Tag: Speeches

Julie James – 2022 Statement on Responses to the Consultation for the Coal Tip Safety (Wales) White Paper

The statement made by Julie James, the Welsh Minister for Climate Change, in the Welsh Assembly on 9 November 2022.

Earlier this year I announced a consultation on the Coal Tip Safety (Wales) White Paper[1] which set out our proposals for a new tip safety regime in Wales. The aim of our proposals is to protect communities, critical infrastructure and the environment by introducing new rules on the appropriate management of tips to help reduce the likelihood of landslides.

The White Paper built on the recommendations made by the Law Commission in their report Regulating Coal Tip Safety in Wales[2] which was published on 24 March. The White Paper also included further analysis undertaken by the Welsh Government on areas not addressed in the Law Commission’s report or where it had recommended were for the Welsh Government to consider. The White Paper set out legislative proposals for the introduction of a new statutory management framework, which would provide a new consistent approach to the management, monitoring and oversight of disused tip and help mitigate the potential impacts from climate change.

The consultation closed on 4 August and I am pleased to publish a summary of responses today. I would like to extend my thanks for the valuable contributions provided by a wide range of individual stakeholders, companies, and organisations who responded to this consultation, and for the continued support and advice from our Task Force partners – the Coal Authority, Natural Resources Wales, local authorities and the Welsh Local Government Association.

I was pleased to see the significant support for the proposals set out in the White Paper with broad recognition of the need for an effective management regime to help ensure the safety of tips and address the risks they pose to communities and the environment.

Turning to the specific White Paper proposals, there was general agreement for an overarching framework suitable for both disused coal and non-coal tips, although the initial focus for the new regime will be on disused coal tips. This will allow incorporation of other disused spoil tips into the regime when appropriate through a phased transitional approach.

There was strong support for the proposal to establish a supervisory authority to oversee the new regime, ensure management arrangements are in place for the highest category tips and to compile and maintain a new national asset register. Respondents supported the proposal for the supervisory authority to be established as an arms-length Executive Welsh Government Sponsored Body. This will ensure the appropriate independence and focus on securing the safety of tips.

A new management framework must, of course, be premised on up-to-date data. There was broad support for the proposal to introduce a centralised national asset register comprised of uniform, and coherent and reliable data. I take on board the feedback from respondents to not underestimate the complexities and challenges associated with this work. This central register will build upon the data collection work already undertaken by the Coal Tip Safety Task Force. We will continue to engage with stakeholders to learn from others experience and look to utilise best practice where appropriate from existing comparable systems.

The White Paper set out proposals for a new national approach to the categorisation of tips which will be underpinned by a tailored hazard assessment for each site. The hazard assessment would account for the hazards a tip might pose to communities, property, infrastructure or the environment. There was broad support for these proposals, although I acknowledge the comments received on the recruitment shortages for suitable qualified or experienced assessors, and also the need to ensure appropriate training and guidance. We will continue to work with partners and key stakeholders on how we address these capability gaps. I am grateful to our Task Force partners for the ongoing close collaboration and engagement as we continue to trial hazard assessments and categorisations, and refine proposals for inspections, appraisals, management plans and maintenance agreements.

A key theme to emerge consistently in responses to the White Paper is the significant funding and resource requirements to establish and implement the new regime. There are also separate concerns around ensuring a disproportionate burden is not placed on tip owners. I acknowledge these points and commit to ensure transparency around costings as the legislation is developed. It is also worth reiterating there are many economic, social and environmental opportunities that might be gained from investing in disused tips, many of which are located in some of the most deprived areas of Wales.

Finally, there was broad support for the proposals for a two-tier monitoring approach with a proportionate approach to tip management based on the category of each tip. Respondents also recognised the need for appropriate powers of access to private land to enable inspections, maintenance works and spot checks to be undertaken. It was also accepted that civil sanctions would need to be an essential part of the regime with many views provided on how these could be developed. It was recognised the regime will only work effectively if there are appropriate measures in place to ensure compliance.

The responses to the consultation represent a valuable source of evidence and ideas which will help inform the development of our legislative proposals. Over the coming months, my officials will continue to engage with stakeholders as proposals for new legislation are fully developed.

