Oral Answers to Questions

David Cairns Excerpts

Wednesday 9th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am very happy to discuss that issue with my hon. Friend and with the Secretary of State for Health. As he knows, we have introduced far tougher steps before these decisions can be taken, to ensure that local needs, and the views of patients and local GPs, are respected. The whole point about the new system, which is GP-led, is that hospitals will thrive when local people use and value them.

[David Cairns (Inverclyde) (Lab)]

Q7. In the past few weeks, the Government have rebranded antisocial behaviour orders as criminal behaviour orders, renamed control orders as terrorism prevention and investigation measures, and rechristened curfews as overnight residence requirements. Does the Prime Minister not realise that no amount of rebranding will disguise the fact that a Government preparing to cut police numbers by 10,000 will be seen as nothing other than weak on antisocial behaviour, reckless on terrorism and soft on crime?

[The Prime Minister]

I notice that the Labour party is going a long way to rebranding new Labour as old and irresponsible Labour, and I have to say that the project is going very well.

EU Council and North Africa

David Cairns Excerpts

Monday 7th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, which is that when this happened a very bad message was sent about what we stand for in the UK and our views in terms of the response to such a heinous crime. It is important to bear that in mind, and as I said in my statement, I do not think that enough thought was given to that, which in the end is the most precious of all judgments that Ministers should make.

[David Cairns (Inverclyde) (Lab)]

As the Minister of State in the Scotland Office at the time, and as Mr Megrahi’s constituency MP, I strongly agree with the Prime Minister that Mr Megrahi should have spent the rest of his natural life in prison. Does he agree with me that however ill-considered and ill-judged phrases such as “our game plan on Megrahi” may be—had anyone approached me with such a game plan, I would have told them where they could put it—it must not obscure the central fact that it was a decision that was taken, and could only ever have been taken, by Scottish Government Ministers? There was no collusion, no cover-up and no conspiracy, just a bad decision by the SNP.

[The Prime Minister]

I go a long way with the hon. Gentleman, who I think made the right judgment about the release of Megrahi. The problem, and this comes out in the report, is that memos submitted to Ministers in the Foreign Office included things like,

“Facilitating direct contact between the Libyans and the Scottish Executive is a key part of our game plan on Megrahi”,

and that submission was subsequently agreed by the Minister. That is the point. The language about facilitating contacts that was put into memos was subsequently agreed by Ministers, including the former Foreign Secretary, and we were not told about that in the House of Commons. That is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Public Bodies Reform

David Cairns Excerpts

Thursday 14th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Maude]

I have been invited to go down that path before, and I am a cautious fellow so I shall resist the temptation to do so. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his endorsement of the approach that Sir Philip Green has taken in helping the Government pick up a number of stones to find out exactly what is crawling around underneath.

[David Cairns (Inverclyde) (Lab)]

The Minister is proposing to merge UK Sport and Sport England, which do quite distinct jobs—there is a clue in their titles. From his existential ruminations, will he tell me how he proposes to guarantee that elite athletes in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, who are getting magnificent support from UK Sport in the run-up to the Olympic games, are not disadvantaged by what is effectively a takeover by Sport England, which understandably has a quite different focus?

[Mr Maude]

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport will no doubt be able to answer the hon. Gentleman’s regular questions about how that will work.

[David Cairns]

You merged them.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Cairns Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd June 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. I admired the work that Anthony Steen did. We have not set a date and he gives me an important reminder that I must get back to my office and make sure that we do.

[David Cairns (Inverclyde) (Lab)]

Q9. For more than 20 years, Sky News has provided an excellent source of impartial news and analysis. Can the Prime Minister give a guarantee that, whoever ends up owning BSkyB, it will not be allowed to turn into Fox News, and that there is no room here for shouty, reactionary propaganda passing itself off as fair and balanced news?

[The Prime Minister]

The very idea of shouty, reactionary propaganda being passed in the House of Commons is an appalling thought. As I am sure we all recognise, these are matters for my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, who will be looking at them very closely.

Saville Inquiry

David Cairns Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Gentleman rightly speaks with great power and emotion about how people on all sides in Northern Ireland have suffered, and people in the community that he represents have suffered particularly badly. Some horrific things have happened to people completely unconnected with politics—people who are innocent on every single level—and there is nothing that you can do to explain to someone who lost a loved one in that way that there is any logic, fairness or sense in that loss. The hon. Gentleman asks how we try to achieve closure on such matters. There is no easy way, but we have the Historical Enquiries Team, which goes through case after case, and if it finds the evidence, prosecutions can take place.

I hope that the inquiry report published today will give some closure to those families from Londonderry, but one way for families who have suffered to gain more closure about the past is for terrorists or former terrorists to come forward and give information about those crimes. However, in the end, we have to move forward and we have to accept that dreadful things happened. We do not want to return to those days, and that sometimes means—as he and I know—burying very painful memories about the past so that we can try to build a future.

[David Cairns (Inverclyde) (Lab)]

Does the Prime Minister recall that in the last Stormont elections the single biggest issue by a long way for both sides of the community was water charges and rates? Does not that demonstrate that in many ways the majority of the people of Northern Ireland have already moved on from the troubles that dominated so much of the past? Is it not important that on a day like today, when emotions will understandably run high, we do not lose sight of the fact that the majority of people in Northern Ireland are today concerned about the same issues about which his constituents and my constituents are concerned? That is a good thing and it represents progress.

[The Prime Minister]

I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman. One of the great prizes of the peace process would be for Northern Ireland to experience politics in the same way as the rest of us in the United Kingdom where it is about knocking on doors and talking about the health service, schools and water rates. That is what politics should be about, and there is a chance of that happening. It was great to go to Northern Ireland as Prime Minister without the normal security paraphernalia that previous visits involved, so we are making progress. That is what politics in Northern Ireland should become. The more that happens, the more people will find it unthinkable to go back to the days that came before.