UK Plans for Leaving the EU

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Monday 9th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

It is right that people will be able to come to live and work in the United Kingdom, but those coming from the European Union after the point at which we have left the European Union will be required to register. This is part of the building block to the new immigration rules that will be in place at the end of the implementation period.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

Constituents of mine at GCHQ play an expert and invaluable role in the defence of this nation and the continent of Europe. Does the Prime Minister agree that the unconditional guarantee of ongoing intelligence co-operation is a constructive step that should help to pave the way to early trade talks?

[The Prime Minister]

I would hope that the European Union would recognise the benefit of our security relationship and the relationship we have on matters of counter-terrorism, as well as on law enforcement and criminal justice more widely. That relationship is in both our interests, and I hope the EU recognises its importance.

Grenfell Tower Fire Inquiry

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Wednesday 12th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

May I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) on such a powerful and articulate maiden speech? It is clear that she will be a forceful and effective advocate for her constituents. Her sister, the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), who is sitting behind her, her parents, who are sitting in the Public Gallery, and her constituents, who are watching on TV, can all be proud.

I will say a few words about the public inquiry into this dreadful tragedy. At the risk of stating the obvious, it is of course vital that the inquiry is carried out with absolute impartiality and without fear or favour, and is motivated by a dogged determination to get to the truth, wherever it may lie and however convenient or inconvenient it may be. It is precisely because of those fundamental principles that I think Sir Martin Moore-Bick is the right man for the job, notwithstanding comments that have been made.

Let me be clear: I do not know Sir Martin from Adam. I have never met him, but I know the Court of Appeal, where he served with great distinction, and I have appeared there as an advocate on more occasions than I care to remember, and I can say with my hand on my heart that it is a jewel of the British constitution. In that body reside some of the most brilliant brains to be found anywhere in our country, and perhaps more importantly, that academic distinction is allied with absolute and ferocious independence. I am sorry to say that I have lost there far more times than I have won, but the most powerful tribute that I can pay to the Court of Appeal is that I have always left it understanding the judges’ reasons and acknowledging the consummate fairness and integrity that they have brought to the process.

That is why I want to address a troubling insinuation that may be being made: that as an educated man with a title, Sir Martin is somehow ineligible for this job. Let me be clear that in our system of law, no one gets to his position by being nice to the Government. They get to it, more often than not, by being a nuisance—by holding the Government back when they overreach themselves, and by holding them fiercely to account—because the legal culture in this country is that the greatest accolade that can be paid to a judge is that he or she is fair. The Court of Appeal has that in spades; Sir Martin has that in spades. We owe it to the victims to let him get on with the job.

Grenfell Tower

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

The families of the victims are entitled to the truth—not speculation or conjecture, but the truth, based on evidence—so my right hon. Friend was absolutely right to set up the public inquiry, but can we ensure that an early date is agreed for publication of an interim report? In this case, perhaps more than any other, justice delayed is justice denied.

[The Prime Minister]

I would hope and expect that the judge, when appointed—obviously, that individual will be independent—will indicate publicly when they expect to be able to publish an interim report, so that people can have that confidence.

Debate on the Address

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Wednesday 21st June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Dodds]

That is a very important point. One thing that has been very welcome in recent years is the strong security and working relationship between the Garda Síochána in the Irish Republic and the Police Service of Northern Ireland. That co-operation is very strong, and it will continue. Indeed, the PSNI Chief Constable recently made some remarks about how it would continue once we had left the European Union. Again, a pragmatic, sensible solution will be found to allow jurisdictional and other issues to proceed.

In meeting the challenge of Brexit, how much stronger Northern Ireland would be if we were able to get the Northern Ireland Executive up and running as quickly as possible. If we cannot restore the Executive, we will ensure in the House of Commons, working closely with Ministers, that Northern Ireland’s voice is heard and our interests are protected. What we want is the return of an inclusive Government with everyone involved in drawing up what should happen, together. That makes sense. That is the positive, sensible way forward. It makes no sense for people to say, “We are not going to take our seats at Westminster; we have brought down the Executive, and we are not going to get it up and running again”, and then to complain about what is happening. That is simply not logical.

