European Council

Ann Clwyd Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I do not have all those figures to hand, but what I can say to my hon. Friend is that because of the very hard work done by the Home Secretary, we will be able to bar more criminals from coming to Britain, and we will have longer re-entry bans. We are solving problems that the European Court of Justice has put in our way. As for prisoners, the prisoner transfer agreement that we negotiated will mean that we can get foreign prisoners out of our prisons and into their jails. Outside the EU, that would be far more difficult—perhaps impossible—to achieve.

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

I think that I am the only Member who was elected to the European Parliament in 1979, at the same time as the father of the Mayor of London—who, I must say, talked a lot more sense than his son. We were then on opposite sides. I was against membership of the EU, while the Mayor’s father was in favour of it. However, I changed my mind. After two years in the European Parliament, I saw the benefits of working with people from other nations. [Interruption.] Cynics! We talked about acid rain, and about restructuring and its social effects on people who worked in the older industries. I gained enormously from working with people of other nationalities, and I hope that the Prime Minister will emphasise, again and again, the importance of internationalism.

[The Prime Minister]

I thank the right hon. Lady for her honesty in saying that she had changed her mind when she was sitting with Stanley Johnson: two blonde bombshells, if you like, in the same European Parliament. I remember campaigning with Stanley Johnson, and if the good people of Newton Abbot had decided to vote the right way in, I think, 2005—or perhaps it was 2010— he would be sitting here, and we would have been able to hear from him as well as from the Mayor of London.