Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Bill

Debate between Anna Soubry and Baroness Morgan of Cotes

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Monday 16th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Anna Soubry]

In a moment.

The reality, which is faced in the White Paper, is that if we do not deliver frictionless trade in the way in which companies such as Toyota need and demand, they will simply not be able to operate. Some 81% of Toyota cars produced at Burnaston are exported into the European Union. And before anybody says, “Well, there will be new markets”—those unicorns that our Government will be chasing in new deals—please understand how the modern manufacturing industry works. Companies such as Toyota already make cars in other parts of the world to satisfy and supply the local market.

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Charlie Elphicke]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Anna Soubry]

I will give way to my right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough and then I will come down the row.

[Nicky Morgan]

Does not the intervention on my right hon. Friend made by our hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) show what is the matter with this Brexit debate? Rather than talking about the detail and the risk to thousands of jobs across the country in our manufacturing sector—the Conservative party has championed that sector since 2010—he prefers to trade insults and trade on personalities.

[Anna Soubry]

Here is a surprise: I completely agree with my right hon. Friend.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Anna Soubry and Baroness Morgan of Cotes

Thursday 7th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

I congratulate the new hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) on an excellent and confident maiden speech. I was sorry to hear about the online abuse that she has already experienced but pleased to hear about the support she has received. She talked about unity and togetherness, and she might have found the House at a challenging time for such things, but we will hopefully find a way through these debates. Her predecessor was a doughty champion of the armed forces, about which he spoke often in this House.

So it starts—the real process for getting us out of the European Union. The Bill is needed. It is needed legally to disentangle us and to make many people really believe that we are actually going to leave the European Union, something that I have not had difficulty believing. Like many colleagues who share my views, I have been clear since 24 June 2016 that it was going to happen because, as the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) said, we believe in democracy in this House of Commons. However, the Bill contains two major ironies. First, as was said earlier, it is not a repeal Bill but a reintroduction Bill, and those who wanted to get away from EU law now seek to bring it all over here. Secondly, those who wanted to take back control showed no concerns about the amount of Executive power that will be wielded as a result of the Bill until a number of the rest of us started to highlight such issues, and they now claim to be happy with the amendments that might be discussed in Committee.

In the limited time available, I want to draw attention to two parts of the Bill that have already been discussed. It is worth putting them on the record again so that Ministers are in no doubt about the parts of the Bill that they are going to have to discuss with colleagues throughout the House and agree amendments to if they want the Bill to pass. The first is the Henry VIII powers in clause 9, which could theoretically bite on the Bill itself and allow Ministers to amend the very legislation that the House is now debating and being asked to assent to. We might ask why we are going through the troublesome and time-consuming business of getting the Bill into shape when Ministers can use clause 9 to reverse the changes they dislike with speed, efficiency and a minimum of parliamentary oversight. The Secretary of State’s response to the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), the Chairman of the Exiting the European Union Committee, about the fact that the withdrawal agreement should not be implemented until this House has had its say, is incredibly important.

[Anna Soubry]

Will my right hon. Friend advise ardent leavers, possibly those on the Government Benches, that there is a real danger that the amount of money that might be paid to the European Union by way of what we call this divorce bill could be decided by the Government without report or redress in this place by virtue of clause 9?

[Nicky Morgan]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. She is absolutely right. As a former EU budget Minister, I can say that money will be paid to the European Union, and I disagree fundamentally with the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood). As one of our MEPs, Dan Hannan, said, this country pays what it owes. We have made financial commitments to the European Union until 2020, and we should pay what we owe. As the Secretary of State has said previously, we may well even decide to pay more towards some elements in order to have access to them, in particular Horizon 2020 and so on.

The second issue is the power for the Ministers to specify the date of the exit day, which will be subject to no parliamentary scrutiny procedure whatsoever. Interestingly, the Secretary of State started his remarks by saying that the Bill does not take us out of the European Union. I did think about intervening, but it was very early in his remarks and I thought that he might clarify things. The difficulty with what he says is that clause 1 baldly states:

“The European Communities Act 1972 is repealed on exit day.”

If the 1972 Act is repealed, the UK leaves the European Union, so if this Bill is passed and its provisions are enacted, we will leave the European Union. Article 50 is a process for giving notice to start the discussions. I am afraid that the Secretary of State was not correct about that.

