Points of Order

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. In the past 24 hours, the Foreign Secretary has twice accused me of seeking to slow down the UK Government’s ability to sanction individuals during the passage of the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018—once, before the Foreign Affairs Committee, and, again, this morning during departmental questions. She made similar accusations against my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) before he corrected her and she was compelled to apologise for having got the facts wrong, gallantly blaming her staff for the quality of her notes.

The accusations that the Foreign Secretary made against me do not stand up to scrutiny—I am using parliamentary language here, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am particularly aggrieved by the Foreign Secretary’s suggestion that I, in her words,

“wanted changes to make it tougher for us to sanction oligarchs”.

At no point during the passage of that Act did I seek to slow down the Government’s ability to sanction individuals who posed a threat to the UK—quite the opposite. I was one of those who pushed for the inclusion of Magnitsky sanctions in the Act—sanctions against Russian oligarchs, which were then blocked by the Conservative Government who shut down the relevant Committee debate after half an hour to prevent the issue being put to a vote.

I welcome Conservative Ministers’ belated conversion to the importance of such measures, but not the Foreign Secretary’s attempt to rewrite history. The comments of mine to which she referred were explicitly about Ministers using so-called Henry VIII powers to amend primary legislation without parliamentary oversight, not what she has intimated.

Given these points, Mr Deputy Speaker, would it be in order for the Foreign Secretary to come to the House at the earliest opportunity and correct the record?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for giving notice of her point of order. As the Speaker and the team from the Chair have said, we are not responsible for the content of contributions made by Ministers. However, her point has been heard on the Government Benches and, if an error has been made in this instance, I hope the Foreign Secretary will seek to correct it as quickly as possible.