In relation to the wider coal tip safety programme, the fifth round of inspections of the higher rated tips commenced in October and will run throughout the winter months. Despite the challenges in relation to evidence gathering, the coal tip data collation and analysis exercise is progressing and I remain committed to publishing the locations of disused coal tips in Wales. I will continue to keep Members updated.

[1] Coal Tip Safety (Wales) White Paper | GOV.WALES

[2] Law Com 406, 24 March 2022, Regulating-Coal-Tip-Safety-in-Wales-Report.pdf

November 10, 2022
Kate Green – 2022 Statement on Leaving the House of Commons

The statement made by Kate Green, the Labour MP for Stretford and Urmston, on 9 November 2022.

Personal news:

Many apologies for the suddenness of this news, but it has been announced this morning that Andy Burnham intends to nominate me to become deputy mayor of Greater Manchester responsible for police, crime and fire, in succession to my great friend Beverley Hughes. There are some formal confirmatory steps to go through, but I hope to take up post by the new year. This means I will be standing down from parliament in the next few days, and a byelection will be held very shortly.

It has been an enormous privilege to represent my wonderful constituents in Stretford and Urmston over the past 12 years, and I am very sad that I will no longer be your MP. But we have a great candidate in Cllr Andrew Western, and I look forward to campaigning to get him elected to parliament. I am also very pleased that I will have the opportunity to continue to serve people in Stretford and Urmston, and across Greater Manchester, in my new role.

I want to pay tribute to all Bev has achieved in the role – she has always been a huge source of support to me. I am very much looking forward to working closely with her to secure a smooth transition in the coming weeks.

Meantime, may I thank you for all your support and friendship, and I very much look forward to staying in close touch.

Best wishes and speak soon

Kate

November 10, 2022
Lee Anderson – 2022 Speech on Documents Relating to Suella Braverman

The speech made by Lee Anderson, the Conservative MP for Ashfield, in the House of Commons on 8 November 2022.

We all know in this House that it is not appropriate for the Government to publish information relating to confidential advice, so why are we here today, again wasting parliamentary time when we could be talking about real issues? I am just looking at the Labour Benches opposite, and seven Labour MPs have turned up for this debate that they asked for. They cannot even be bothered to turn up to a debate.

Why are we actually here? It is nothing to do with security. It is nothing to do with standards. It is nothing to do with wanting to do the right thing. This is a bullying campaign to get rid of the Home Secretary. That is all it is—it is a relentless bullying campaign to get rid of our brilliant Home Secretary. I can tell you now, she is going nowhere. In the real world where I live and where I represent, I have not had one single email. If you are talking about releasing documents, how about you lot over there—[Interruption.] Sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker. How about Opposition Members releasing their emails to show how many emails they have actually had on this subject? I suspect it is not very many at all. They do not live in the real world.

Like I say, it is a relentless horrible bullying campaign to get rid of the Home Secretary. The Home Secretary needs to have the backing of this place. She needs the backing of Parliament. She needs the backing of the whole country. She needs people to get behind her so that we can sort out the migrant problem, crime on the streets and these silly protests that we have outside, but that will not happen unless the Opposition get behind her and unless we all get behind her. They are just playing politics—that is all they are doing. I used the word “bullying”. That is all they are—a bunch of bullies. I have been bullied before by the Labour party. I was bullied out of the Labour party, but thanks to them, I am stood here now, sticking up for my residents in Ashfield and Eastwood.

The British people get it; they understand. Like I said, I have not had one single email on this subject. Why are we here today, wasting taxpayers’ money, when we could be talking about the boat crossings, crime on the streets or saving lives? We could be talking about the important stuff. You can sit there with glazed expressions on your faces again like you normally do, looking at me as though I have just landed from a different planet.

Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)

No, I am not looking at all glazed. Please follow proper parliamentary procedure.

Lee Anderson

I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker. You may be aware that Opposition Members are looking at me like I have landed from a different planet, but I have not—I have landed from planet Ashfield, and this is where real people talk common sense. This lot on the Opposition Benches need to visit my constituency, if they ever get the chance. At the next election, I challenge them to come up, knock on some doors and speak to some real people in the real world of Ashfield, and they will go away knowing that that seat of Ashfield is going to stop blue for a long time. I cannot talk any more, because this is a very narrow debate, but what I will say is that they are nothing but a bunch of bullies, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

November 10, 2022
Ruth Cadbury – 2022 Speech on Documents Relating to Suella Braverman

The speech made by Ruth Cadbury, the Labour MP for Brentford and Isleworth, in the House of Commons on 8 November 2022.

