Budget Resolutions

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

I suspect that I have much more confidence in the world-class quality of the food and drink that is produced in Scotland than the hon. Gentleman. I do not believe that Scotch whisky really depends on the Foreign Secretary to become a world leader, and I do not believe that the world-class food and drink that we produce in Scotland really depends on gunboat diplomacy to make people throughout the world understand. What it does depend on is barrier-free access to markets, and it is a bit rich for those who support the removal of our barrier-free access to the biggest single market on the planet to claim to have a monopoly of wisdom about how to develop our international trade.

Let me say once again that I do not accept the argument that the sole purpose of foreign policy is to benefit wealthy investors and bankers in these islands. The most important part of the foreign policy of any developed and wealthy nation is to ensure that its wealth is distributed so that terrorist attacks such as the ones that we have seen in Egypt recently, and the starvation that takes the lives of thousands of children every day, become things of the past. If I have to pay a wee bit more income tax, or any other tax, to make that happen, I for one am more than happy to dip into my pocket.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman referred to the intervention in Yemen in a castigating way. Will he at least acknowledge that many Arab countries are involved in the war in Yemen, and that they are trying to avert a humanitarian crisis and deal with the difficulties in that country that are a direct result of Iranian intervention in support of the Houthi rebels? The situation is much more complicated than the hon. Gentleman is trying to suggest.

[Peter Grant]

I entirely agree that it is more complicated than it is often presented as being. I have not said that Iran is entirely innocent, but Iran is not buying £2 billion-worth of weapons of war from the United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia is. Saudi Arabia stands accused of war crimes. Until those allegations are investigated, I do not think that we should be selling weapons to those who may be committing crimes of mass murder, and I do not consider the question of whether or not they are using our weapons to commit those crimes to be relevant.

When I looked at the timetable for our Budget debate, I saw “Monday: global Britain”, and thought, “That’s not going to take very long, is it?” The fact is that even the Government’s own misguided ambitions for Britain’s place in the world, which I believe are still based on the fanciful belief that we are somehow entitled to retain an empire and colonies, rather than a simple acknowledgement that the world has moved on since the days when any nation could claim the right to colonise any other nation—