Oral Answers to Questions
Anne-Marie Trevelyan Excerpts(5 years, 4 months ago)
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Margot James
I assure the hon. Gentleman that the Government take music and other creative arts education very seriously. The Minister for School Standards has introduced a hub scheme across the country, with substantial funding to enable state school pupils to access music, as they deserve.
Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Michael Ellis)
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight that issue. Northumberland is, of course, a county that millions want to visit, and should do. I am hoping, in fact, to visit myself; I commend it to everyone. I have addressed the issue of Airbnb with its representatives in person, and I see the Bed and Breakfast Association regularly. In my discussions with Airbnb representatives, I have made it clear, and cautioned them, that they need to work to satisfy all concerned about health and safety issues, and they assure me that they are doing that. We will continue to monitor the situation.
Centenary of the Armistice
Anne-Marie Trevelyan Excerpts(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)
It is an honour to speak in this debate and to follow so many moving and erudite speeches.
War is a ghastly failure of all other possible negotiation methods to resolve disputes over territory and resources. As a mother, alongside every other mother since time began, the prospect of war makes me feel sick to my stomach; the prospect of our children, of those we love and are responsible for, having to put their lives on the line—a brutal and sometimes fatal last line—to defend our values and population. War goes against every possible mother’s instinct, except of course the most profound one—that every mother would give up her own life for her children’s to be saved. But in times of war, it cannot work out like that.
A hundred years ago, mothers across our country and around the world were mourning the loss of millions of young men who had gone to war in far-flung trenches, hundreds of miles from their homes, to places they had never heard of and could not pronounce, in support of their Government’s call to stand against an enemy trying to destroy a neighbour’s way of life and identity. This was brought home to me four years ago when my children and I visited the Somme and a number of those fateful battlefields, and went to a place called Ocean Villas—or so I thought—to explore a series of real trenches unearthed by a British lady who had retired to the area and found them in her back garden. On arrival, I realised, as a French speaker, that the name of the village is Auchonvillers, which, if you say it in an English accent, sounds like Ocean Villas. It sounds like a rather lovely place when you say it like that, but it is very far from the ocean and the view would have been unimaginably different from a pleasant sea view. So as young men in 1914 headed over the sea to northern France and elsewhere, mothers waited at home for news of their boys, willing them to make it back home, broken perhaps, but alive, rather than buried in far-flung fields.
In the far western part of my constituency is a large area of high moorland territory known as Otterburn Ranges. It is one of the Army’s largest training areas for young soldiers and cadets, and in the heart of this training area are some of Britain’s best- preserved world war one trenches. Hundreds of trenches were dug in Britain by some of the 1 million men who volunteered in 1914, as a way of preparing them for warfare.
From Northumberland went thousands of young men, many of them joining up to go to war as members of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. The regiment raised 52 battalions, with 29 of them serving overseas. It was awarded 67 battle honours and five Victoria Crosses, losing 16,000 men during the war. It had ever been the case that soldiers who die in battle are buried where they fall, and for all those mothers and wives whose menfolk never returned, the loss was compounded by the inability to say goodbye or to find any peace in their bereavement by visiting their graves. So the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in the years that followed the war to end all wars, and the slaughter of a generation of young men, to help those who remained to learn to cope, is extraordinary. I thank all those across the world who care for them.
Some of Northumberland’s young men, however, went further afield than Alnwick to join the Fusiliers and headed to the sea, to Tyneside, to join the Royal Navy—or, indeed, to join the Submarine Service. It is of those young men—the submariners—and the maverick, unconventional and challenging new part of the Royal Navy’s fleet of weaponry that I want to speak for just a few moments. The Submarine Service is often referred to as the silent service, because of course a submarine can sneak up on an enemy unheard and unseen, and because we never really talk about the incredibly dangerous work that it does.