This debate has as its core the issue of standards and integrity in our politics. When he was appointed as Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak) proclaimed that he would bring integrity back to Government. He certainly had a front-row seat to its disappearance, seeing that he served faithfully next to a previous Prime Minister with form on the issue. Yet one of his first acts as Prime Minister was to bring back a Home Secretary who just six days before had quit for not one, but two breaches of the ministerial code. They were not accidental breaches or a one-off mistake where an official forgot to tick a box; they were clear breaches of the ministerial rules.

The issue of standards relates not just to emails and the use of personal IT, but to the ethics of how the Home Office works as a Department. Like all of us, Ministers are public servants. We all sign up to the seven Nolan principles of public life: integrity, openness, selflessness, objectivity, accountability, honesty and leadership. Ministers also have a duty to this country on public safety, national security and human rights and a duty to the taxpayer. Have we seen that from the current Home Secretary? No—and that is what this debate is about.

I want to focus on the record and decisions of the Home Secretary and the Home Office in relation to their approach to the crisis in the UK response to asylum seekers. For instance, last week the Home Secretary played to the anti-immigration gallery by implying that asylum seekers had to be stopped from wandering our streets—hence the Government’s policy on Manston—yet her Department was responsible for two groups of destitute asylum seekers being found wandering the streets around Victoria and having to be picked up by a small charity to ensure that they had warm clothes, warm shoes and food.

I also remind the Conservative party that asylum seekers are seeking refuge. They are fleeing—

Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)

Order. I am afraid the hon. Lady is also going a little wider than the terms of the motion. If she could bring herself back to the motion, that would be very helpful to everybody.

Ruth Cadbury

I appreciate that, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I hope you will let me continue, because I will bring my speech back to the point about standards in public life, which is where I started and what I think this motion is fundamentally about.

Just to give some background, if you will indulge me, Madam Deputy Speaker, in Hounslow there are currently almost 3,000 asylum seekers in nine hotels, and more than 500 in dispersal accommodation, which are mainly rundown houses in multiple occupation with shared kitchens and bathrooms. There are 140 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. The challenge locally is not asylum seekers roaming the streets causing problems for the community, because by definition asylum seekers want to play by the rules because they want to be given asylum. They do not want to cause trouble, and they are not going to cause trouble. The problem is the challenge for our public services in making sure that these vulnerable people have the right to education and social services to ensure that they are safe and comfortable while they are waiting in the ever-lengthening queue to get their status. The Home Office—

Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)

Order. The hon. Lady absolutely must come back to the terms of the motion, because she is roaming much wider, and I have pulled up other Members for that. She must come back to the motion itself.

Ruth Cadbury

The Home Office has contracts with organisations such as Clearsprings Ready Homes, which then has contracts with a network of other agencies that are providing a terrible service. One person who works with these services said that asylum seekers receive food not fit for a dog and accommodation not fit for animals.

The hotels—I am coming to my point, Madam Deputy Speaker—receive £40 a room, yet the agencies are receiving Home Office money and taxpayer money at £130 a room, and they are pocketing the difference. The agencies are getting £15 a meal, yet the caterers are receiving £5.

Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)

Order. I am sorry, but the hon. Lady is not talking about security, as set out in the motion. If the hon. Lady can tell the House how what she is saying relates to these issues of the release of papers, that would be very helpful.

Ruth Cadbury

All right, Madam Deputy Speaker. I take your point and I will keep my notes on that level of misuse of taxpayer money for another time.

I will conclude by saying that perhaps the Prime Minister could finally appoint an independent ethics adviser to ensure that when we see serious breaches of the ministerial code, they can be investigated impartially and a report can be published. I fear that we have returned to an outdated and old-fashioned approach to standards—an approach that simply says, “Trust us, don’t worry, we’ll look after it”, yet surely we and all those who we represent deserve so much better.

November 10, 2022
Danny Kruger – 2022 Speech on Documents Relating to Suella Braverman

The speech made by Danny Kruger, the Conservative MP for Devizes, in the House of Commons on 8 November 2022.

