"This is a difficult and somewhat moving moment in which to give a final speech in Parliament, made impossible by the need to compress 38 years of thoughts into five minutes of gabble. I realised that it was time for me to go when I found that, although I was …..." Austin Mitchell - View Speech
"It is a pleasure to stand here as the chair of the NUJ parliamentary group, but to crack a Ken Dodd joke, it is a pleasure to be standing anywhere at my age. I am delighted to support the secretary of the group, my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes …..." Austin Mitchell - View Speech
"I shall be coming to my comments on the BBC very shortly. I apologise for not responding immediately to my hon. Friend’s question. I have to have a translator, not to translate things from English into Yorkshire dialect, but because I am stone deaf.
"There are alternative ways for the BBC to help out the newspapers financially. It now observes a requirement to buy stories from the local television stations—indeed, it has begun to buy stories from Estuary TV in my constituency. That is a good thing. There is no reason why the BBC …..." Austin Mitchell - View Speech
"Yes. That is the argument. It must be an additional subsidy. I must admit that when I was a television journalist, my first recourse was to steal stories from the local newspapers. There is no reason why such stories should not be developed and sold by local newspapers. We have …..." Austin Mitchell - View Speech
"Unfortunately, I forgot to mention the Yorkshire Post, which is Yorkshire’s national newspaper, so I would like the Minister to include it in his roll of honour...." Austin Mitchell - View Speech
"I will not follow the hon. Member for Braintree (Mr Newmark) into his fantasy world; the Government seem to be in danger of moving into a fantasy world where it is as if all the nation’s problems have been solved by the miraculous efforts of this Chancellor. The Budget seemed …..." Austin Mitchell - View Speech
"The tale I want to tell today is an everyday story of business folk who have been robbed of their company by big banks acting in collusion with one of the big four accountancy houses—two sets of robbers, both too big to be touched by the machinery of regulation that …..." Austin Mitchell - View Speech
"Will the Minister tell us what is happening about the Tomlinson report, which is a review of a series of very similar cases to this one, but concerning RBS? That demands action, too...." Austin Mitchell - View Speech
"I want to speak as a partial and not wildly enthusiastic supporter of the Select Committee’s report and as a very long-standing advocate for devolution. In 1974, with the late Richard Wainwright, I formed the campaign for the north, back in the days of Redcliffe-Maud, beyond recall, in a first …..." Austin Mitchell - View Speech