President Trump: State Visit

Debate between Alan Duncan and Andrew Turner

Monday 20th February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Alex Salmond]

That is not for the Minister to decide. Mr Turner, you are in the Chair, not the Minister.

[Mr Andrew Turner (in the Chair)]

Order. That is not eligible as a point of order. Sit down, Mr Salmond. Go on, Minister.

[Sir Alan Duncan]

Thank you, Mr Turner.

I was talking about the prospect of the President addressing both Houses of Parliament. Comment on whether that might happen has run completely ahead of itself. The simple fact is that no request for any parliamentary event to take place has been received from Washington. The question of addressing a meeting of Parliament has never even been mentioned. Any discussion or judgment of that possibility is therefore purely speculative.

Within the views that have been expressed about the appropriateness of a state visit from the President, there lurks a fundamental principle that Members of this House should consider very seriously—the principle of freedom of speech. President Trump was democratically elected by the American people under their own constitutional system. To have strong views about him is one matter, but to translate a difference of opinion into a demand to ban him is quite another.

Given the understandable questions on certain policy stances that arise on any change of Government, it is prudent for us to work closely alongside the United States as the new Administration chart their course. We have already seen the importance of that engagement: the Prime Minister’s early meeting with the President has elicited key commitments on NATO, which were echoed by the vice-president in Munich on Saturday, and has laid the groundwork to establish a swift post-Brexit free trade agreement. Further constructive engagement will be helped by a state visit.

In February 1917, a century ago, The Spectator published its view on the US and the UK:

“It would be easy to write down a hundred reasons why unclouded friendship and moral co-operation between the United States and Britain are a benefit to the world, and why an interruption of such relations is a detriment to progress and a disease world-wide in its effects.”

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Alan Duncan and Andrew Turner

Wednesday 31st October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

4. What estimate she has made of the number of people in (a) Israel, (b) Gaza and (c) the remainder of the Occupied Palestinian Territories who are in employment; and what assessment she has made of the factors preventing equalisation of employment levels in the region.

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Alan Duncan)]

In the second quarter of this year, unemployment was 7% in Israel, 28% in Gaza and 17% in the west bank. We support the International Monetary Fund’s recent assessment that Israeli controls on external trade and access to Area C of the west bank are a serious constraint on Palestinian employment levels.

[Mr Turner]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that more needs to be done to persuade Israel to remove the barriers that prevent Palestinians from crossing the border in order to find work, and, indeed, to seize more opportunities to create work in Gaza and the rest of Palestine?

[Mr Duncan]

Yes, we want people and goods to be able to cross borders freely with the minimum constraints necessary to ensure Israel’s security, and we want the Palestinian Authority to be able to exploit its own resources, such as the gas fields off the coast of Gaza, so that the PA can pay its own way and eventually require less support from the international community.