I am afraid that we just have to ignore the shameless politics of this motion. It is, of course, the job of the Opposition to bring this sort of motion before the House. There may come a day—a very distant day—when we sit on the Opposition Benches and make similar attacks on the Government. If the Labour party is the Government, we will have plenty of material to work with based on its last stint in office. There will be new names to add to the illustrious roster of Hinduja, Ecclestone, Mittal and so on, and perhaps even some old names will be coming back. I have the fortune of representing the noble Lord Mandelson as a constituent. I dare say that he will be back on the Front Bench of the Labour party if it is ever back in power and he, no doubt, will be resigning two or three times during his next stint in office. Our Home Secretary has only ever had to resign once, compared with him.

We should not complain, even if it is very thin stuff that Labour Members are bringing. What is going on here? Is it the context or the subtext of this motion? Labour is not attacking the Home Secretary because she shared a policy document with a fellow Privy Counsellor and a former security Minister. The document itself contained no security information. In fact, all the information in the document was already in the public domain. There was no national security breach and no private data involved. That is not the purpose of their attack. The attack is because of her approach to immigration, and I suggest that that is not a subject for this sort of political knockabout, because the topic matters to us all. Despite the knockabout, I think both sides have a legitimate concern and legitimate points to make in this debate, and deep down we all want the same thing.

It is easy to caricature one another’s positions: the Opposition say we are heartless; we say they are naive. They say we are against refugees altogether; we say they want open borders—I said that last week, and it is true of some of them, but let me be fair to the majority of our opponents and try to represent their view fairly. They want us to play our part as a country—a leading part, given our history—in the management of the great people movements of the world. They want our attitude as a country to those people huddled in boats in the English channel to be one of compassion. They want our responsibility—

Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)

Order. The hon. Gentleman is straying—

Danny Kruger

I am straying, Madam Deputy Speaker—

Madam Deputy Speaker

Order. The hon. Gentleman needs to sit down when I am standing. Thank you. He is straying away from the terms of the motion, and he should be quite careful what he says about other Members of the House.

Danny Kruger

That is a fair point, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I thank you for that guidance. I do not have much more to say, then, because the topic of the debate should have been the question of how we manage migration—that is the real purpose of the Opposition’s attacks on the Home Secretary.

It is right that we on the Government side represent citizens who believe strongly in the importance of protecting our borders against illegal migration. It is preposterous that the Opposition think the Government should reveal legal advice. They cannot attack the Home Secretary for her plans on migration, because those plans are popular and right, so they attack her. I wish they would recognise that we all want a humane asylum system and secure borders; they could even work with us to secure that.

November 10, 2022
Richard Thomson – 2022 Speech on Documents Relating to Suella Braverman

The speech made by Richard Thomson, the SNP MP for Gordon, in the House of Commons on 8 November 2022.

What a debate this is turning out to be on one side of the House. I cast my mind back to last week’s SNP Opposition day debate, and to other Opposition day debates. A single transferable speech seems to be rattling around about all the things that the Opposition could be talking about. The clue for Conservative Members is in the name. If they want to be in charge of choosing the topics for Opposition day debates, they should simply call a general election, which would be welcomed by the country.

Opposition day debates are about the things the Opposition want to talk about, which are very often the things that the Government desperately do not want to talk about. I do not blame the Government or the Paymaster General—the Paymaster General always seems to be the one sent out to defend the crease, even when the post holder changes—for not wanting to talk about the Home Secretary’s shockingly casual approach to security protocols, her apparent disregard for her officials’ legal advice or her extreme rhetoric, which is creating security risks and surely makes her completely unfit for any kind of public office.

We are often told that there are two things we should never see being made: laws and sausages. After the Paymaster General’s remarks today, we might need to add ministerial appointments to that list. It is astonishing that, six days after admitting she had broken the ministerial code and resigning, the Home Secretary was able to saunter back into her old job, off the back of her grubby deal to endorse the Prime Minister in the Conservative party’s leadership election.

It has been obvious in recent years that, whenever a Minister transgresses badly enough, even under this Government, to have to leave office, the time they have to spend in the ex-ministerial sin bin has diminished. I am not sure if that is always because standards have dropped, but the half-life of the radioactivity that results from political misdemeanours seems to have markedly reduced.

The Home Secretary’s reappointment to Government, never mind her reappointment as Home Secretary, raises some extremely serious questions, because there is not one but two emerging scandals surrounding her. Each one, in its own way, not only calls into question her competence and integrity in office but raises extremely serious questions about the judgment of the Prime Minister himself.