Why does scrutiny of statutory instruments matter so much? I suspect that Members have been having discussions with businesses and others who rely on EU law to go about what they do, and they are telling us very clearly that what will make their life easier and a transition possible is regulatory convergence, which means sticking to the regulations and rules we have been following for years, whether we are talking about pharmaceutical companies, financial services companies, food exporters, farmers, universities or many other different sectors.

To those who seek to say that we have been rule takers, not rule makers, I say that successive Ministers, including me, have sat at the European Council table and had those debates. The point is that if we want to have regulatory convergence after March 2019, which is what we are hearing, we will have to take the rules without having had any influence on them.

Finally, I am a proud parliamentarian, and the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Canterbury has just reminded me of how special it is to be elected to this place. Parliamentary scrutiny is not an affront to democracy; it is its very essence. The true saboteurs of Brexit are those who would sanction the exclusion of Parliament from this process. The debate on this Bill has only just started.

Anonymity (Arrested Persons) Bill

Debate between Anna Soubry and Baroness Morgan of Cotes

Friday 4th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Anna Soubry]

I thank my hon. Friend for that contribution. Of course I agree. There is a long-term effect. If we go on to the internet and put in a name, as I have done, or certain key words, we find that a host of people have been in a similar situation to that of the first man who was arrested in Bristol. It has been put to me by all sorts of people—I am grateful for the information and the comments—that once something like that has happened, because of the great power of the internet, it is there almost for ever more. If we google a name or an incident, the information that comes up might go back 10 or 20 years.

The slur on somebody will remain for a very long time, even though they have never been charged, even though they have been exonerated and even though it has been accepted that there was no substance to the allegation. That means that people who put themselves into public life—television personalities come to mind, as do soccer players, even councillors, and those who have chosen a certain profession or job, such as teachers or clergymen—are highly susceptible to false allegations. There are many examples of people who have had an allegation made against them and who have then found that their name and address, the charge and more have been published both locally and nationally.

We have to ask ourselves how all this came about. There is a growing acceptance that a cult of personality exists. The rise of the celebrity has gone into territory that none of us find acceptable any more. Somebody who might have been on television suddenly finds themselves plastered all over every newspaper and magazine. Sometimes their agent or others want that, in order to advance their career. The downside is that they then become almost a free hit—fair game—for anything salacious about them to be published at any time, particularly if they have the misfortune to be arrested for something.

As a society we increasingly have a desire to pick over the intimate and salacious details of too many people. Perhaps we have an unhealthy interest in other people’s private sex lives. We also have the declining fortunes of newspapers. Why do newspapers and magazines find themselves in a position whereby they have to print almost anything in order to keep up their circulation? One reason is the 24-hour rolling news with which all hon. Members will be familiar. The simple truth is that it is sometimes a struggle to fill 24-hour rolling news, and in the endless rolling round of that news, stories are repeated, so something new, something fresh— breaking news—is needed, and everything becomes highly sensationalised and great drama is created.

A recent example was when the congresswoman was shot in that unfortunate incident in Arizona and the BBC 24-hour news service reported that she had been killed. It was wrong on that, but it was working off two reports that it claimed to have verified. I watched with care some of the following analysis and, rightly, criticism of the coverage of the story and how that happened. The BBC said that it had checked it out and done everything that it should have done in following the various procedures. But, with respect, underlying that was a real desire to have a new headline, to break some news, to put something sensational into it, to increase its ratings and keep up with the opposition given the proliferation of channels that we have seen. In many respects it can be said that the old solid principles that I was taught when I trained as a journalist have been eroded in the endless search for higher ratings and greater circulation. I do not think that 24-hour rolling news has assisted us in making our press one of the finest in the world.

We have also seen a decline in advertising. All hon. Members in the Chamber will know their local newspaper, if they still have one. Many of them are suffering quite dramatically from declining sales, for which, as I say, there are many reasons. I have a great deal of sympathy for local and regional papers in these difficult times, but I urge them to be true to the good solid principles of journalism, including not to sensationalise.

