Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and International Committee of the Red Cross (Status) Bill [Lords]

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call Jas Athwal to make his maiden speech.

--- Later in debate ---

[Adam Jogee]

It is a pleasure to have my genuine friend intervene. He served honourably and nobly in the Northern Ireland Assembly. His point about the importance of the CPA branch in Northern Ireland, and of branches across our United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, is well made.

As the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Monica Harding) noted, 33 of the Commonwealth’s members are small states, and they include many island nations, such as Jamaica, the land of my grandfather’s birth. There is something very important about the leaders of small islands and small nations being at the table with the leaders of countries such as Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and, yes, the United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northern Ireland.

We all know that the Commonwealth’s roots go back to the British empire, and that is a complicated history for all of us. We should not forget, or airbrush out, in taking the steps forward that this Bill will help us to take. We must embrace our history and our collective experiences. My grandfather came here to serve King and country on a British passport in the 1940s. We would not have beaten the Germans on the beaches of Normandy, or at Gallipoli, without the bravery and valour of young men—black, white and Asian—from across the Commonwealth, or the colonies as they were then.

Today, any country can join the modern Commonwealth. The last two countries to join were Gabon and Togo in 2022. Their admittance was interesting because neither had age-old colonial ties to the United Kingdom—indeed, there was very little that bound them with Britain—and that in many ways proved a step in the right direction. There is more to do on this. I am very proud of my Zimbabwean roots, but it is a matter of deep personal sadness that a nation that once hosted the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in the presence of Her late Majesty now sits on the outside looking in. With membership comes responsibilities, expectations and standards, as is the case for any club or team one joins. That is why the Bill is so important. I hope that the discussion on Zimbabwe is given a thorough and detailed hearing when the leaders gather in Samoa.

I am one of few Members who can claim to represent the birthplace of a leader of a Commonwealth country. The sixth Prime Minister of Australia, Joseph Cook, started off in the Labor party but ended up a Tory—[Interruption.] I thought Opposition Members would enjoy that. He was born and raised in Silverdale in my constituency, and after leaving our shores for Australia, he went on to hold the highest role in the land. It is a legacy we are very proud of in Newcastle-under-Lyme. A couple of weeks ago, I was at St Luke’s primary school in Silverdale, where there is a fantastic plaque that honours the memory of Cook and cherishes the ties between our community and Australia.

The Bill is important, because it heralds, I hope, a change in British Government policy. We cannot just engage when it suits us, or when we feel like it; we cannot and must not allow the bonds to fray, the contact to cease, or let the phone calls go unanswered. We have seen many examples across Africa and the Caribbean and, increasingly, in the Pacific of the Chinese Government having people on speed dial. The perception—certainly mine and in many other parts of the world—is that the United Kingdom, for at least the past 30 years or so, has failed effectively and properly to seize the opportunities that the Commonwealth provides.

I am pleased that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary are both going to the Pacific—there are competing demands on senior colleagues from all of us every day—but Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth always said that she had to be seen to be believed, and she was right. That is why is important for the Prime Minister to make the admittedly long journey to the meeting. Our departure from the European Union was meant to lead to a global Britain agenda, and I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to make sure that that agenda becomes a reality. The Bill and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association will help us to do that. They show our allies and friends across the Commonwealth that we take our relationships and our responsibilities seriously, that we understand the example we must set, and that we are determined to build, as Gordon Brown would put it, a renewed Commonwealth with a renewed purpose for new times.

As the hon. Member for South Antrim (Robin Swann) noted, if the Bill is passed, colleagues will engage with parliamentarians from across the Commonwealth through the CPA, as I will in the period ahead, and will have something positive to say, which is important. The viability and future of the Commonwealth is on the line if we do not get this new relationship right. The new Government have a lot to do to get our country back on track, and this is part of it. Being good stewards at home and good neighbours abroad are not mutually exclusive. We must do both, and we can do that by supporting the Bill.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call Jack Rankin to make his maiden speech.

[Jack Rankin (Windsor) (Con)]

It gives me great pleasure to make my maiden speech, and it is appropriate to do so in a debate on the Commonwealth of nations. First, I pay tribute to the maiden speech by the hon. Member for Ilford South (Jas Athwal). He spoke passionately about the opportunity and the community that Ilford has afforded him, and his commitment to his people there. I am sure that he will make a great contribution to Parliament.

