Israel and Gaza

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Monday 23rd October 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I think that is a mischaracterisation of some of what some of those countries have said. I spoke to the President of France last night and also leaders from the US, Canada, Italy and Germany. We are united in supporting Israel’s right to self-defence, acting in accordance with international law, and committed to getting humanitarian aid into the region, as we are now doing.

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

I pay tribute to the statesmanlike actions of my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary on this terrible issue. At the weekend, shocking footage travelled the world showing flags of proscribed organisations on the streets of London, with extremists proclaiming Allah’s curse on the Jews and others calling for jihad. British Jews are increasingly feeling unsafe in their own country. But what has made that worse is the apparent refusal of the Metropolitan police to do anything about it, other than stand to one side and then issue a self-justificatory tweet that, frankly, was an insult to the intelligence of anybody who read it. What steps has my right hon. Friend taken to ensure that the leadership of the police will in future enforce a zero-tolerance policy for incitement and extremism on our streets, for the good of all our people?

[The Prime Minister]

Hateful extremism has no place in our society. Calls for jihad and Muslim armies to rise up are a threat not only to the Jewish community but to our democratic values. Of course, the police are operationally independent, but the Home Secretary has raised this with them. Anyone who commits a crime—whether it be inciting racial hatred, glorifying terrorism or violating public order—should expect to face the full force of the law.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

In my Department, the Cabinet Office, I am working very closely with my right hon. Friend the Paymaster General. We are taking extensive steps to ensure that we crack down on fraud and waste and that procurement is transparent. Of course, we will be filling that vacancy very shortly.

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

Q13.   The Government do not have any money of their own—every penny that they spend is taxpayers’ money, including money spent supporting the economy during the pandemic. In that light, does my right hon. Friend agree that it would be disgraceful for a political party to accept huge donations from a company that was simultaneously claiming hundreds of thousands of pounds of public support during furlough?

Confidence in Her Majesty’s Government

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

I rise to declare my confidence in Her Majesty’s Government. There are myriad substantial reasons for doing so, but I am going to focus on just three, because of the time allowed to me.

The first, of course, is the ending of the Brexit impasse, which the dead Parliament of 2017 to 2019 showed itself to be incapable of doing. Under the leadership of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, the Conservative party won a landslide victory at the 2019 general election, when I had the privilege of being elected for the first time to represent my constituents in Orpington.

It is undeniable that a significant reason for the national result was the mandate to deliver on the largest democratic exercise in this country’s history—an exercise that had hitherto been thwarted by arrogant elites, some of whom I see sitting opposite me this evening. On 31 January 2020, Her Majesty’s Government delivered on the will of the people, and we left the European Union. The Labour party claimed that a Conservative Government would not achieve a Brexit trade deal, and yet Her Majesty’s Government announced on 24 December 2020 that Britain and the EU had agreed a post-Brexit trade deal, ending months of disagreement. A clear manifesto commitment that the previous dead Parliament had failed to deliver had been completed within a few weeks of the election. In the months that followed, the Government announced more than 70 trade agreements with countries all around the world.

That is achievement No. 1, and I will now move to achievement No. 2. Shortly after we left the European Union, the worst pandemic in a century hit the entire world. Her Majesty’s Government put their arms around the people, at great pace and under enormous pressure, and introduced a comprehensive package of support for individuals and businesses. Component parts of the support deal, such as the furlough scheme, saved millions of people from being made redundant when businesses could not trade because of the spread of the virus. Although our economy was on life support, it was kept alive thanks to the actions taken by the Government. As a direct result of decisions taken by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, this country was among the first to begin to emerge from the pandemic.

Her Majesty’s Government made the right call when it came to the vaccine. Thanks to the Government’s quick action to secure the most promising vaccine doses in advance, more than 120 million doses were administered in the first year in the UK alone. It should be noted, however, that the leader of the Labour party wanted Britain to remain in the European Medicines Agency, which would have delayed the roll-out of the vaccine. Countries in the EMA were much slower with vaccine production and roll-out than the UK was. Had Labour remained in power, the vaccine success that we experienced in this country would not have occurred at anything like the speed it did, with potentially dire consequences.