At a time of unprecedented change and challenge, it is vital for Northern Ireland to have an Assembly and Executive that work properly. We did not collapse the Executive, and we did not walk out of the Assembly. We could have done so last year, when Sinn Féin and the IRA were associated with the murder of a man in the Markets area in Belfast. The Ulster Unionists walked out, but we did not. We stuck in there. We worked together to try to continue to make the devolved institutions work.

We want to make sure that the Assembly is up and running, and we have set no red lines or preconditions. We believe that the challenges of Brexit—the issues of health, education, the delivery of public services and the economy—are far more important than the issues that divide us. They are the people’s priorities, and they should be the politicians’ priorities as well.

The economic outlook for Northern Ireland would, of course, be much easier to predict if there were stable government in Belfast, and that doubtless applies here as well. The electorate sent politicians a very clear message about austerity, and since the election it has become clear that they must listen to what the people have said. I must say that I was very taken with the election slogan adopted by the right hon. Member for Wokingham: “Prosperity, not austerity”, and I was glad to hear from the Chancellor at the weekend that he was not deaf to what had been said. For our part, we will again work with the Government over this Parliament to ensure that we deliver prosperity, that we deliver greater spending on health and education, and that we see an end to the dark tunnel of austerity.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Nigel Dodds]

I am about to end my speech, and I know that others want to speak.

We are about strengthening the Union, delivering Brexit, defending our country from threats of terrorism at home and abroad, creating prosperity, and ensuring that Northern Ireland continues to move forward. It is in the furtherance of those objectives that we will act and vote in this Parliament over the next five years.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Chalk]

Has my right hon. Friend had the experience I have had in my constituency of speaking to doctors and other medical professionals and hearing that they are crying out for a cross-party approach that will take the political heat out of these matters, which affect their lives and their patients’ lives? They want to see the politics taken out of something that is so very important for our society.

[Mr Mitchell]

My hon. Friend is making, with great eloquence, the point I am trying to make: we need to have a national debate. We cannot continue with this sticking plaster approach on all these matters.

Let me conclude my remarks, so that others can get in, by ending on a consensual note. It would be churlish of this House not to recognise the effective election campaign waged by the Leader of the Opposition, with whom I have had many dealings during our long period together in this House. The whole House will want to pay a special tribute to him in this respect: we salute his extraordinary qualities of mercy and forgiveness as those in his party who have bad-mouthed him in public and in private over the two years since he became leader now flock back to his standard and slink back into his shadow Administration.

This is a good Queen’s Speech and I look forward to supporting it in the Lobby.

--- Later in debate ---

[Heidi Alexander]

I agree with my right hon. Friend. The fact that some people will not sleep easily in their beds tonight is proof that the Government have failed.

[Alex Chalk]

I commend the hon. Lady on rightly pointing out the enormity of the tragedy, but does she agree that it does no service to the victims or their families to seek to politicise this before we even know the cause of this dreadful fire? We have to take the process in stages: find out the cause and then take the necessary action. To politicise this in advance serves no one and does not serve justice.

[Heidi Alexander]

I do not believe that I am politicising this. I am expressing the views of a significant number of my constituents and people who live in London.

On the day on which the election was called, I was stopped by a constituent at Lewisham station. He simply said to me, “We have to stop the damage Theresa May is doing to our country.” I put that statement on every one of my election leaflets. His concern was about Brexit, about his job in central London, and about his ability in the future to pay for his home and look after his kids. The repeal Bill that was formally announced in the Queen’s Speech will not make him feel better, although it is lauded by some as a positive thing. It will incorporate EU law into our domestic law so that we can decide at a later date which bits we keep and which we do not. That is okay as far as it goes, but there could be a massive sting in the tail.

The process might, for example, include repealing the European Economic Area Act 1993, which underpins our place in the single market. I see no circumstances in which I could vote for us to leave the single market. The Prime Minister might want us to think that the EU and the single market are the same thing, but they are not—the lie has to be nailed. I want to stay in the EU, but if Parliament is engaged in a damage limitation exercise, we must stay in the single market and in the customs union. I am not prepared to risk the queue of lorries at Dover and the queue of people outside Lewisham job centre that is associated with the alternatives.

The UK should be a country in which businesses want to invest, not a country that businesses want to leave. We need to maintain the ease with which British businesses trade with their European counterparts and sell to European consumers. We have seen the list of companies setting up operations overseas and considering their next move. In London, firms such as Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Lloyds of London are moving jobs to France and Germany. Yes, those are City firms, but we should also think of all the other jobs linked to our capital’s status as one of the world’s financial centres: in retail, hospitality and events management; and those of the couriers, cleaners and caterers who are up at the crack of dawn and sit on buses running through my constituency to keep this incredible city running.

