The comments made by Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, on 19 November 2021.
I’m utterly devastated that a teenage boy was fatally stabbed last night in Croydon. Violent crime tears families and communities apart. We’ll continue to bear down on violence— but we must root out its causes too. Prevention is the only long-term solution.
The comments made by Nigel Harris, the Editor of Rail Magazine, on 19 November 2021.
This really took me aback….a lashing out act of vengeance which shows how angry they are, beneath the veneer of Grant Shapps air of smug condescension this last 24 hours, about the strong rejection of the IRP and scrapping of HS2E.
The statement made by Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, on 16 November 2021.
Presiding Officer, on Saturday, COP26 concluded with 197 countries endorsing the Glasgow Climate Pact.
Today, I will report on the Scottish Government’s activities during COP and offer our preliminary view on the agreement.
Firstly though, I want to record my gratitude to all those who ensured that the hosting of the summit was a success.
COP26 was one of the most important events ever held in Scotland – and also one of the largest.
More than 40,000 people registered to attend – a higher number than for any of the previous 25 COPs.
In addition, tens of thousands of activists visited the city.
Some inconvenience was inevitable and I know the city did experience disruption.
But the warmth and enthusiasm of Glasgow’s welcome was praised by every international visitor I met.
So my first, heartfelt thank you is to the people of Glasgow.
I also want to thank the Scottish Events Campus, Glasgow City Council, all volunteers, and partners across the public and private sector whose hard work made the event possible.
My thanks go also to the United Nations and in particular to the Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change, Patricia Espinosa.
The UK COP president, Alok Sharma, also deserves huge credit. He and his team worked tirelessly to secure the best possible outcome. I am also grateful to them for keeping me well briefed throughout the negotiations.
Finally, peaceful protest is vital at any COP.
It keeps pressure on negotiators and reminds those inside the blue zone of the vital job they are there to do.
Over the course of the two week event, more than 400 protests were staged in Glasgow.
That there were fewer than 100 arrests in total is a real credit to protestors, but also to Police Scotland.
COP 26 has been the biggest policing operation ever undertaken in the UK and I pay tribute to the Chief Constable and to all officers, from forces across the UK, who worked under his command, for the highly professional manner in which it was conducted.
Over these past two weeks, the eyes of the world have been on Scotland and we have shown the best of our country to the world.
Amongst the almost 500 meetings, events and other engagements undertaken by Ministers – including almost 100 that I undertook personally – many were with businesses and potential investors in green innovation.
We also took the opportunity to strengthen our bilateral relationships with a number of countries and regions across the world.
As well as showcasing the country, the Scottish Government also set clear objectives for our participation in COP itself.
Firstly, we aimed to amplify voices too rarely heard in these discussions – for example, of young people, women and those from the global south – and be a bridge between these groups and decision makers.
To that end, we funded the Conference of Youth when the UK government opted not to.
We supported the Glasgow Climate Dialogues to give a platform to voices from developing and vulnerable countries.
And, in partnership with UN Women, we launched the Glasgow Women’s Leadership Statement on gender equality and climate change.
I was joined for the launch by the leaders of Bangladesh, Tanzania and Estonia, and the statement has now been signed by more than 20 countries.
We also endorsed the UNICEF declaration on children, youth and climate action.
Second, we worked hard to ensure that cities, states, regions and devolved governments played our part in securing progress.
Scotland is currently co-chair of the Under2 Coalition, which held its General Assembly during COP.
More than 200 state, regional and devolved governments are now members of the Coalition.
Collectively, we represent almost 2 billion people and account for half of global GDP.
In the run up to COP, the Coalition launched a new memorandum of understanding, committing members to reach net zero by 2050 at the latest. 28 governments have already signed up and we are encouraging others to do so.
Finally, more than 200 cities and states have now signed up to the Edinburgh declaration on biodiversity. That represents welcome progress as we look ahead to the biodiversity COP next year.
Our third objective was to use COP to challenge ourselves to go further and faster in our own journey to net zero.
That is why I chose – as my first engagement at COP – to meet with climate activists Vanessa Nakate and Greta Thunberg.
It is also why we moved away from our previous commitment to maximum economic recovery of oil and gas and embarked on discussions with the new Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance.
We also published additional detail on our policy ambitions for onshore and offshore wind, and launched a new Hydrogen strategy, and a £55 million Nature Restoration Fund.
We published a new planning framework with climate action at its heart.
And we promoted our Green Investment portfolio to a range of businesses and investors.