Her Majesty’s Government made the right call when it came to reopening the economy last year—something that, of course, the Labour party disagreed with. Time after time, senior Labour figures called for the maintenance, and even an extension, of restrictions. The Leader of the Opposition even said that he would vote for a circuit-breaker lockdown over Christmas, and then days later pretended he had never backed a Christmas restriction. Had he been in power, it would have been less Captain Hindsight, and more Major Catastrophe.

Finally, this Government and this Prime Minister have led to the west rallying international support for Ukraine. Her Majesty’s Government have kept our country safe. They have led the world in response to the first ground war on the European continent since the second world war, and they have got Brexit done. It is therefore patently obvious that the House should have confidence in Her Majesty’s Government, and I will be supporting the motion.

Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 14th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

I think the danger is precisely the opposite. The arrangements that the hon. Lady would like us to have are ones that put the monarch in a regular position of making a decision, and brings them closely into not only party politics, but sometimes into partisan politics within a political party. It is perfectly possible that a Prime Minister might have lost, or be about to lose, the confidence of their political party, but that political party might still want to govern and carry on under a different leader. In other words, there may be within the House an alternative Government who would be better for the nation.

My other problem is that there seems to be a very high theological understanding of the role of the Executive. I think the former Leader of the House set that going with his rather Stuart early-17th-century understanding of the constitution, which is that basically, as long as the Prime Minister has the confidence of the House of Commons, he or she should be allowed to do pretty much anything and, frankly, parliamentary democracy is a little bit of an irritant. It is worth always bearing in mind that the Executive today is the only body who can ensure that business and legislation are considered, and the only body who decide when Parliament sits, when it will go into recess, and how long it will go into recess for. If we had the same rules today as we had in 1939, nobody would have been able to table an amendment to the recess debate that led to the big row before the beginning of the second world war. Today we have an Executive who are more powerful than they have been at any stage since the early 17th century, and it is time, occasionally, that the House of Commons said, “You know what? We’re a parliamentary democracy. Let’s take just a tiny bit of power into our own hands.”

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

I will be brief as I gather I have only a few minutes to speak. The Lords amendment would require the House of Commons to give prior approval to a dissolution of Parliament, and that would be done by simple majority rather than the two-thirds majority required by the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011. On the face of it, that would be an improvement to the existing position, but it is still something of a half-way house that causes confusion. In the event that a Government lose their ability to command a majority in the House of Commons, it does not automatically follow that the House would vote to approve an election.

For example, it may suit Opposition parties to keep a lame-duck Government in place, so that they can inflict parliamentary defeat after parliamentary defeat, as a means of further undermining confidence in the Government. But in whose interests would that be? Certainly not the interests of the country. As hon. Members have said, we very much saw that in the “zombie” Parliament of 2017-19, when Parliament initially refused to allow an election to take place. The country became ungovernable, and contempt for Parliament rose dramatically—I speak as somebody who was outside Parliament at that time, and who shared in that contempt. I submit that that is not in anyone’s best interests.

We recently heard some confused interventions on this matter from the other place. For example, a Liberal Democrat peer asked:

“But why should a Prime Minister who cannot get a majority of the House of Commons for an election be entitled to a Dissolution?”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 February 2022; Vol. 818, c. 1590.]

I am still not sure whether that was a rhetorical question or whether the Lord in question was trying to figure it out for himself. Either way, it is non-sequitur reasoning because in the example he gave, a Government would not seek to dissolve Parliament unless they found it impossible to gain simple majorities in the first place. In my opinion, a rather better, and frankly rather more honest question would be: why would Parliament want to avoid an election, unless it feared that the result would go against its own wishes? That is the real question that those who support the Lords amendment must ask themselves.