Members have spoken about the woeful situation at Manston and, with your indulgence, Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to move away slightly from the discussion of the unauthorised release of information and talk about the obstinate refusal to disclose relevant information—surely that is completely the wrong way round for how Ministers should be operating. We have heard the Home Secretary’s approach to defending the way she dealt with legal advice; she did not, apparently, ignore it, but simply chose to act in a contrary and potentially unlawful fashion having read it.

What cannot be in dispute is that a facility designed to hold up to 1,600 people for no more than 24 hours at a time as a short-term processing facility became, under this Home Secretary’s watch, severely overcrowded. The result has been what the Prison Officers Association assistant general secretary Andy Baxter described as a

“humanitarian crisis on British soil”,

with people sleeping on cardboard in tents amid outbreaks of covid, diphtheria, scabies and hepatitis. David Neal the chief inspector of borders and immigration told the Home Affairs Committee that we are now past the point where we can describe Manston as being a safe facility.

All of that coincided with the Home Secretary’s first period in office. Although she denies this, numerous sources, both inside and outside Government, have stated that one major factor for that overcrowding was that the new Home Secretary was refusing to sign off on hotel accommodation—or “alternative accommodation”, call it whatever you like—that would have allowed people to move on from Manston. I tabled a named day question last week asking how many people had been rehoused in that alternative accommodation and how many such alternative places had been approved by the Home Secretary. Remarkably, the answer that came back refused to divulge that information, because, apparently, it could be obtained only at “disproportionate cost”. I do not think that disproportionate cost is something that can be measured in financial terms, but I hazard a guess that this would have come at a greatly disproportionate cost to the remaining credibility of the Home Secretary.

I go down that byway because paragraph 1(c) of the motion calls for the “minutes”, “submissions” and “communications relating to” the Home Secretary’s appointment or

“advice relating to that appointment”

to be disclosed. It would be extraordinary if the advice that we have been told was being proffered to the Home Secretary was dealt with and treated by her, through her actions, in the manner that many of us believe it was.

This debate is, of course, concerned with security rather than Manston itself, and the reason for that is simple: we know that, by her own admission, the Home Secretary sent confidential information from a secure government IT environment to her own personal Gmail account. She also sent information to another Member of this House, who was not authorised to receive it in that form. Incredibly, she also tried to send it on to the Member’s spouse’s email account and the only reason they failed to receive it was that the Home Secretary accidentally sent it to a different unauthorised recipient, a member of staff of a different parliamentarian. So there were two unauthorised recipients, one of whom it was sent to deliberately and the other of whom was an accidental recipient, every bit as unauthorised as the other intended recipient.

In her resignation letter, the Home Secretary claims to have “rapidly reported” the breach when she realised it. However, a former chairman of the Conservative party has said:

“As I understand it, the evidence was put to her and she accepted the evidence, rather than the other way round.”

In a letter to the Home Affairs Committee on 31 October, the Home Secretary wrote that she realised her error at 10 am and that by 10.2 am had emailed the staff member involved asking them to delete the document—whoop-de-doo. Despite that, the Home Secretary apparently did not think to email or contact the Chief Whip—this further contradicts her claim of rapidly reporting the breach—or, perhaps more pertinently, the permanent secretary or the Cabinet Secretary. It was nearly lunchtime when the Home Secretary said that, by coincidence, she saw the Chief Whip, who by then was already aware of what had happened. It is impossible to square the Home Secretary’s explanation of her actions and motivations with the timeline and the information that we now know. What I think is perhaps hardest to accept is the complete and utter insouciance of the Home Secretary in this matter. Indeed, if we were to take both her resignation letter and her letter to the Home Affairs Committee at face value, we could be forgiven for imagining that this was the first Home Secretary who had ever been forced to resign for doing absolutely nothing wrong.

To take the two most high profile resignations from this Government of late, there is some quite remarkable language used in the letters. The Home Secretary said that she was

“choosing to tender her resignation”,

when she should not even have been given the luxury of that choice. That is almost as good, if not better than, the line in the letter of resignation from the right hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng). He said:

“You have asked me to stand aside as your Chancellor. I have accepted.”