We share a set of values with our Commonwealth kin: a belief in the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech, property rights, and innocent until proven guilty by a jury of our peers, all built on a shared constitutional heritage. I want to fight for those principles during my time in Parliament.

My Windsor constituency is at the beating heart of Parliament, because it is not just a series of beautiful towns and villages, although that is undoubtedly true; it also encapsulates the glorious history of our constitution, the evolution of our parliamentary democracy and the very best of our shared Commonwealth of nations. My predecessor was a son of the Commonwealth, with a Ghanaian father and an English mother. Adam Afriyie came from a tough background, growing up on a council estate in Peckham, but he became a successful tech entrepreneur and the first black Conservative Member of Parliament. Adam spent his years in Parliament campaigning against Heathrow’s third runway—I will continue that campaign—as well as supporting many local good causes, including the children’s charity, Sebastian’s Action Trust. I also appreciated Adam’s work on fintech and his role as the longest serving chair of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. As someone with an academic background in mathematics and physics, it is clear to me that this place needs more of a quantitative and scientific approach. Above all, Adam is a good man and a person I am proud to call a friend. I wish him and his family all the best for the future.

Windsor’s link to the royal family is self-evident: the Conqueror first built the castle, and the royal house proudly carries our name. But fewer know that the Windsor constituency was the home of monarchs long before the arrival of the Norman yoke. Old Windsor was an important palace of Saxon kings, documented as a defended royal manor in Edward the Confessor’s time, but evidence suggests that there were royal connections since at least the ninth century.

William the Conqueror chose the site for Windsor castle, a strategically important position high above the key medieval route to London on the River Thames. It was part of a ring of motte and bailey castles around London, each a day’s march from the city and the next castle, allowing for easy reinforcements. The first king to use Windsor castle as a royal residence was William’s son, Henry I. Perhaps he was attracted by the proximity of the royal hunting forest—then Windsor forest, now Windsor Great Park in the centre of my constituency. I represent most of the communities around it, including Ascot, Sunninghill and Sunningdale, where my wife Sarah and I have made our family home with our sons, Edward and Christopher.

Henry’s great-grandson John was besieged by the barons in 1214 and signed Magna Carta the following year. Whether it was signed north of the river in Wraysbury or south on Runnymede meadows is lost to time. Whichever the true site, both are in the Windsor constituency, thanks to the most recent boundary changes, and we welcome Runnymede meadow into the patch, together with the Surrey villages of Englefield Green and Virginia Water, as well as the east of Langley in Slough.

Whether Wraysbury or Runnymede, it remains undeniable that there is a propensity for there to be too much water in those places. One of the things I will advocate for in this place is proper flood defences for Datchet, Wraysbury, Horton and Old Windsor. Disgracefully, if the River Thames scheme is built as currently envisaged, those villages will be the only parts of the Thames, from Taplow to the North sea, that remain materially undefended. What was proposed as channel 1 of the River Thames scheme must be funded centrally as national strategic infrastructure. This House will hear from me again on that topic, I assure you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

In the handful of weeks I have been here, I have already lost count of the times this place has been incorrectly referred to as the “mother of Parliaments”—a misquoting of John Bright. It is England that Bright referred to as the mother of Parliaments. In that speech, Bright was arguing for what became the Reform Act of 1867, which, for the first time, enfranchised part of the urban male working class, from which I hail. England is the mother of Parliaments because of the principle, established in Anglo-Saxon England, that yes, we owe our allegiance to His Majesty the King—then in Old Windsor; now in new Windsor—but within a framework that protects our ancient individual liberties, as articulated in Magna Carta. That heritage is proudly ours. The Saxon Great Councils started to be called Parliaments by the 13th century; the principles underpinning them—among other things, that the King could only make law and raise taxation with the consent of the community of the realm—now belong to the whole Commonwealth and the wider free world.

That concept—that taxation should be raised only with the consent of the community of the realm—should give the new Government pause for thought. I recommend it as a good conservative instinct. In this House, those on the Treasury Bench—the Crown—should be cautious about levying taxation, especially if punitive or excessive, without gaining wide common counsel. As this new Government raise taxes in breach of their manifesto commitments, my counsel would be that taxation will gain wide consent if, and only if, it leads to a material improvement in the quality of public services. That will not happen without quite radical public sector reforms to drive productivity improvements, which I seriously urge the Government to consider.