There is concern in certain quarters that going to the electorate to seek a new mandate would allow an opportunistic Government to call an election at a convenient time to increase their majority. It is true that the power to call an election gives an advantage to a sitting Government, but that ability is a double-edged sword and can seriously backfire against a Prime Minister seeking to exploit a perceived opportunity. Post-war history is replete with examples of an incumbent Government misreading the political situation, and calling an election that fails to deliver the result they wished for. Harold Wilson’s Labour Government in 1970 and Ted Heath’s Conservative Government in February 1974 are obvious examples of that. Similarly, a failure to call an election can damage an incumbent Government. The obvious recent example would be from 2007 when Gordon Brown publicly flirted with calling an election, only to back off at the last moment and cause irreparable damage to his public image as a result. The power to call an election—or not—does not automatically confer an insuperable advantage on the incumbent Government. The Lords amendment is therefore completely unnecessary, and I will continue to support the Bill as it stands.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

Members across the House want the repeal of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011, but in its defence, it was a creature of its time and it delivered stable government for five years. Let us not reinvent history regarding why it was introduced in the first place. It disappoints me that so much of this debate has been seen through the prism of 2019. That was a unique political position where we were divided by an issue that crossed party and electoral politics. We risk making very bad law on the basis of what happened in that history.

Call me old-fashioned, but I am a romantic when it comes to our constitution. We have an unwritten constitution, and the less of it that is written, the more likely it is to flex to meet those challenges. On that basis I am opposed to the Lords amendment. However, equally, while the Government’s stated ambition is to go back to the status quo ante, the existence of the ouster clause goes beyond that, and the amendment is an alternative to that ouster clause—it is another way of ousting the courts from deliberation on our proceedings—so the ouster clause’s existence makes a strong argument for it as an option.

I regret that we are having this debate. As Conservatives, we ought to stick to the more romantic view of our constitution and be able to expect Prime Ministers to behave well and honourably in their deliberation with monarchs so that monarchs are never put in that difficult position. However, we have the Lascelles principles, which articulate the occasions where the monarch can be empowered to involve themselves in politics, and that should be enough. I recognise that the argument is lost—it was probably lost in 2011 when the Fixed-term Parliaments Act was passed, and it certainly was when we came to the sad events of 2019—but I hope that we can go back to normal.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I repeat what I told the hon. Lady ages ago—if I have got her right. I have seen absolutely no evidence of successful Russian interference in any electoral event.

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

7. I welcome the steps that the Government are taking this year to help hard-working families in Orpington with their energy bills. The majority of people receive at least £350 of support. Can my right hon. Friend confirm that even those not eligible for the council tax rebate will still receive additional support thanks to discretionary funding set aside for local authorities?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I can tell him that the people of Orpington and elsewhere will receive support if they do not qualify for the council tax rebate from the £144 million fund that he rightly mentions.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Wednesday 24th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Paul Scully]

So much work has been done on the gender pay gap, as the hon. Lady says, but we are certainly looking at it, and we will report back on what we are doing about ethnicity pay reporting and disability pay reporting.

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

3. What recent discussions she has had with Cabinet colleagues on diversity and freedom of belief in public institutions.

[The Minister for Equalities (Kemi Badenoch)]

I regularly discuss these important issues with other Ministers, as does the Minister for Women and Equalities. Freedom of belief and speech are vital pillars of our democratic society, and no one should be silenced for expressing their legitimately held opinions. Freedom of speech in universities is already protected by law, but there is no effective enforcement mechanism. The Government are therefore taking steps, in line with our manifesto, to strengthen academic freedom and free speech in universities in England.

[Gareth Bacon]

My hon. Friend may be aware that John Cleese recently felt that he needed to pull out of speaking to the Cambridge Union following the revelation that it had blacklisted certain people from speaking. Although the union’s president has now rowed back on the claim that a list of banned speakers exists, will my hon. Friend outline what the Government are doing to promote freedom of speech and belief in our universities to make sure that students are exposed to a range of views even though they may themselves disagree with them?