My goodness, how gracious of him! Nevertheless, there are serious discrepancies in the Home Secretary’s version of events around this breach.

When it comes to that laxness in IT and informational security, we know, of course, that the Home Secretary has form. She herself has conceded that, on six separate occasions, between 15 September and 16 October, she sent documents from her UK Government email environment to her personal Gmail account. That gives rise to a much, much wider issue, which is that, as a result, the UK is now in the absurd position where the Minister responsible for national security has, by her own actions and admissions, proved that she cannot be trusted with the integrity of sensitive documents. That has very serious implications—whether Conservative Members wish to hear it or not—for what the security services can be confident in sharing with the Home Secretary and consequently, flowing from that, serious issues about the accountability that there can be of the security services to Ministers. International partners will also have taken note, and I suspect that the explanations that have been given will cut little ice. They will simply see a security risk.

If the Prime Minister wants to restore some level of confidence in national security and in the office of Home Secretary, he now needs to remove this Home Secretary from office and commit to a full investigation and to the release of all the relevant documentation to establish what exactly took place. If the Prime Minister was in the least bit serious when he talked of integrity and accountability in his Government, he needs to match those fine words with the reality of his actions: release that information and sack the Home Secretary.

As I have said, this matter raises very serious concerns about the Prime Minister’s judgment. That is why the information must be released. That is why the Government must release information also made available to the Prime Minister in deciding whether to reappoint the Home Secretary. That would allow us get to the bottom of it. It would allow us to reach an informed judgment and see whether it is justified that so many Members on the Opposition Benches take the view that the appointment of this Home Secretary was a very, very serious misjudgment indeed.

November 10, 2022
Chris Clarkson – 2022 Speech on Documents Relating to Suella Braverman

The speech made by Chris Clarkson, the Conservative MP for Heywood and Middleton, in the House of Commons on 8 November 2022.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord). I was not planning to speak at length, because this all has an air of déjà vu about it, and apparently that is also true for official Opposition Members because there are so few of them here. I mean, this is an Opposition day motion and we are outnumbering them here by two to one. They are fed up with hearing about this too. It is not as if this topic has not been hashed and rehashed ad nauseam, but I suspect that Labour Members will continue to bang this particular drum for a while because, let’s face it, they have absolutely nothing else to talk about.

The right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) has taken on the demeanour of the witchfinder pursuivant lately: “I saw Goody Braverman talking to the ERG in the Aye Lobby—she must be hanged!” It is not like we are looking at the second coming of the Blair era here. We are not faced with bright, intelligent people bringing alternatives to this country; it is just more carping. They are a tired, lazy Opposition. I was going to call them beige but I think they are more of a Farrow and Ball crowd. I had a look through the range and the closest colour to beige I could find was called smoked trout, which I think is quite apt.

Mr Deputy Speaker, with your indulgence I am going to get to the motion via a slightly circuitous route. I am headed there and I am developing my argument en route. I think Labour Members might want to reflect on why they lost supposedly safe seats at the last general election, including mine in Heywood and Middleton. I know it is very easy to blame Brexit and that is of course their go-to: it must have been Brexit because everything was fantastic and they had such a good manifesto and everyone agreed with it; that is why people did not vote for them. We saw the first signs of that in 2017. There is a clear values dissonance between the Opposition’s increasingly metropolitan and louche outlook and what used to be their core vote.

When I knock on a door in my constituency I can guarantee that if I mention the Home Secretary, the first words out of someone’s mouth will not be, “Well, there was a data breach.” The first words out of their mouth will be “small boats”. Of course we are not talking about small boats today, but people want to know what we are doing to stop that influx of illegal migration. They want to make sure that our rightly generous and welcoming asylum system is not being abused by people coming here to take the mick. The fact that Labour Members care about what we are talking about today more than that issue should be extremely telling for the people who voted Conservative for the first time at the last election. My constituents want more coppers on the street and fewer boats in the channel, and I think we have the team in place to do that.

Turning to the motion, I would love to say that I was surprised by it, but yet again we have sixth-form politics. The official Opposition are asking to breach the confidentiality of advice regarding appointments. Officials should be able to rely on the advice that they give being done in a private and confidential way. Setting a precedent that their advice could be published as a matter of course would inevitably weaken the quality of the advice that they give to Prime Ministers of all parties.