In the early 20th century, submarines were considered somewhat shocking—not really sporting—by our own naval chiefs, but a few who understood their military potential for advantage quietly got on with building these strange underwater tubes; or, as one modern-day submariner described it to me, a caravan with no windows with a gang of friends in it, and you have no idea where you are. Modern-day submarines are highly technical, very expensive bits of kit, some more complex than a space station, but back in 1914 they were simpler and less safe, and the chances of survival as a submariner were very low. If a submarine was hit or had mechanical failure, it nearly always ended up at the bottom of the sea: a cruel and brutal death, and for the whole crew. The technology moved fast as the Germans built up their U-boat fleet and demonstrated how they could sink our ships, so the Royal Navy encouraged more use of this maverick weapon, with the support of the then First Sea Lord, Winston Churchill.
A young lieutenant commander, Max Horton, said to have been an aggressive and self-confident gambling man, daring by nature—we do not get those these days, somehow, in the world of peace and safety that we can enjoy—took on the challenge of demonstrating the power of the submarine. He later became an admiral and commander-in-chief of the Western Approaches in the second world war, responsible for the battle of the Atlantic. But back in 1914, Horton and those young Northumbrians who had joined up were living in inhuman conditions in those early submarines. We might consider today that their work was guerrilla warfare. Both our submarines and, as the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) mentioned, German U-boats targeted enemy military surface fleets, and both took hits. In fact, out of 17,000 German men who served in submarines, more than 5,100 lost their lives. Serving on a submarine was, without doubt, one of the most dangerous occupations of that entire war.
We read the historical records about the battalions and their battles; the bravest young men with battle honours; statistics and events; moments of critical importance in those battles; and leaders’ decisions made always with imperfect information, some leading to victory, some not. But human conflict was always the ultimate consequence. Armistice—that moment when a cessation of hostilities is agreed by all parties; the start of the negotiations to find a solution for a lasting peace—has to be the moment that we must celebrate and remember that every mother always has to carry this burden.
Oral Answers to Questions
Anne-Marie Trevelyan Excerpts(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
We have tried to work with the Scottish Government for years, but when the First Minister first took my hand on a cold Christmas eve, she promised me broadband was waiting for me. It is three years later and we are still waiting for the Scottish Government to get on with it.
Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)
My constituency is on the southern side of the border, which is just a line on the map as far as they are concerned. North Northumberland is still struggling to get the broadband it needs so that my many small villages are not cut off. Will the Minister ensure that, in 2018, we will see progress there?
Matt Hancock
Yes, absolutely, and increasingly we need to ensure that the delivery works on both sides of the border. Obviously, what matters is getting the roll-out of superfast broadband to everybody in the borders and throughout the country. No matter where the administrative boundaries are, what matters is getting broadband connections to people.
Passchendaele
Anne-Marie Trevelyan Excerpts(7 years ago)
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Dr Murrison
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. The thing that impresses one most of all about this commemorative period is the extraordinary amount of work that has been done right across the country—some of it sponsored and assisted by the Government, some of it not, and some of it quite spontaneous in its evolution. Together, that forms a wonderful patchwork of commemorative activity, and it just shows the passion the public have for commemorating this period in our history. That suggests to me that there will, indeed, be a very rich legacy when we come towards the end of our four years.
Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)
I commend my hon. Friend for the extraordinary work he has done to ensure that this commemoration period is given as wide a reach as it can be. Last year, he encouraged me to look at the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers—the young men from my constituency who went out to fight in the first world war. Those boys and young men were the same age as my son is now, which brings this home very bluntly to me. Last November, I went out to northern Italy to lay a wreath at the war graves at Tezze, in northern Italy. By chance, a group of Italian students of 17 and 18 was visiting. They had never been in the cemetery before, but they saw a woman in a red coat with a wreath, and they were curious, so they came over. Their teacher, who spoke perfect English, asked me to explain why I was there and why British soldiers had been fighting in their country. These children had had very little education about the first world war, because the fascist regime altered the way history was taught in Italy. To a young man and young woman, they were absolutely transfixed. They were enormously appreciative of, and slightly overwhelmed by, the fact that young men had come from far away—in this case, from Berwick in Northumberland—to fight for freedom. I commend my hon. Friend for the efforts he has made, which have given us the opportunity to share these things with those children across the water.