[Kemi Badenoch]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. Indeed, John Cleese was quite right to highlight this issue. However, it should not be up to comedians to educate students on core values such as freedom of speech and freedom of belief; the universities themselves should do that. Those that seek to bully, harass and intimidate others because of their views risk undermining our precious freedoms. Such behaviour should not and will not be tolerated on university campuses. That is why we have introduced the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill to strengthen freedom of speech and academic freedom in universities and ensure that individuals can seek redress.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

What we have done with universal credit is abolish the old system, which unfairly taxed people on universal credit, and help people with a £1 billion tax cut. What we on this side of the House believe in is rewarding work. That is what the people of this country want to see. That is why we have put the tax cut on those who are on universal credit and that is why we are lifting the living wage. What is the Opposition’s policy on universal credit? It is not nothing; they want to abolish universal credit.

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

The Mayor of London is refusing to rule out the so-called outer London charge, which would apply to all vehicles registered outside Greater London that cross the Greater London boundary. That would have terrible consequences for my Orpington constituents and those who live in the neighbouring constituency of Old Bexley and Sidcup. Louie French, the excellent local candidate for the by-election, has pledged to fight that appalling proposal. Will my right hon. Friend join me in wishing Louie French luck with that and ensure that this silly move from the Mayor of London is stopped in its tracks?

[The Prime Minister]

I certainly do agree with my hon. Friend, who is an old friend of mine; I have worked closely with him on London issues for many years. I know where Labour’s instincts are. It always wants to put taxes up, particularly on motorists, and I think a checkpoint Chigwell would hit working families. What the Labour Mayor of London needs to do is get a grip on TfL’s finances and stop whacking up the taxes on ordinary people in the capital city.

Speaker's Statement

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

I could spend a very long time talking about James Brokenshire. I knew him for the best part of a decade and a half. Indeed, for the past 11 and half years he served as my local Member of Parliament in Old Bexley and Sidcup, but James to me was so much more than that. He was a dedicated and exceptional public servant, but he was also a very loyal friend. Above all, James was a family man and my heart goes out to Cathy, to Sophie, to Jemma and to Ben.

The courage with which James faced up to his illness and the determination with which he fought it, his refusal to feel self-pity and his steadfast determination to remain positive really was the mark of the man. He was taken from us far too soon. His constituents and his country have lost a great public servant, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Sir David Evennett) has said, and we have lost a much-valued colleague. I will miss him terribly, but I will always be grateful for the privilege of having known him and the honour to be able to call him my friend. James, rest in peace.

Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 6th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

I join colleagues from across the House in warmly welcoming my hon. Friend the Minister back to her place. It is a great pleasure to see her back here today.

I rise in very strong support of this Bill. It is a long overdue redress of our constitutional balance and the use of the royal prerogative. The Bill reasserts that Parliament is sovereign in our democracy over what are fundamentally political decisions.

Let me speak to clause 1. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which this Bill repeals, is a prime example of how short-term measures, necessary at the time, can have very hazardous long-term implications for our constitution. I understand why the coalition Government considered it necessary to bring in the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, and the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) set out those reasons in what I thought was a very thoughtful speech earlier on. There were both political and economic considerations at the time. The reverberations of the financial crisis were still being felt, and the economic mess that was left behind by the outgoing Labour Government needed urgent and stable administration, but the election of 2010 did not deliver that. A clear outcome had not been achieved, so there was a need to show that the Government would provide stability for a full term. Whether the Fixed-term Parliaments Act was required to achieve that, or a simple Bill fixing the length of a single Parliament, is something that we could debate endlessly. However, we have to deal with what is, and the detrimental trade-offs have been shown to be patently obvious.

