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

Debate between Caroline Nokes and Jack Rankin

2nd reading
Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Commons Chamber

[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.