We also launched the Blue Carbon International Policy Challenge; supported international agreements on low carbon transportation and reducing agricultural emissions; and signed new Memorandums of Understanding on heat with Denmark, and on peatlands with Chile. A full list of these initiatives will be placed in SPICE later this week.
Of course, our most important objective was to use our engagement, influence and interaction to push for an international agreement that would live up to the urgency of the climate emergency.
We wanted to see action to limit global warning to 1.5°C – and, as a minimum, a tangible mechanism to keep 1.5 alive.
We wanted the $100 billion of finance, promised by the global north to developing nations 12 years ago, to be delivered.
And we wanted to see the developed world recognise its obligation to help developing countries pay for loss and damage they are already suffering as a result of the climate change they have done so little to cause.
The Glasgow Climate Pact represents progress on many of these issues – but it must be built on quickly if climate catastrophe is to be avoided.
It is important that the necessity of capping temperature increases at 1.5 degrees is no longer questioned.
However, the world is still on a path to temperature increases of well over 2 degrees – a death sentence for many parts of the world. To keep 1.5 degrees in reach, global emissions must be almost halved by the end of this decade.
So the requirement for countries to come back next year with substantially increased nationally determined contributions is vital.
Finance is crucial to faster progress.
I welcome the aim of doubling finance for adaptation by 2025, and the commitment to a longer term finance goal.
But it is shameful that the developed world could not deliver the $100bn of funding promised in 2009, by the 2020 deadline – or even by 2021.
This COP also delivered significant commitments on methane and deforestation. And for the first time – albeit in language watered down in the final moments – a COP cover text has agreed the need to move away from fossil fuels.
In the run up to COP – and as a result of what we heard during the Glasgow Climate Dialogues – the Scottish Government decided to champion the issue of loss and damage.
Two weeks ago we became the first developed country in the world to make a commitment to support countries experiencing loss and damage. I’m delighted that our commitment has since been supplemented by Wallonia, and by a contribution from the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation.
The final position agreed at Glasgow represents progress in recognising the loss and damage that the climate crisis created by developed nations, is already causing in developing nations – but it does not go nearly far enough.
I particularly regret the decision by some developed nations to block the establishment of a Glasgow Financial Facility on Loss and Damage.
Over the weekend I met with Dr Saleemul Huq, one of the leading campaigners on this issue. I have pledged that the Scottish Government will continue to work with him and others to build the case on loss and damage ahead of COP27 in Egypt.
Loss and damage was an example of Scotland’s leadership during this COP.
But ultimately Scotland can only lead and speak with credibility, if we deliver our own net zero targets.
As I reflect on the past two weeks, I feel pride in the leadership that Scotland has shown and been recognised for.
However, I also feel a renewed sense of responsibility to go further and faster, to face up to tough challenges as well as the relatively easy options, and to help raise the bar of world leadership more generally.
And so our focus in the months and years ahead will be firmly on delivery.
This decade will be the most important in human history.
The actions we take between now and 2030 will determine whether or not we bequeath a sustainable and habitable planet to those who come after us.
The stakes could not be higher – and so I understand why many are angry and frustrated that more progress was not made in Glasgow.
However the Glasgow Climate Pact does provide a basis for further action. The key test will be whether it is implemented fully and with urgency.
That is what all of us must focus our efforts on between now and COP27.
Scotland will continue to play our full part.
While we can be proud of the part we played at COP26, our responsibility now is to ensure that future generations will look back and be proud of the actions we take in the months and years ahead.
The comments made by Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, on 19 November 2021.
Transport for London is dealing with an unprecedented financial crisis caused by the pandemic. We are now less than a month away from TfL’s emergency funding deal expiring on 11 December. Unless the Government provides the long-term funding needed to maintain our public transport network, there will be no choice but to make significant cuts to services just as demand is growing again.
This would mean fewer, less frequent and more run-down bus and tube services for Londoners, making it more difficult to travel around the city. It would also mean more road and tunnel closures due to a lack of funding to maintain key transport infrastructure. The widespread disruption and gridlock all these changes would cause would not only unfairly punish millions of Londoners for the impact of the pandemic on TfL’s finances, but would put the national economic recovery at risk.
I support greater transport investment in regions across the country, but levelling up Britain must not come at the expense of levelling down London. There can be no London recovery without a properly funded public transport network in the capital, and there can be no national recovery without a London recovery. Our city contributes £36.1bn net to the Treasury each year. TfL contracts contribute around £7bn to the UK economy, and its supply chain supports 43,000 jobs around the country, which could be at risk.