Services account for nearly 80% of our economy. The single market is essential if we are to continue to trade freely and easily. If we do not put the economy first in Brexit talks, we will crucify our public finances, and we can then kiss goodbye to the extra investment needed in our schools, hospitals and elderly care. These are political choices. Do we prioritise the economy or controls on immigration in the Brexit negotiations? I choose the economy. We will have an immigration Bill at some point in the next two years, but we have no idea what will be in it. We have a two-year Session because the Government cannot draft an immigration Bill, a customs Bill or a trade Bill until negotiations have advanced and they know what to put in them.

In the meantime we tread water. As a country, we control immigration from countries that represent 90% of the world’s population. We have the more relaxed system of freedom of movement for the 10% who live in the countries closest to us, which by and large enjoy a standard of living that is either comparable to or approaching our own, but even within that more relaxed system, we could have had—and could still have—greater controls within the overall framework: the need to have a job, for example, or to be self-sustaining after three months of being here. We have the laxest approach to freedom of movement. We have chosen not to place conditions on people coming here, but then blamed the EU for our own failure to enforce conditions that could be part of the system.

We now have a revolt against that and all that it entails. The truth is that we already see people not wanting to come here. They do not feel welcome and the value of their earnings has dropped because of the devalued pound. Our hospital wards, care homes, building sites, farms and restaurants will be left scrabbling around for staff while the Government work out what on earth to do. We need immigration in this country. In 1949, the year my mother was born, more than 730,000 babies were born. Average life expectancy stood at 68. Fast forward to 1975, the year of my birth, and the number of babies born was down to just over 600,000. Nearly 30% of births today are to non-UK-born mothers and average life expectancy stands at 81. Our workforce of tomorrow—the people who will start businesses, work in public services and pay taxes—is partly dependent on immigration. We should be honest about that.

When we talk in Parliament about the causes of and solutions to our housing shortage, and about the pressures on our national health service, we should spend as much time focusing on our ageing population as we do on immigration. It is not a queue of migrants that I see at the doors of A&E; it is a queue of frail, disorientated older people. When I go door to door, even in a relatively young part of the country such as Lewisham, I am amazed by the number of older people living alone, barely moving out of one room. A failure to have an honest debate about that, and a failure to look at the evidence and come up with real solutions, will mean we spend the next few years focusing on completely the wrong priorities. That is my fear with the Queen’s Speech. It is my fear about how the Brexit debate dominates everything else, and it is the responsibility of our politics, irrespective of party lines, to find some answers.

UK's Nuclear Deterrent

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jenkin]

I will move on to the next point, Mr Deputy Speaker.

My right hon. Friend the Defence Secretary is fond of describing Trident as an insurance policy, but I counsel him to use that phrase sparingly, because the maintenance of our nuclear deterrent is so much more than just an insurance policy. It is not a premium. That description “de-emphasises” the way in which the deterrent is continuously used, shaping our global security environment, and expressing the character of our country and our national will and resolve. It does not sufficiently emphasise its deterrent quality, which is not to deter terrorism or much lower forms of combat.

The invention of nuclear weapons has undoubtedly ended large-scale state-on-state warfare, and I would even be so bold as to suggest that were we to disinvent them, we would be inviting the resumption of such warfare. I am not sure that human nature miraculously changed after 1945, but something in the global strategic environment certainly did, and we no longer see that large-scale state-on-state warfare.

Members of the Scottish National party have made much of the cost of Trident today, but let me ask them this question: how cheap would it need to be before they regarded it as good value for money? I do not think that that is an argument with which they are prepared to engage. They are against nuclear weapons whatever the cost, and they are perfectly sincere about that, so I invite them to stop bellyaching about the cost, because it is an irrelevant part of their argument.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the use of huge figures in isolation is at best unhelpful and at worst misleading? When applied across a 35-year time horizon, such massive figures would, in fact, be dwarfed by our international aid budget.

[Mr Jenkin]

My hon. Friend is right. The cost of maintaining the nuclear deterrent on a year-on-year basis is much less than our aid budget. A year’s cost of the Trident missile submarine system is the equivalent of one week’s spending on the national health service. It is also about a quarter of our net contribution to the European Union, and I look forward to saving that cost.

