Air Quality Strategy
Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Andrea Leadsom(7 years, 7 months ago)
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Andrea Leadsom
I was in full agreement with the hon. Gentleman until that last bit. Of course not. I was going to praise the work of Southampton City Council, which has received significant Government funding for its clean air programmes. It is doing a good job and should continue to do so. To be clear, as things stand, clean air zones can be implemented by any local authority. It should therefore be in the interests of all local authorities to do whatever they can to improve air quality for their local communities.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
Should not the air quality plan be seen in the wider context of the environment and tax changes? Is it not the case that the Government are in a more difficult position than they would be otherwise because of the legacy of the wrong-headed tax changes made by Labour? As a result of the ridiculous tax changes made under Gordon Brown, we more than doubled the number of diesel cars and increased the number of diesel vans to 3 million.
Bankers’ Bonuses and the Banking Industry
Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Andrea Leadsom(9 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Jackson
Is not this debate a displacement activity for a party that does not have any coherent narrative to deal with jobs, growth and the economy? Is it not reckless of Her Majesty’s Opposition to keep recycling the tax on bankers’ bonuses—10 times over—without ever having to account for where that money will actually go?
Andrea Leadsom
My hon. Friend is exactly right that the Opposition are simply trying to recycle something as a distraction. I am truly delighted that the motion gives me the opportunity to set out the wide-ranging measures that this Government have taken to sort out the appalling legacy of the Labour party on banks and remuneration. We have taken an extraordinarily wide-ranging set of measures to sort out a mess left, once again, by a Labour Government.
European Council
Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Andrea Leadsom(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Andrea Leadsom
That is a good observation and I have noticed that, but it was not what I meant, and my hon. Friend knows it. What I have outlined is down to the Prime Minister to achieve. He has committed to do it. We must have confidence in his determination to follow it through.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
I respect my hon. Friend’s intellect and erudition on this issue, but she will be familiar with the story of Pyrrhus and his remark, “One more such victory and we are doomed.” We can very well defeat the straw man of the financial transactions tax, while we ignore the creation of a de facto country, perhaps called Greater Germany, that will militate against the long-term financial, economic and political interests of the United Kingdom.
Andrea Leadsom
I do not see things as starkly as that. We are now in a position where the Prime Minister can protect Britain’s interest and is committed to doing so. We need to give him the chance to do that.
I want briefly to discuss things that we can do ourselves. First, there is an awful lot of talk about repatriation and things that we could do differently, but in the long years of the previous Government, the EU was largely ignored and many opportunities to improve how we do things at home were missed. Some quick examples include how we implement EU directives. We have an opt-out from the working time directive, as do 16 other member countries, which makes a majority in the 27, if my maths serves me correctly. We could band together with the other 16 and demand that the EU reconsider the directive in its entirety. I have talked to a British delegation of MEPs who think that there could well be interest in doing that. Why have we not done so, if we all like to think that the directive is disastrous?
Secondly, why do we have so few British workers in the EU institutions? Why are none of our people employed there? Why did the previous Prime Minister choose to put someone in the post of High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, instead of having someone in the financial services commissioner post? It has been left to a Frenchman who does not understand financial services particularly well to do that job for us.
Something that should be entirely within our gift to sort out is scrutiny in Parliament, and we do not do enough of that here. We leave it up to the incredibly overworked European Scrutiny Committee, which is ably chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash). In areas such as financial services and agriculture, we should pass directives on to the specialist Select Committees, which have the interest and expertise to look at detailed areas, and ask them for their help and support to ensure that, before we receive directives that we then have to implement, we have done the best job that we possibly can for Britain.