Oral Answers to Questions
David Drew Excerpts(6 years, 6 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
I am sure the sympathies of the whole House will be with Sharon, because no parent should have to endure the agony of burying their child. May I reassure my hon. Friend that we are absolutely committed to seeing mental health services improve on the ground? That is why we have committed to making an additional £1.4 billion available to improve children and young people’s mental health services, and we have committed to ensuring that by 2020-21, 70,000 more children and young people each year will have access to high-quality NHS mental health care. On the specific case she has raised, I know that my right hon. Friends the Education and Communities Secretaries will be happy to look into the detail of it in order to ensure that lessons are indeed learned.
Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)
The Prime Minister
I will look into the specific issue the hon. Gentleman has raised and ensure that the appropriate Secretary of State meets him to discuss the issue with him.
Voter ID Pilots
David Drew Excerpts(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
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Chloe Smith
It is incredibly important that electors hear that reassurance from their Member of Parliament, and I am pleased that my hon. Friend has been able to put that on the record. I can confirm that Bromley is offering the choice of photographic and non-photographic identification, and electors can also apply for a certificate of identity, free of charge, from the local authority. That is the crucial point. Every elector who is eligible can secure alternative arrangements should they need them. What we are hearing from the Opposition is a self-interested argument. Instead of doing voters down they should talk our democracy up.
Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)
Will the Minister apply the same criteria to postal voters and postal voting?
Chloe Smith
I can confirm that in addition to the five pilots that we are primarily discussing there are three pilots to strengthen postal and proxy voting processes, and I am equally supportive of those.
Military Action Overseas: Parliamentary Approval
David Drew Excerpts(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)
I am pleased to be able to make a short contribution today. In 1996, on the back of outrages in east Africa and the fact that Sudan had not long gotten rid of Osama bin Laden from its territory, the US launched a cruise missile attack on Al-Shifa on the basis that it was the site of a plant for the creation of VX. It later transpired that the Al-Shifa plant was producing pharmaceuticals and that there was no evidence whatsoever that chemicals were being used in any improper way. The Sudanese still refer to the incident, keeping the site as rubble, and, on the occasions that I have been there, have offered to show people, including the Americans, what the plant was. I use that as an example of where things have been found to be wrong. Intelligence is not sacrosanct. I have never been a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee and am never likely to be, but it is right for this Parliament to hold the Government to account, and there is nothing more important than Parliament holding the Government to account on whether it is right to go to war.
The Al-Shifa example is about the Americans and their lack of intelligence in this respect. The strike became known as a wag-the-dog incident, because it was more to do with President Clinton trying to offset some of his own problems at home. I cannot say what the motive behind the thinking of the current President of the United States is, but there are sometimes ulterior motives for why people launch attacks. In our case, we have Afghanistan, when we were told that not a shot would be fired and that it would be a straightforward invasion, and Libya, which we were told was about regime change and evolving a democratic structure.
Dr Drew
I am not giving way, because we are short on time.
In our case, however, this is more about Iraq. I was in the House at the time of the Iraq war, and I remember that the Government did not willingly give Back Benchers a vote. We dragged it out of the Government, and there was so much opposition that they had to give us a vote. In a sense, Back Benchers created that precedent, which is an important convention.
It is important that Parliament has a view, and one of the problems is that our constituents have been emailing us and stopping us in the street to ask, “What is your view? Why haven’t we heard what Parliament has to say?” The right hon. Member for Twickenham (Sir Vince Cable) made that point, and I totally agree with him. It is important that Parliament has a say. Parliament can get things right and get things wrong, but so can Governments, and it is right that we exercise our democratic right as elected representatives.
A war powers Act—remember that this is just an SO24 debate—would undergo proper scrutiny, as the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) made quite clear, and go through all the process. He suggested that there could be other ways of doing this, but I strongly believe that this debate should be had, because things are unclear at the moment. The Government have changed the convention. They should have come here for a debate—not a question session, but a debate and a vote. They chose not to, however, so the situation is unclear. A precedent was created on Iraq, but it has now been changed, so I merely say that it is right and proper to have this debate today and that we therefore begin to move towards clarity on what was previously a convention of the House. It no longer exists, and it is about time that Parliament had its view and was able to decide on whether the convention is right or wrong.
Carillion
David Drew Excerpts(6 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Lidington
My hon. Friend makes an important point. It is right that taxpayers’ money is used to protect public services, not to bail out either creditors or shareholders of a private sector company that has made serious financial mistakes.
Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)
Where Carillion has a public sector contract and is in dispute with householders, will the Government commit, if the settlement is in favour of the householders, to make payment to those householders?
Mr Lidington
I am sure that a constituency case lies behind that. I am very happy for myself or another Minister to talk to the hon. Gentleman about the precise circumstances.
Proportional Representation
David Drew Excerpts(7 years ago)
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Jonathan Reynolds
It is excellent if we view this simply as a partisan issue where the only thing that matters is our side winning, but as democrats we have to look at this from the point of view of what the public put forward, and we have to respond to that public demand. If we are not doing that, we have to ask ourselves what the purpose of elections is to begin with. It cannot just be about maximising individual party advantage and finding a system that gets us to that point. That is not good enough, and it is not what democratic systems are based on.