If the Government fails to work with us to protect London’s transport network, the capital and the whole country will pay the price for decades to come.
The comments made by Anneliese Dodds, the Chair of the Labour Party, on 19 November 2021.
It is totally unacceptable that police recorded hate crimes against LGBT+ people have doubled in the last five years. That’s why, on the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance, Labour is committing to do something to stop it.
All victims of hate crime have a right to expect equal treatment under the law, but that’s not the case today. So Labour will fix this injustice by bringing in tougher, fairer hate crime laws so that every category of hate crime is treated as an aggravated offence – and those who commit hate crimes against LGBT+ and disabled people can no longer get away with softer sentences.
The Conservatives could have done this years ago, but they’ve sat on their hands as usual. There is little wonder that former members of their now defunct LGBT advisory panel have accused ministers of creating a hostile environment for LGBT people.
Labour recognises that trans rights are human rights. So we would update the Gender Recognition Act to enable a process of self-identification while continuing to support the implementation of the Equality Act, including the single sex exemption. We would ban conversion therapies outright immediately. And we would introduce these vital changes to hate crime laws that we’re announcing today.
Equalising hate crime laws is just one way in which Labour would seek to end the Conservatives’ epidemic of violence on our streets. We have set out a wide range of proposals in our Ending Violence Against Women and Girls Green Paper, including sweeping reforms to sentencing and protections for women and girls and treating misogyny as a hate crime.
The Conservative Government is failing our communities on every front. Only Labour has a plan to make them safer.
The comments made by Jack Dromey, the Shadow Paymaster General, on 19 November 2021.
These emergency rules have led to billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money being handed out on dodgy contracts and opened the door for the shocking levels of lobbying that the Owen Paterson case exposed. The Government must act now to revoke these emergency rules, clean up how public contracts are awarded and put an end to this scandal.
The statement made by Matt Kelly, the Editor-in-Chief of the New European, on 19 November 2021.
I was called last night (Thursday) at 10.30pm by a man who identified himself as being from Downing Street Communications office, but whose name I didn’t catch. His opening gambit was: Boris Johnson is going to sue The New European for defamation.
I won’t go into the rest of the conversation in detail, but suffice to say I made it clear to him that this was not a threat that troubled me greatly and we stood by our story.
After a few minutes, the caller eventually told me: ‘You just crack on then mate’ and put the phone down.
I texted him, asking him to repeat his threat of legal action and to send across the Downing Street denial. I also asked him – twice – to identify himself, which he refused to do.
For a public official to cold-call a newspaper and threaten them with a law suit from a sitting PM, and not to even identify himself, was, I thought, odd. I tried the Downing Street press office to verify the caller’s identity, but they didn’t come back to me. I went to bed.
The next morning, I established that the phone number of the caller belonged to Jack Doyle, the Downing Street Director of Communications.
I now understand Downing Street denies they threatened legal action, to which all I can say is I stand by our story, and our story about the story. If Boris Johnson changes his mind again and decides to sue, we’ll see him in court.
Should the veracity of this account be challenged, I do, of course, have the texts.
The speech made by Baroness Sally Greengross in the House of Lords on 16 November 2021.
My Lords, since 2015 dementia has been the leading cause of death in the UK, and there are currently 850,000 people who are living with the condition in this country. Of course, there are many different types of dementia, which all have very different symptoms and progress at different rates. We know that in the coming years the number of people living with some form of dementia is projected to increase significantly. This will place an even greater strain on our health and care system.
Research into dementia is critical. It may help prevent the occurrence of these conditions and will certainly allow people living with them a better quality of life. Dementia does not just affect those who have the condition; it also has a profound impact on family, carers and loved ones. Many of us in this Chamber will have experienced seeing someone we care about getting dementia and wanting to do anything we could to ease the suffering for them and those who support them. I declare my interest in the register as chief executive of the International Longevity Centre UK, which is currently working on a project analysing the impact of dementia on the high street and the retail sector. The growing number of people living with dementia will impact on the whole of society and have a significant economic impact as well.
In the 2019 general election, the Conservative Party made a commitment to bringing forward a dementia moonshot and
“doubling research funding into dementia”
over the next decade. Figures from the National Institute for Health Research show that this would increase government investment in dementia research from £83 million a year to £166 million, although I gather the Government’s figures differ from this. I am sure the Minister will respond on this point.