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

My local newspaper, the Loughborough Echo, has started a new column of reports from the local magistrates court about those brought up and charged with offences. That is an old-fashioned style of reporting, but it is good to read about those who have been charged with committing an offence. However, that is the right time for the public to become aware of the fact that people have committed offences. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to ask for a period of anonymity earlier in the charging process.

[Anna Soubry]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. I am familiar with Loughborough Echo. For reasons that I shall not go into because they are completely irrelevant, I buy it and I read it. It is an example of a good local paper, but it is also an example of a paper that is struggling with its circulation. I am delighted that it has such a column. When I worked on the Alloa and Hillfoots Advertiser and Journal, one of the great sources of our stories was the sheriff court. As a trainee journalist, I was duly packed off to sit with my newly acquired shorthand skills, which were extremely limited, and report on what was happening there. One of the problems in our society is that because so many newspapers find themselves in a position where they cannot afford to employ the staff that they used to employ, they are not covering the magistrates courts or the Crown courts in the way that they did. I know that from my experiences at the Nottingham Evening Post, which had a reporter in almost every court.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anna Soubry]

I am again grateful, because that is a good point well made. There is a good argument that the way to cure this mischief is by amending the Contempt of Court Act 1981. I will in due course deal with why that Act is inadequate. If it were adequate, I have no doubt that the Attorney-General would have used it to stop the salacious and vilifying nature of the coverage of the man arrested in Bristol.

To return to why it is wrong for someone to be named and vilified after being arrested, we should also consider the distress caused to that person, which I touched on earlier. During the course of my research, I looked at the case of a much-loved television personality—I will not name him—who appealed to people of all ages and was a true family entertainer. I did not know, because it does not matter to me, that he is gay. He had been married and had children, but the reality is that he was a homosexual. In due course he came out, which was a matter for his private life, and got on with his life. Most importantly, he continued to be an extremely good television presenter and entertainer. One evening, he was arrested as he came off stage following an allegation of a misdemeanour some years earlier. As a result, his name and the details of the allegation were published.

What followed was not quite a media feeding frenzy, but the details of the man’s private life, his sexuality and such matters were written about extensively in the press. A few weeks later, when he returned to the police station, the police said that they would not be charging him and he was accordingly exonerated of the allegation. He always maintained his dignity, and issued a statement through his solicitor which said:

“I was always confident my name would be cleared in due course. However, it’s been a very anxious and upsetting time for me and my family, not least because of press coverage at the time of my arrest.”

I quote that statement because it is important to remember that we are talking about real people who somehow have to pick up the pieces of their lives. Knowing what has been published about the first man who was arrested in Bristol, we must ask how on earth he will pick up his life after what has been said and written about him.

[Nicky Morgan]

The issue affects not only the individual, but other people such as their family—particularly their children—and work colleagues. My hon. Friend talks about the media interest, and she will remember that in the Bristol case the media, rightly seeking to profile the initial person who was arrested, went to the school where he had taught. The head or deputy head teacher had to go on television to talk about the individual, and such experiences are distressing if one has never been in the glare of the media spotlight before. Does my hon. Friend agree?

[Anna Soubry]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that, and I completely agree. That is the difficulty. In the newspapers we see the headlines and the story but never what is behind them or, most importantly, what happens in the wake of them.

I was describing how, by googling on the internet or doing any research through newspapers—although googling is the quickest and smoothest way—I came across several cases of football players who had been arrested on allegations of rape. One case is relevant to my hon. Friend, because it involved a Leicester football player. I did not recognise his name, but that matters not at all. He received extensive media coverage when he was arrested on an allegation of rape, and again, within a matter of weeks, when he went back to the police station on bail he was told that he would not be charged and that was the end of the matter. The newspapers and local television station covered the arrest extensively, but the fact that no charges were brought barely received a mention. I have not found any case, anywhere, in which somebody’s not being charged has received exactly the same amount of publicity as their arrest.

There are cases of councillors—some might be known to Members—who have been arrested on all manner of allegations, be they fraud, corruption or sexual assault. Again, I have looked at the newspapers and on the internet, and their arrest often makes the front page of the local newspaper. The fact that they are never charged, however, does not get on the front page; if they are lucky, it might be on page 2 or 3 and amount to half a column, but it is never the same as the initial coverage they receive when they are arrested. That is not right or fair.