Business of the House

Deidre Brock Excerpts

Thursday 18th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

We now come to the SNP spokesperson.

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

This week, Britain has been treated to not one, but two, Conservative conferences: the far-right Conservative Democratic Organisation and the extreme far-right National Conservatism conferences. I was rather surprised that the Leader of the House was not there after her recent starring role; nevertheless, the Home Secretary, the Levelling Up Secretary, and lots of up-and-coming Tory Back Benchers all made eye-catching contributions, along with some other rather extraordinary speeches. The holocaust was dismissed as Nazis mucking things up, and we were told that only married straight couples could safely bring up children, that pagans and narcissists are harming western civilisation, and that woke teachers are ruining children’s education—it should make for an interesting Tory manifesto. Many of my constituents are extremely concerned by these latest developments. Can we have a debate to examine the extremist language and attitudes that we have witnessed at those conferences, and can the Leader of the House tell us whether they further signal her Government’s alarming slide into the grip of the far right, or will she reject these ideas out of hand like all decent people?

At Prime Minister’s questions last week, the Prime Minister said that the Scottish Government should ditch plans to introduce highly protected marine areas, apparently unaware that the Scottish Government are only at the very start of a consultation process, with many hundreds of responses to go through yet, and that our First Minister and Ministers have said that no community will have an HPMA forced upon it. I do not know why some of the Prime Minister’s Tory MSPs could not have told him that, although judging from recent behaviour in the Scottish Parliament, perhaps some struggle to use the internet.

However, rather embarrassingly, I see that the PM himself, when touting for Tory membership votes last year, signed a pledge from the Conservative Friends of the Ocean group supporting the creation of HPMAs, and his Government recently announced that three HPMAs will be created in England. What is going on here? I know that the Conservatives are desperate to win back the Scottish coastal communities after their Brexit catastrophe, but those communities will see through this hypocrisy, and my jaw nearly hit the floor when I saw that the lead patron of that same Conservative Friends of the Ocean group was the Leader of the House herself. Perhaps a debate sorting out exactly where the UK Government are on this important issue would be helpful, and can the Leader of the House clarify how she is dealing with the PM’s flip-flopping on HPMAs? Will she be resigning from Government to honour her role as patron, or resigning as patron to uphold Government policy?

[Penny Mordaunt]

First, the hon. Lady asks me about the National Conservatism conference. That is not a conference that has been organised by Government or the Conservative party, and is therefore not within my remit or responsibilities to respond to. I am taking this as a positive, as she is running out of complaints to raise about my Government.

She raises the matter of HPMAs. I am very proud of my Government’s record, both on improving water quality and boosting the economic resilience of coastal communities and the many things that we have done around the world to protect our valuable oceans, including the Blue Charter and others. I am proud to be patron of that Conservative group that looks after our oceans and the industries they support.

I gently say to the hon. Lady that I hope we all share those aims in this place, but how we go about doing things is also rather important. The complaints that not just Conservative MPs and MSPs have about how the Scottish Government have been going about this, and the concerns that have been raised by many coastal communities, are because the Scottish Government do not consult and do not listen to those communities. It is the same story with their disastrous bottle deposit return scheme, which will impact negatively on recycling rates and cause massive problems for businesses.

I was surprised this week that the hon. Lady decided to have an Opposition day debate on the cost of living, given that the SNP is hiking taxes, spending like there is no tomorrow and failing to deliver on decent public services. We have heard this week that it will now cost more to finish those ferries that are so massively overdue than to do a complete new build. We know that Scottish Ministers appreciate the difficulty for and impact on their constituents and the travelling public, because in order for them to visit the island of Rùm, they had to hire their own boat; they were not able to use the ferry services.

I wonder whether the hon. Lady and her colleagues have read any of Audit Scotland’s reports or acted on any of its recommendations. They have no concept of the catalogue we now have of arrests and raids and multiple police investigations into the mismanagement of their party finances, and of how negatively that has reflected on Scottish politics. We also have the poor stewardship of public funds and an increasing question about the ongoing saga of the Scottish National Investment Bank. We are wondering not just how much longer those CalMac ferries will be in the dock, but how many SNP figures will be as well.