CHOGM, G7 and NATO Summits

Debate between Barry Gardiner and Boris Johnson

Monday 4th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Rwanda and the UK hosted the “Keeping 1.5 Alive” event in Kigali, but at the same time, the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report said that the requirement—the opportunity—to keep within 1.5° had now shifted forward from 2032 to 2025. Given that most major emitters in the G7 are not even meeting the Paris commitments that they made seven years ago, what realistic chance does the Prime Minister believe there is of the G7 stepping up to the plate in the next three years to achieve that turning down of emissions?

[The Prime Minister]

If the hon. Gentleman looked at the G7 communiqué, he would see that there was an explicit reference to making sure that anything we did was within our COP26 commitments to keeping 1.5° alive and to the commitments made in Paris.

Ukraine

Debate between Barry Gardiner and Boris Johnson

Thursday 24th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right because the plan that the G7 has agreed on, and our friends and partners have agreed on, is that Putin must fail—Putin must not succeed in this venture. We have to put in place all the steps we need to take, diplomatically, economically and, yes, militarily, in order to ensure that that is the case and that is what we are doing.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister is right to have set out the most stringent possible set of sanctions against the Government of Russia. Can he outline for the House what the implications will be for co-operation at the international space station?

[The Prime Minister]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that. We will have to see what further downstream effects there are on collaboration of all kinds. Hitherto, I have been broadly in favour of continuing artistic and scientific collaboration, but in the current circumstances it is hard to see how even those can continue as normal.

Sue Gray Report

Debate between Barry Gardiner and Boris Johnson

Monday 31st January 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I take responsibility for everything that happened in No. 10 and that the Government did throughout the pandemic.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

The Gray report is clear that there should be no excessive consumption of alcohol in a workplace. Can the Prime Minister therefore assure the House that his own consumption of alcohol was not excessive and in particular that his judgment was at no time so clouded that he was in danger of telling the truth?

[The Prime Minister]

I could not quite hear the end of the hon. Gentleman’s question, but the answer is no. If he thinks I drunk too much, no.

COP26

Debate between Barry Gardiner and Boris Johnson

Monday 15th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My right hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. The resources are there. There are adequate supplies; the problem lies in the supply chains. That is an issue that we are working on, together with our American friends and other partners around the world, to ensure that there is no disruption in those supplies of critical things, particularly semi-conductors.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

First, may I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma)? He has gained enormous international respect for the diligent, courteous and tenacious way in which he conducted the negotiations as COP26 President.

Given that article IV of the Glasgow climate pact requires us to accelerate the phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies, can the Prime Minister tell us whether the 130% tax super deduction announced by the Chancellor will now have a climate filter imposed so that the taxpayer does not end up paying the full cost of projects such as the Cambo oilfield, and whether the Government will use the $27.5 billion windfall from the International Monetary Fund special drawing rights to significantly scale up their provision of climate finance to developing countries, as demanded under articles III and V?

[The Prime Minister]

What I can certainly tell the hon. Gentleman is that the 125% super deduction he rightly refers to will be of great assistance to companies across the whole of the UK in investing in new clean, green technology. That is the way forward.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Barry Gardiner and Boris Johnson

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend. We are already working with Rolls-Royce. We gave £20 million seed money to the Rolls-Royce-led consortium when this Government first came in to help them to develop their small modular reactor design. As I said to him the other day, we want to see that company coming forward with a fully worked out plan—a fully worked out business case—that we can all get behind.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister has set out today that he wants a high-skill, high-wage economy. He has also been on the record as saying that the tactic of fire and rehire is “unacceptable”. Surely the best way of ensuring that we have a high-wage economy is to work with the proposals in my private Member’s Bill so that we end that tactic of fire and rehire.

[The Prime Minister]

The most vivid example of fire and rehire is that conducted by the Labour party. If I recall, the leader of the Labour party himself fired his deputy leader and then rehired her as shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and shadow Secretary of State for the future of work. The future of work under Labour is low wages and low skills driven by uncontrolled immigration. The people of this country have had enough of that; what they want to see is high wages, high skills and controlled immigration, and that is what this Government are committed to deliver.

European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Debate between Barry Gardiner and Boris Johnson

Monday 14th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner]

I am pleased that I gave way to my hon. Friend, who has said what it is critical to understand on both sides of the House: we cannot simply have deals with everybody that are as good with everybody. We will have to pick and choose.

For my own part, I have never been star-struck by the prospect of a trade agreement with the USA; even under President Obama, it wanted us to weaken our food standards so that it could increase access for American agri-foods to the UK.

[Boris Johnson]

rose—

[Barry Gardiner]

I will give way to the right hon. Gentleman in a minute—and quicker than his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Development did.