Dr Murrison
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and she is absolutely right. That gives me the opportunity to say that this is, of course, not just about the western front. I am pleased that she mentioned Italy. It is important, as part of this four-year commemorative period, that people do come to appreciate that the first world war was, indeed, a world war, and the Italian campaign is an important part of that.
May I also mention centenary interns while I am talking about young people? I hope this project will become an important part of our presence on what was the western front for people wishing to visit commemorative sites. The Canadians have, for a long time, had young people guiding visitors from Canada around sites on the western front that are particularly important to Canadians. It struck me that if the Canadians can do so well from a distance of 3,000 miles, we can probably do something rather similar from a distance of 200 miles. Right now, we have established the first tranche of our centenary interns, who will guide people around the principal sites for us—Tyne Cot and Thiepval—under the supervision of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. When colleagues and others visit the western front and the cemeteries and sites of importance in northern France and Belgium, I hope they will look out for the very obvious orange T-shirt uniforms of our centenary interns. Those I met last week when I visited Tyne Cot were people of exceptional quality, and I am sure people will be very pleased to see them and to be guided by them around those sites.
It is remarkable that the third battle of Ypres was not only preceded by Messines—a victory that I think encouraged Hague in his dialogue with Lloyd George— but succeeded the success at Cambrai, which was remarkable for another reason, in that it introduced mechanised warfare realistically for the first time on the western front. That was the gathering note for what became a far more kinetic stage in the last 100 days of the war.
For most people in this country, what makes Passchendaele special, as it were, is the mud and blood. It was quite different from the Somme, which resulted in far more casualties. That mud was caused by rain, of course, but also by the inundation of Flanders following the barrage of artillery that completely destroyed all the dykes and engineering that held back the sea from that part of the world. Flanders is, of course, pasture land, and crops cannot be grown there, because it is far too wet. The reason it can be utilised for agricultural purposes at all is that it has an advanced system of water engineering. Bombardment means that that is completely destroyed. It was not for the first time in the first world war that the British Army knew the full consequences of the destruction of that system. The combination of heavy rainfall and the destruction of civil engineering in that area made it a complete quagmire, which gave Passchendaele its particular awfulness.
I would like to finish on a contemporary note. In two weeks’ time, many of us will be privileged to attend the commemorations in Ypres and Tyne Cot. We will stand there among the row upon row of headstones, we will look at the Menin Gate, with its rank upon rank of names carved in stone, and we will be left with a sense of wonder. We will try to work out what it all means. In the context of the debate we are having about our future in Europe, one wonders perhaps what others think of us, too. There are those in Europe who say that this country is somehow less than European—that we are poor Europeans. I would just say this: it has always been the case, and it is the case now—this country was certainly demonstrating this full well 100 years ago—that there is no country in Europe that is more engaged in Europe than the United Kingdom.
I would just ask colleagues, as they look among those headstones and gaze up among those names carved in stone, to reflect on this country’s contribution to European history. Whether we are Brexiteers or not—and I am a completely signed-up Brexiteer—we need to understand that we are Europeans; that is what we have always been, and that is what we will always be. We should take absolutely no nonsense from those who, for their own purposes, try to suggest that we are in some way disengaged from Europe. I am proud of our history. This country has always been there when Europe needed us—when we needed to face down the general disturber of the peace. I am confident that we will continue to do just that.
Two weeks’ time will be a solemn time for our country. The media will most certainly be focused on Tyne Cot and Ypres. We will be among friends in Belgium—a country that is extraordinarily sympathetic to this country and a good friend of ours. It is important that, whenever we have the opportunity, we reinforce in the minds of our friends and neighbours in Europe our solidarity and comradeship with them. There can be no more enduring testament to that European engagement than the Menin Gate in Ypres and Tyne Cot at Zonnebekke.