I will conclude, because we have such a strong turnout in the Chamber. I just want to go through some of the commonly held views, such as those shown in the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (John Spellar) and the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay. It is true that lists are suboptimal—there is no doubt about that—but what I find hypocritical is the fact that many of the people who cite lists as an example of undue party advantage know full well that first past the post is open to manipulation. It has always been the case in every party represented here that favoured sons and daughters have been parachuted into constituencies or selection processes have been manipulated. It is simply not true that that can be transferred to any system that has a list involved.
With regard to minority parties, I think that we should teach better history in schools. As the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay was speaking, I thought, “Well, right now things are dependent on the DUP.” We had the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition before that. John Major was dependent on the Ulster Unionists. We had the Callaghan Government’s Lib-Lab pact. We had minority Governments and coalitions before the war. We had the situation with the Irish nationalists. The history of this country is not one of first past the post delivering clear results. In fact, we have had a situation quite recently in which a proportional system has delivered a majority Government in Scotland while first past the post has delivered a hung Parliament in the United Kingdom, so we need to look more closely at the evidence.
Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)
Our party once stood on a manifesto of proportional representation in the 1920s. We invested a lot of time and effort in the Plant report, which subsequently was taken up by Jenkins. That was never followed through by the Labour party, which is very sad, because Jenkins gave us a way forward. Does my hon. Friend agree?
Jonathan Reynolds
I absolutely agree. Labour could have seized the initiative many times in our history. Many times we have come close, but we have never followed it through. We must change that now. As has already been said in this debate, fundamentally we have an electoral system designed for two-party politics, which is no longer the case in this country. We will not go back to that. We saw a big increase in the vote share for the two big parties at the election, but that was a response to each other. When I talk to people, I do not find that all of a sudden we have stopped having a plurality of political views in this country and that everyone is happy simply voting Conservative or Labour.
With regard to the AV referendum, AV is not proportional representation. I and many people here voted for it simply because we knew that people such as my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley would cite the result as an endorsement of first past the post. The referendum was really about Nick Clegg and dissatisfaction with the decisions that led to the formation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition Government, but that cannot be the end of the debate. It would simply cheat people and ignore serious issues if we did not continue the discussion.
I will finish with the point that the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay often makes, which is that the result of the AV referendum shows that people do not want it, they are not asking us for it, and it is simply a political obsession. I ask everyone here today: when they are out in their constituencies or talking to anyone about what they do, how many people say, “You know what? I think British politics is spot on. There is nothing we should change. I am satisfied with British politics. Get back there and continue”? I do not think that is true. I think there is alienation and a huge amount of concern about how we are reducing our political culture so that it is no longer capable of solving the problems this country faces. There is no magic wand that we can wave to change everything, but if we want a better politics we have to start reflecting on how the people vote and what they want in the composition of our Parliament. That is why we must change to a system of fair votes.
Craig Mackinlay
I am always grateful to the hon. Lady for her contributions. This is a wide-ranging debate, and I will come on to other forms of PR.
On the question of decisiveness, we generally have decisive outcomes from first-past-the-post systems. In my South Thanet constituency I was very fortunate to receive 50.8% of the vote, so under first past the post, AV or supplementary vote I would still have won. That is true of many Members. AV, the system that was wholly rejected, has a “one, two, three” system, as hon. Members will be aware. Supplementary vote is seen in police and crime commissioner and mayoral elections. I stood for police and crime commissioner in 2012. Even after educating the public about what the two columns meant—“Vote for one, vote for two, or don’t use the second column and just use the first”—the number of spoilt ballot papers was truly exceptional. That is still true today in London elections. I do not know hon. Members’ experiences in their own constituencies, but the number of spoilt ballot papers in first past the post is vanishingly small, and I was alarmed to see the number of spoilt papers in mayoral elections.
Craig Mackinlay
As the hon. Gentleman will be absolutely clear, the list system for European parliamentary elections has been foisted on us, and is not one that we would have chosen for ourselves.
I was just going through the various systems. With the single transferable vote system, we can have a transferable vote down from the winning candidate or a transferable vote up from the eliminated candidate. We can have the additional member system, with a constituency member and a party vote top-up. Last year, I was fortunate to go on a visit with an all-party parliamentary group to Hungary, which operates that system. We were warmly entertained by one of the Hungarian list MPs. I asked her about that experience. There are others in this room who are more familiar with these systems, particularly in Scotland. I asked, “Are you busy as a constituency MP?” She said, “No, I don’t get any post at all. I have nothing to do, because nobody knows I exist, because there is no link to my constituency.”
Oral Answers to Questions
David Drew Excerpts(7 years, 1 month ago)
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Rory Stewart
Procurement is central to the Secretary of State’s reforms in DFID. She has made open and transparent procurement, and a suppliers review run by my right hon. Friend Lord Bates, central to how we take this forward, and of course that is right. Getting procurement right can help not only businesses, but the poorest people in the world.
Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)
Does the Minister accept that there are many places in the Commonwealth where conflict is still ever present? Will he assure me that DFID will never cut back on moneys for peace and reconciliation before we even get to the opportunity of development?
Rory Stewart
Conflict is probably the biggest single driver of economic catastrophe, poverty and refugees in the world. We will continue to commit half our budget to fragile and conflict-affected states, because without peace there can be no development.