to you, the Minister and right hon. and hon. Members because I am between a rock and a hard place. The rock is my duty here, and the hard place is a meeting being held in my constituency because, as a constituent said in a letter to me, 18,000 houses are being dumped there. The House can imagine the outcry that that has caused. Consequently, I must leave early, so I beg your indulgence, Mr. Benton, and apologise sincerely. I congratulate the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) on securing this important debate at an important time on an important subject. His speech opening the debate was immensely valuable and of the highest quality. It has been a pleasure to listen to him. It is also a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley), a man of great stature in the House, whose statements always have great credibility. I listened to him with rapt interest. He made some important points, which I am sure the Minister has noted. I congratulate the Committee on an excellently constructed report. It was produced on 20 February, which impedes its import somewhat, but it contains much of we must take account. I also congratulate the Government on their full response in May. All that is excellent, but it was blown out of the water on 12 June, when the situation in Iran changed dramatically within 24 hours. That is not to say that there is not massively important information in the report and the response, but we face a new situation in Iran, for which many of us had hoped for many years, but few of us believed would materialise in quite the way it did—in the number of people who came out on the streets following what appeared to be an election that did not quite comply with the rules that we try to apply in this country. The situation is new, and we now know that there are two Irans. There is the elderly, rural Iran, which until now has in the main supported a mediaeval theocracy. That is the Iran that the Iranian propaganda machine tried to tell us was totally and fully supported by the nation's population. We now know that there is also a new, young, urban, modern Iran, which supports change. The people who came out on the streets showed immense courage in supporting change after an election that millions believed to be without credibility. I believe that the future lies with the latter Iran, and I am sure that we all pray that it does. It is vital for the security of the middle east and beyond that that is the case. The question now is: how do we work to achieve that objective as peacefully as possible? The Government must pay attention to that, and although I cannot be here to listen to the Minister's response, I shall read it in Hansard with great interest. The truth is that we in this country have appeased the former and taken little heed of the latter over the past few years. We have been beguiled by the output of a state propaganda machine that told us that there was no real dissent, and that the only people who dissented were anoraks, idiots, radicals—call them what you will—who are anti the Almighty, but not the majority of Iran's citizens. That propaganda has been blown apart, so we must rethink the situation. The report and the Government's response do not take that into account, nor could they. However, the events of 12 June tell us that appeasement is not the way forward. We have another view of what Iran is all about. It is that the younger, modern, thrusting element of society needs our help, support and understanding if Iran is to become the peaceful, democratic and free society that we all hope it will be. Appeasement has a long record. The position was summed up on 1 February 2006by the then Foreign Secretary's. His statement, culled down, was that the People's Mujahedeen Organisation of Iran was proscribed at the behest of the mullahs as a sort of gift. We are seeing in a number of ways how wrong that was. I believe that the argument was based on Foreign Office information that was so dated as to be untrue. I shall take a liberty now by referring to a letter that I will not ascribe, although I am willing to show it to the Minister if he feels that that would be useful, for his information only. Its content is very important and I shall quote two sentences from it. It is from a former Minister. Talking about Iran, he states:""As time went by…I became less confident about the information with which I was provided. Some was too old to have realistic implications for the present. Some was sourced in ways that made checks on reliability extremely difficult or impossible."" He goes on to say in another paragraph:""It is never easy for a former Government Minister—or indeed Governments—to acknowledge their analysis was wrong, however well motivated. But that is the case."" I am happy to show the Minister the letter privately, because I do not want him to think that I am trying to be misleading or clever in any way. The information has a real bearing on what we are talking about today and needs to be taken into account in a very serious way. Later, I shall talk about the evidence that I have to support its import. We need to recognise that the analysis was wrong. We also need to recognise, as the Select Committee report itself hints, the ineffective nature of sanctions. They have not had the effect that we would want. Paragraph 13 of the conclusions and recommendations states:""We conclude that although the sanctions currently in place against Iran act as a disincentive for its nuclear programme, they are not sufficiently robust to coax it into suspending its enrichment."" That supports the argument made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling when he said that appeasement had not done its job on the nuclear issue. We have only to read another conclusion in the report to find out about the effectiveness of the E3+3 diplomacy. Paragraph 4 of the conclusions and recommendations states that""the E3+3's diplomacy over Iran's nuclear programme is currently a long way from successfully achieving all its goals."" The truth is that there are two great findings: the report's finding that our effort to appease the regime has failed and our sanctions have been ineffective, and the subsequent finding that there is a greater rising of the human spirit in Iran than was ever thought possible before. Whatever we say about the people who came on to the streets, they did us a great service through their courage and endeavours, because never again can it be said that there is no opposition to the regime internally. Of course there is opposition to the regime internally, and we need to take great note of it and encourage those people. If what we believe about freedom and democracy in this country means anything, the need to encourage those people must be paramount. I am sure that that will be taken into account by the new Minister, whom I welcome to his position. He gives us considerable hope.