We already know quite a lot of the salient details that the Opposition are asking for in this motion. The Home Secretary’s letter to the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee—the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) is unfortunately not in her place—said:

“The draft WMS did not contain any information relating to national security, the intelligence agencies, cyber security or law enforcement. It did not contain details of any particular case work.”

The letter also points to the fact that the data in question was already in the public domain.

I hate to labour the point, but I feel I must in the vain hope that the message starts to percolate through to the Opposition. My constituents want more police, like the 15,300 we have already put on to the streets. They want to stop illegal crossings, and they want to stop the evil traffickers who exploit and endanger the most desperate. They like the Rwanda plan and they like the tough measures in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, both of which the Labour party voted against.

Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Chris Clarkson

No, I will not.

My constituents think we should be banging up people who glue themselves to the roads and vandalise buildings and monuments. They want fair, controlled migration, not open borders. Any of those things would have been a worthwhile use of an Opposition day but, again, we are talking about a process issue—the same thing we have talked about half a dozen times. It is a waste of parliamentary time. Sadly, it is predictable, wearing and utterly ridiculous. Get a grip.

November 10, 2022
Richard Foord – 2022 Speech on Documents Relating to Suella Braverman

The speech made by Richard Foord, the Liberal Democrat MP for Tiverton and Honiton, in the House of Commons on 8 November 2022.

On 5 April 1982, three days after the invasion of the Falkland Islands, the then Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, resigned. He took full responsibility for a failure by the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office had not signalled in advance of the Argentine invasion that the UK would stand resolutely by the people of the Falkland Islands. The Franks inquiry, in the following months, had access to some of the relevant papers. We later learned that the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, had asked Lord Carrington to stay on, but Carrington had decided to do the decent thing. He resigned.

Just imagine what would have happened if Lord Carrington had returned to office six days after his resignation. The Government would have barely had time to work out where South Georgia was, never mind give orders for its recapture—yet a Cabinet Minister’s return to office six days later is the situation that we see in this Government in 2022. This was just six days after she, by her own admission, deliberately emailed sensitive documents to a friend on the Back Benches without clearance. Since then, we have also heard about six further data breaches. What do they relate to? We do not know, so sensitive are they.

Lord Carrington understood a phrase that I was reminded of by a constituent from Axminster recently: noblesse oblige. One must act in a fashion that conforms to the position and privileges that have been bestowed upon one. This Government cannot seem to recognise that with privilege comes responsibility. We are in this place to act on behalf of our constituents and the country, not our own vested self-interest or party political interests. This exposes something about the Prime Minister. In spite of a myth crafted by a slick PR campaign, he is just as complicit as Conservative Prime Ministers before him.

It is clear that the Government have learned little from the past two years, including the by-election in Tiverton and Honiton this summer. Voters overwhelmingly said that they had had enough of sleaze and cover-up, yet to coin a phrase from one former Prime Minister, nothing has changed. This Home Secretary readily uses inflammatory language to exacerbate anxiety about inward migration. There is a real issue relating to inward migration that has developed while the Home Secretary has been in government, but instead of whipping up fear by speaking of an “invasion”, she should learn from Lord Carrington who, when faced with a real invasion—that of the Falkland Islands—did the right thing and resigned. So, too, should she.

November 10, 2022
Ian Blackford – 2022 Speech on COP27

The speech made by Ian Blackford, the SNP leader at Westminster, in the House of Commons on 9 November 2022.

I thank the Prime Minister for advance sight of his statement. Let me also welcome his last-minute change of heart to attend COP27. But I am afraid that, whether he likes it or not, his initial instinct not to attend will be long remembered, and rightly so. It means that he now has a major job to convince people that he is truly committed to the challenge of climate change.

That commitment starts with our own domestic targets, but it is vital that our collective commitment extends to those in the global south. Nations and peoples are being damaged the most by a climate crisis that they have contributed the least to. These are the poorest people on this planet and they always seem to pay the highest price. That is why it is so right and necessary that loss and damage were on the formal COP agenda for the first time.

I am proud to say that, through the leadership of our First Minister, Scotland has become the first developed nation to pledge finance to address loss and damage. Our country is now committed to a total of £7 million—a small sum on the scale of what is needed, but a powerful message to larger nations that need to follow that lead. We do not need to wait for consensus and a decision at COP. We can start funding loss and damage programmes straightaway.