Ten days ago, I had the pleasure of attending the Oxford farming conference. It was clear that the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who had spoken to them the day before, had got farmers seriously concerned. They were pleased that he confirmed that our food production standards in the UK would not be reduced, but incensed by his refusal to deny that food from the USA and elsewhere, which had been produced to lower standards, would be allowed access into the UK to undercut them in our domestic market. That, according to the Government, of course, is not a lowering of our standards in the UK but simply consumer choice and the pursuit of free trade. I now give way to the former Foreign Secretary.

[Boris Johnson]

I admire the tone in which the hon. Gentleman is making his remarks. May I ask him about the free trade deals that he says Labour would like to pursue? I am puzzled to hear that. It was my impression that Labour had abandoned its policy of coming out of the customs union and was instead preparing for us to remain in it as a paying, participating member, setting the same tariffs. Will he explain exactly how that is supposed to work?

[Barry Gardiner]

I am delighted to say that the rest of my speech will be doing precisely that; I hope it will satisfy the right hon. Gentleman.

Alignment of standards is key to trade. That was properly recognised by the Minister for Trade Policy himself—sadly, he is not in his place at the moment—when he said:

“If we come out of alignment with EU regulations in this area, then there is a penalty to be paid in terms of frictionless trade with Europe.”

Of course, the idea that this particular American President is not going to demand greater access for American healthcare businesses into our NHS is simply a fantasy. So yes—I would love to do more business with the USA. It is already our major bilateral trading partner as a country rather than a bloc, but whatever benefits a trade agreement with it may bring must be weighed against the corresponding losses in our existing or any future trade agreement with the EU.

[Barry Gardiner]

I am glad to say that the one thing that I can honestly claim I have no responsibility for are the words of the right hon. Gentleman.

When listening to some of the more extreme proponents of Brexit, it has often amused me to hear them say that trading with the European Union on World Trade Organisation terms would not be the slightest problem for us; in the same breath, they insist that to achieve our destiny we cannot possibly trade on WTO terms with the United States—and that that is why we need to break free from the EU.

The simple truth is this—I hope it answers the right hon. Gentleman’s question: it makes good sense to have good trade agreements with everyone, but to have the best trade agreements with our closest trading partners. For us, that is the EU, with which we do 53% of our trade and which takes 44% of our exports.

[Boris Johnson]

rose—

[Barry Gardiner]

No, I will not give way again to the right hon. Gentleman.

I move on to immigration, which was a key part of the referendum debate. Like many Members, I was outraged by the dog-whistle politics of the Vote Leave campaign’s very own “Project Fear”: that millions of Turkish citizens would be queueing up for entry into the UK. That was a lie, and those Members who associated themselves with that campaign should feel ashamed.

I also want to express my disgust at those who have sought to paint leave voters as ignorant racists; it is that sort of demonisation of our fellow citizens that is so damaging to the discourse around Brexit. It precisely obscures some of the real concerns that leave voters did express, and had every right to. Their concerns were about the lack of housing, the strains on the NHS, and being undercut in the workplace by unscrupulous employers who often exploited migrants and paid them less than the minimum wage. All those issues are about public services and domestic enforcement. They will not be solved by our leaving the EU, but they will also not be solved by our remaining. What is needed is a change of Government policy, or, better still, a change of Government.

Immigration is a vital element of our economic growth, and of our trade and trade negotiations. We need migration. The Government’s own economic assessment shows that European migration contributes 2% of GDP to the UK. The Government’s proposed £30,000 salary threshold would actually preclude three quarters of EU migrants. I am not referring simply to seasonal agricultural workers or careworkers; even some junior doctors do not earn more than £30,000 a year. The Government’s supposed skills threshold is really a salary threshold, and it would do serious damage to our economy.

The irony is, of course, that EU net migration is coming down. Statistics published just last month record the number as 74,000. The Government have been complaining that free movement gives them no control over those people. Presumably they mean the sort of control that they have always been able to exercise over migrants coming from the rest of the world. Is it not strange, then, that the figure recorded for net migration from the rest of the world is 248,000?

This is why politicians are not trusted. They tell people that we need to abolish freedom of movement to bring migration down to the tens of thousands when our own rules, over which the EU has never had any say, are allowing three times that number. What we should be explaining to people is that net migration should go both up and down in line with the needs of our economy. As long as we have fair rules and competent and reasonable management of migration, this country will be better off. The trouble is that we have had lies, arbitrary targets that bear no relation to our economy’s requirements, and, frankly, administrative incompetence.

As with regulatory alignment, so with the exchange of people. The deeper the trade deal we want, the greater the need for an exchange of people. Foreign companies that invest in the UK want and need their indigenous workers to get visas, and the harder we make that process, the less investment we will secure. When the Prime Minister went to India two years ago to secure a trade deal, she was rebuffed on precisely that issue. The Times of India summed it up on its front page with the headline “You want our business. But you do not want our People”.