Tax without proper consent is something that Governments over the years have come a cropper over—most famously the British in North America in the 18th century. I hope our American cousins may rejoin the Commonwealth one day. It is often they who remember our shared constitutional heritage most keenly. The Magna Carta memorial in my constituency was erected in 1957 by the American Bar Association, which alongside us and our Commonwealth kin is the beneficiary of that great legacy.

I assure the House that I will be bringing its attention on many occasions to the extraordinary wealth of cultural and historical riches, tied to the history of our great country, that originate in my constituency—from the foundation of Eton college in 1440 and of Royal Holloway University by Victorian social pioneers over 170 years ago, as one of the first places in Britain where women could access higher education, to the establishment of Ascot racecourse in 1711, when Queen Anne found a flat expanse of heathland that she thought would be perfect for racing horses. That tradition continues over 330 years later; I say to Labour Members and particularly to the new Ministers that it is a fantastic place for a freebie. Please see my updated entry in the register of interests next month.

The foundation of Combermere barracks in 1796 and of Victoria barracks in 1853 made Windsor a proud double-garrison town. We owe our armed services so much for protecting the legacy of which I am talking. We will remember them. Of course, none of this compares to the events of 1996, with the foundation of the great institution of Legoland.

I cannot give my maiden speech without turning to the house of Windsor, our British royal house and the reigning house of our brothers and sisters in the other 14 Commonwealth realms. It gives us enormous pride that King George V proclaimed:

“Our House and Family shall be styled and known as…Windsor”.

It was felt inappropriate during the first world war that the royal family be called Saxe-Coburg-Gotha as London was being bombed by aircraft of the same name. It was thought that Windsor sounded necessarily regal and English; I wholeheartedly agree.

We have now seen our fifth monarch of the house of Windsor, albeit that it is sometimes better that we forget about the second. They have all made Windsor their home, but few monarchs will be more associated with Windsor than Her late Majesty of blessed memory, Elizabeth. Our late Queen made Windsor her principal weekend retreat—indeed, she made it her home—but retreating was something that she very rarely did. Her great passion was the Commonwealth. On her 21st birthday in South Africa in 1947, she dedicated her life to the service of the Commonwealth, famously saying:

“I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong”.

Didn’t she just? She was the living embodiment every day of the model of Christian service and of the history and continuity of this country and its constitutional monarchy—the very essence of our great nation. Throughout her reign, as the then Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip said on her passing, she was

“the keystone in the vast arch of the British state”—[Official Report, 9 September 2022; Vol. 719, c. 499.]

But she was more than that. She was head of state, yes, but she was also head of the nation and, more widely, the head of our family of nations. She deeply understood the role to which she had been called in the context of a millennium of constitutional development, lots of which is local to my constituency but relevant to free people the world over.

I come from a much more modest background, but all of us in this House, like Windsor’s Elizabeth the Confessor, would do well to appreciate that we are but the momentary trustees of our country. As Burke said:

“Society is…a contract…between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

Yes, we have a responsibility to our constituents today, but we also have the shared inheritance of our history and our great parliamentary democracy, and we all have a duty to uphold the great traditions of our past in order to safeguard its future.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call Lillian Jones to make her maiden speech.

[Lillian Jones (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the contribution of the hon. Member for Windsor (Jack Rankin) to this debate on the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the International Committee of the Red Cross. It does not need saying how important the work of both those organisations is.

I have listened to many hon. Members delivering maiden speeches in this House and have been struck by all their excellent contributions, but I stand before the House today with immense gratitude and a profound sense of responsibility. It is the greatest honour for me to have been elected to this House to represent the people of Kilmarnock and Loudoun, a place that I have called home for nearly 20 years. I have been a local councillor serving the ward of Kilmarnock West and Crosshouse for 12 of those years. I moved to Kilmarnock after meeting my partner Nettie, and we have been together ever since. She is my best friend and my anchor—I just don’t know what I would do without her.