The Joint Committee of both Houses, established under section 7 to review the Act, found it flawed in several respects. There are still unanswered conundrums in key areas, which demonstrate why the Act should be repealed. For example, who governs after the 14-day period following the successful passage of a no-confidence vote? Is the Prime Minister still in charge? Should he or she resign immediately? Who takes over and how? What if an agreement is reached on the 15th day?

Secondly, how do other traditional confidence motions such as the Budget and the Queen’s Speech tie into the Act when statutory provisions mean that the Government could refuse to put a specific motion before the House? Thirdly, and most crucially, the gridlock, uncertainty and, eventually, utter paralysis that became the hallmarks of the bitter disputes of 2019 meant that we faced the absurd situation in which the Government could neither legislate nor go to the country. I can testify, as somebody who was a member of the general public and not a Member of this House at the time, to how that massively undermined the status of Government and Parliament in the eyes of the general public. Every single person I spoke to was tearing their hair out at what they saw as self-indulgent paralysis in this House.

My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster outlined the important elements contained in clauses 2 and 4 of the Bill. I will focus on clause 3, which is extraordinarily important because it safeguards due political process from interference. Events during the last Parliament showed that the judiciary can be used and abused by activists to wage political wars through the courts. One of the most dangerous aspects of the Miller and Cherry case was that not only did a group of largely unelected elites seek to thwart the democratic will of the British people—I hasten to add that the 2016 referendum result was finally vindicated when we eventually had an election in 2019—but the sovereign was drawn into a partisan dispute. It is paramount for our constitutional democracy that the sovereign must be, and must be seen to be, above party political battles.

The Bill will help to prevent such a situation from arising again by making the revived prerogative powers non-justiciable. That is wholly welcome. For those reasons, I will support the Bill, and I congratulate the Government on delivering another of their manifesto commitments.

Public Health

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

While we wait for the roll-out of the vaccine, there are no easy choices available to the Government. The choice is between lockdown, a tiered system and unrestricted return to normal life. From an economic and social perspective, lockdowns are by far the worst option. Entering a cycle of lockdown, reopen and repeat does not amount to living with the virus; it is hiding from it, while causing long-lasting damage at the same time. People have put up with a great deal this year and are understandably desperate to return to their normal lives, but we know that the national health service comes under strain in the winter months in normal times and that these are very far from normal times. To simply reopen with no restrictions would be a huge gamble that could lead to the loss of tens of thousands of lives. That leaves the option of regional tiers, which I believe offer the best option for living with the virus while waiting for a full deployment of the vaccine. In acknowledging that, it is important to recognise that tiers are not a destination; they are a holding pattern.

As colleagues have said, the Government could do a great deal more in making transparent the evidential basis for decisions on tiers. I am not especially happy with my constituency’s tier. Orpington is part of the London Borough of Bromley and as such is part of Greater London. While Greater London has a range of infection rates, most are much higher than those in my borough. Greater London also has a very large number of hospitals. We know from Department of Health and Social Care figures that the NHS in London is now, at the end of the year, at only 76% of the level it was in spring. On that basis, it is possible to make the argument that the NHS has surge capacity to cope with a spike of infections in London and it could therefore perhaps have been placed in tier 1, rather than in tier 2. However, it is also possible to conceive of a situation where the virus could run out of control.

In addition, I note that the Government have listened to representations from colleagues on the Conservative Benches and across the House, and a range of activities can now resume in tier 2 that were not available during lockdown. However, as other colleagues have said, hospitality, in particular pubs, will be hard hit. While the existing measures and the additional financial support announced by the Prime Minister today are welcome, I call on the Government to have another look and see whether more can be done while we wait for the vaccine.

In closing, I must comment on the total abdication of responsibility offered today by the Leader of the Opposition. It is truly scandalous. It is all very well pointing to the faults of others, but a supposedly alternative Government must have an alternative plan. The moral vacuity of standing and saying, “I do not like what you are doing” but neither offering an alternative nor having the courage to vote on it is absolutely damning.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Speakers 82 to 84 have withdrawn, so we go straight to Rob Butler.