At about 6% of the overall defence budget and about 2% of GDP, this weapons system represents extraordinarily good-value expenditure, given that it deters large-scale state-on-state warfare. It is a matter of great pride that our country has inherited this role, and, precisely because we do not want every NATO country or every democracy to have nuclear weapons, it is our duty as global citizens to retain the system, contributing, as we do, to the global security and safety of the world.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Jenrick]

The point that I am making is that we cannot predict the future. We only have to look at the events of recent days and weeks to see the incredible unpredictability of this world. Most Members, myself included, could not have predicted the events of the last three weeks and we certainly cannot predict the events of the next three or four decades.

[Alex Chalk]

On the subject of Russia’s actions, would not the annexation of territory on our continent have been unimaginable two years ago? This just goes to show that we need to be prepared for things that are completely beyond our expectations.

[Robert Jenrick]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. The past is a poor predictor of the future. Looking back at our own history, we can say that we are not good at predicting the future.

Thirdly, as the Prime Minister has said, we cannot outsource our security—or rather, we can, but we take a grave risk if we do so. In the early post-cold war period, the willingness of the United States to stand with its allies—

Report of the Iraq Inquiry

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Lady wants to replay all the arguments of the day, but I do not see a huge amount of point in that. Members of Parliament came to this House, listened to the arguments and made the decisions in good faith. They can now reflect on whether they think the decisions they took were right or wrong. Instead of what she suggests, I think that we should try, as Sir John Chilcot does, to learn the lessons from what happened and find out what needs to be put in place to make sure that mistakes cannot be made in the future.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

The decision not to give Hans Blix more time to conclude his UN weapons inspections is surely one of the principal misjudgments of the pre-war period. Does my right hon. Friend feel that in the light of the changes he alludes to in the culture and practice of government, the scope for ignoring the UN in this way has been reduced?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is right: one of the most powerful points in the report is that Blix should have been given more time. That argument was advanced at the time, but the way in which it is expressed by Sir John gives it even more force.

I do not think I can stand here and honestly say that all the changes we put in place make mistakes like that impossible. At the end of the day, Governments and Cabinets must make judgments on the basis of the evidence in front of them. The National Security Council, given the way in which it is set up, provides a better forum when it comes to making decisions, listening to arguments and hearing expert advice. I think that that makes it more difficult to press ahead if you cannot take expert opinion with you, although, of course, in the end Cabinet Ministers can decide.

European Council

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

If I had come to the House and not mentioned these issues, which has enabled colleagues on both sides of the House to question me about them, I think there would have been justifiable outcry, so I wanted to give the hon. Gentleman the opportunity to do so. When it comes to people casting their vote, we won the last election because we won the support of working people, and we did so because we were creating jobs, cutting taxes, reforming welfare, improving schools, investing in our country and making the economy stronger and our society fairer.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

Is it not right to acknowledge that the British policy of taking refugees from the camps supports those who are in no position to take the journey—the poor, the sick, the weak and the vulnerable—and is absolutely the right thing to do?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I think that more and more countries can now see that that is the right approach.

National Security and Defence

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Monday 23rd November 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The aim of the new strike brigades is to try to make them more manoeuvrable themselves so that they are less dependent on lift from the other services. Today I visited RAF Northolt and talked to some of our Army personnel about the new Ajax class of armoured vehicles, which were formerly known as Scout, and the new generation of Warrior armoured vehicles. They have longer reach, more capabilities and faster speeds in order to increase not just the deployment but the flexibility of our Army brigades.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

The security and intelligence agencies, including those in my constituency, play an absolutely vital role in identifying terrorists and keeping us safe, and the emphasis in the SDSR on strengthening our agencies is very welcome. Will my right hon. Friend confirm that he will press on with legislation to ensure that, underpinned by robust judicial oversight, they have the powers as well as the resources they need to protect our country?

[The Prime Minister]

I can certainly give my hon. Friend that assurance. He represents Cheltenham, and GCHQ is an amazing national resource. Many countries are extremely envious of the expertise we have built up over the years, and we should be very proud of what it does. We will invest in cyber—we will, I think, double the amount of money we put into cyber by the end of this Parliament—and establish a new cyber-command centre, which will also make a big difference.