I want to extend my love and my thanks to my family for their everlasting support and encouragement. I am thinking today of my aunty June, who was only 10 years older than I am. We said goodbye to her just six days before the election, but I know she will be watching over me with my gran and Arthur. Arthur was my granda, but I fondly remember that as a child I would call him by his name, which just stuck. As Members can imagine, that raised curiosity among the teachers at my school, who would always inquire if Arthur was my gran’s boyfriend, much to my gran’s amusement. As they look down on me, I hope I make them proud.

I thank my friends and colleagues who gave up every spare moment to help me. My friend Maureen, the Labour group leader on East Ayrshire council, is a woman like no other. She invested time and energy in me and has mentored me since my first election to East Ayrshire council in 2012. Despite her own personal challenges, she was determined to do all she could to get me here to this place and to play a huge part in my campaign. Barry, who is known affectionately as our local stato genius, kept us well drilled and well informed—and, boy, did that pay off, with a 5,000 majority. I would not be standing here today if it were not for the contributions of those who believed in me and supported me throughout this journey. I thank every one of them.

I pay tribute to my immediate predecessor, Alan Brown, who was first elected to this House in 2015 and was committed to working hard for his constituents throughout his time in Parliament. I wish Alan and his family well for the future.

In 1945, Clarice Shaw was the first woman elected to this place to represent the people of Kilmarnock on a platform of jobs for all, industry in the service of the nation, public ownership, a welfare state from cradle to grave and a new national health service. Some 57 years later, I took up a post in our national health service. I was later privileged to join a team of dedicated colleagues who helped to shape me into the person I am today. It was and still is an honour to have been part of the hospital at night team, which was first launched in Glasgow in 2007, and to have forged many friendships that will last a lifetime. I am thinking today of my former NHS colleagues; I pay tribute to all members of the team who selflessly did their duty throughout the coronavirus pandemic and who continue to do so in sometimes very challenging circumstances.

Clarice was a tireless campaigner for equality, an unwavering agitator for peace and a dedicated socialist Member of Parliament. Her legacy serves as a beacon of hope and inspiration for all of us who believe in the power of collective action and social justice. Sadly, just days after Clarice was sworn in, she became seriously ill and was unable to return to Parliament to deliver her maiden speech. In October 1946, Clarice stood down. Sadly, she died a few days later.

As a working-class woman elected to this House, I reflect on Clarice Shaw’s contributions and am inspired to carry forward her vision into today’s world, where it is just as relevant now as in 1945. It is a vision in which peace prevails over conflict, co-operation triumphs over division and equality is not just an aspiration but a reality for every citizen—one that ensures that our national health service will be there when people need it most and for future generations.

The second woman elected to represent Kilmarnock and Loudoun was Cathy Jamieson in 2010, although by that time she had already been a parliamentarian for 11 years in the Scottish Parliament. Her wealth of knowledge and experience saw her appointed to the official Opposition Front Bench in 2011 as shadow Economic Secretary to the Treasury. Cathy will be a hard act to follow, but I will do my absolute best. Cathy is also arguably Kilmarnock football club’s biggest fan. I was delighted to learn that the club won the 2024 best-kept war memorial competition for its satellite garden and memorial, thanks to Kilmarnock’s branch of Royal British Legion Scotland and to the club ambassador, Raymond Montgomerie.

My constituency is not only famous for having the oldest professional football club in Scotland, or for its famous sons such as Nobel peace prize winner John Boyd Orr, who was born in Kilmaurs in 1880, Andrew Fisher, the fifth Prime Minister of Australia, who was born in Crosshouse in 1862, and Sir Alexander Fleming from Darvel, who discovered penicillin. This month, it may interest the House to know that in Killie we are unique: we celebrate Halloween before anyone else in the country. This year is even more unusual, because we are celebrating Halloween before the clocks go back—something that cannot happen in the rest of the country.

On the last Friday of October, Killieween comes to life, supporting our local economy, with weans young and old in fancy dress out in the streets trick-or-treating. Over recent years, it has become a favourite date in the calendar for communities across the constituency. It is fantastic to see so many schools, volunteers, businesses and organisations such as Kilmarnock community fire station putting effort, energy and pride into making Halloween such an exciting time for so many children across the towns and villages of my constituency.

I am shaped by the people who have loved, mentored, taken a chance on and believed in me. I stand before the House today as a proud public servant with a combined 34 years of public service. Being in the service of people is when I am at my best. This is who I am. I know that my life and work experiences will serve me well in the role of Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call David Mundell.