Will the Prime Minister guarantee that UK overseas aid earmarked for climate finance will be spent within the five-year timeframe, as originally promised? Will he also guarantee that the total aid budget will not be slashed further in the autumn statement next week? Finally, in terms of the new Prime Minister’s domestic targets on climate, will he honour the promises made to the north-east of Scotland on carbon capture and storage? Will he commit to taking the Scottish cluster off the Government’s reserve list and to fund it right now?

The Prime Minister

I am pleased that it was the UK that established a new Glasgow dialogue on loss and damage to discuss arrangements for funding activities to avert, minimise and address loss and damage, and those conversations are ongoing. With regard to our international climate finance pledges, as I say, we remain committed to the £11.6 billion, and it is our intention to deliver it over the timeframe that was originally envisaged. With regard to targets, again, it should be a source of enormous pride for everyone in this House that we have decarbonised in this country faster than any other G7 country. Our targets are among the most ambitious in the world and we have a credible plan to get on and deliver them.

November 10, 2022
Keir Starmer – 2022 Speech on COP27

The speech made by Sir Keir Starmer, the Leader of the Opposition, in the House of Commons on 9 November 2022.

I thank the Prime Minister for advance copy of his statement. May I start by raising the case of Alaa Abd el-Fattah? As the Prime Minister knows and has said, he is a British citizen jailed for the crime of posting on social media and has been imprisoned in Egypt for most of the last nine years; he has been on hunger strike for the last six months. The Prime Minister just said that he raised this case with President Sisi; what progress did he make in securing Alaa’s release?

It is right that the Prime Minister eventually went to COP27. Remember the stakes: the world is heading for 2.8°C of warming—that is mass flooding, habitats destroyed, untold damage to lives and livelihoods. We must prevent that, for security, for the public finances and for the next generation. That is why it was inexplicable that he had to be dragged kicking and screaming to even get on the plane. Britain should be leading on the world stage, helping the world confront the greatest challenge of our time, but his snub, one of the first decisions of his premiership, was a terrible error of judgment and sent a clear message that if you’re looking for leadership from this Prime Minister, look elsewhere, and that if you want to get this Prime Minister to go somewhere, get the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) first—get him to come along, then the Prime Minister will follow.

And the Prime Minister’s reluctance is so bizarre because climate action is not just a once-in-a-generation responsibility, it is also a once-in-a-generation opportunity: an opportunity to lower energy bills for good; an opportunity to ensure Britain’s security is never again at the mercy of tyrants like Putin; an opportunity to create millions of jobs and break out of the Tory cycle of low growth and high taxes. They are opportunities that he is passing by.

The Prime Minister said in his speech at COP27 that we need to “act faster” on renewables, so why is he the roadblock at home? As he was flying to Egypt, his Minister was reaffirming the ban on onshore wind—the cheapest, cleanest form of power we have.

The Prime Minister also said at COP27 that he realises

“the importance of ending our dependence on fossil fuels”,

but he inserted a massive oil and gas giveaway when Labour forced him into a windfall tax: taxpayers cash handed over for digging up fossil fuels. Shell has made £26 billion in profits so far this year, but not a penny paid in windfall taxes; he has completely let it off the hook.

And what about the industries of the future? Manufacturers of batteries for cars in Britain: struggling. Green hydrogen producers: struggling. Yet in other countries, these industries are taking off: jobs going abroad because we have no industrial strategy here at home.

The Prime Minister also said at COP27 that it was

“right to honour our promises”

to developing countries. So why is he cutting the aid budget? It is always the same message, “Do as I say, not as I do,” and because of that, it will always fall on deaf ears.

It is time for a fresh start. A Labour Government would make Britain the first major economy to reach 100% clean power by 2030. That would cut bills, strengthen our energy security, create jobs, and make Britain a clean energy superpower. And our green prosperity plan would establish GB Energy, a publicly owned energy company, to invest in the technologies and the jobs of the future here in the UK.

As we attempt this endeavour, we have a fair wind at our back: not just the ingenuity and the brilliance of people and businesses in this country but the natural resources of our island nation. Wealth lies in our seas and in our skies, and it is an act of national self-harm not to prioritise them over expensive gas. That is the choice at the next general election, whenever it comes: more of the same with the Tories or a fairer, greener future with Labour.

November 10, 2022