The Government have confirmed on many occasions that they intend to uphold the promise to double dementia research funding over the next decade. However, to date, they have announced no details of this. In early 2021, the All-Party Group on Dementia, which I co- chair with Debbie Abrahams MP, held an inquiry into the state of dementia research in the UK and investigated how this funding could best be used to support work in this field. The inquiry found that funding for dementia research was lower than that for other medical conditions; for example, funding was three times higher for cancer research than for dementia. However, the UK has to date been a world leader in dementia research, with only the United States spending more on research into these conditions.
The pandemic has taken a serious toll on dementia research, with many programmes having to be paused or even abandoned during 2020. One serious issue has been the reliance on charity funding, which in this country makes up 51% of dementia research funding. As we know, the economic conditions we now face due to the pandemic have considerably reduced charities’ ability to fundraise. The other factor has been the impact of Covid-19 on people already living with dementia. In the first 12 months of the pandemic, it is believed that 34,000 people who died of Covid-19 also had some form of dementia. One area that needs greater research is the impact of Covid-19 on those with dementia, as there is some evidence that the symptoms differed in Covid-19 patients who did not have dementia, and the Covid-19 mortality rate for those with dementia was considerably higher. Due to the need for social distancing to stop the spread of the disease, much of this or other ongoing dementia research could not take place.
There is evidence that there are at least 12 modifiable risks that can help reduce dementia. While research has shown that there are actions we can take individually and as a population to prevent some forms of dementia, very little is being done in the way of public education and awareness.
The other area of research that surveys show has strong public support is improving early detection. Some medications available on the market can slow the progress of some dementias, at least for a small amount of time, and early detection provides the best opportunity for these treatments to work. There is also some evidence that social prescribing, particularly exposure to art and music—particularly music, I think—can play a positive role in delaying the progress, or improving the quality of life, for those who have received an early diagnosis of dementia.
A few years ago, I had the privilege of going to an orchestral performance conducted by a gentleman who had had dementia for over 20 years. He had not been able to speak for many years, yet he often hummed tunes, and a group of music students were able to transcribe his music and perform it in a big concert hall. Seeing this man with dementia come alive, as he conducted the orchestra playing his music, was a very moving experience for me and taught me the importance of social prescribing. This is simply one area where we can learn so much more.
One of the concerning findings of this inquiry was the lack of evidence-based care approaches when supporting people with dementia. The Wellbeing and Health for People Living with Dementia project, funded by the National Institute for Health Research, starkly demonstrated this lack of evidence-based care. In a review of 170 training manuals for person-centred care in dementia, researchers found that only four provided evidence that methods had worked when tested in a research setting.
The all-party report made a number of important recommendations, including: that a priority for new dementia research funding should include investment in novel methods for early diagnosis, such as blood and other biomarkers; confirm appropriate funding for the UK Dementia Research Institute for at least the next 10 years; and build on the success of the multidisciplinary approach of the Alzheimer’s Society’s centres of excellence model and further expand this by introducing three new centres that will focus on some of the biggest challenges in dementia research. It also recommended that the Government should establish a specific fund of £40 million to support both clinical and pre-clinical postdoctoral research positions and talent retention in dementia research, and that the Government should develop a Longitude Prize for dementia, which would support the development of novel technologies. It also recommended that Join Dementia Research become an opt-out model and that data gaps in this programme should be addressed by integrating it with electronic patient records. Lastly, it recommended that the new Office for Health Promotion should launch public information campaigns which would explain how the public can take steps to reduce their dementia risk.
Finally, I acknowledge the Government’s recent announcement that they will spend £95 million on the delivery of their Life Sciences Vision and £2.3 billion to transform NHS diagnostic services. Can the Minister please clarify how this funding will benefit those people living with dementia and the dementia research community as a whole?
The comments made by Nadhim Zahawi, the Secretary of State for Education, on 19 November 2021.
School uniform provides a sense of identity and community for children and young people, and should be a real source of pride. But it must never be a burden for parents or a barrier to pupils accessing education.
This new binding guidance will help to make uniforms far more affordable for families by driving costs down as we work hard to level up the country.
The comments made by Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, on 19 November 2021.
Today the UK Government has laid an order in Parliament to proscribe Hamas in its entirety – including its political wing.
Hamas has significant terrorist capability, including access to extensive and sophisticated weaponry as well as terrorist training facilities, and it has long been involved in significant terrorist violence.
Hamas commits, participates, prepares for and promotes and encourages terrorism. If we tolerate extremism, it will erode the rock of security.