Gareth Snell
Main Page: Gareth Snell (Labour (Co-op) - Stoke-on-Trent Central)Department Debates - View all Gareth Snell's debates with the Ministry of Defence
(4 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Dr Evans
My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point. I would love to put that question to the right hon. Member for Makerfield, if he was here, although I expect that it would have come more eruditely from my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) on the Front Bench. This is precisely my point: we do not know how that issue will be resolved.
The hon. Member for Alloa and Grangemouth (Brian Leishman), who spoke before me, spoke about the humanitarian situation, which is hugely important. We have no idea what the decisions of the right hon. Member for Makerfield will be when it comes to dealing with international aid. After all, the current Prime Minister castigated the previous Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, for making cuts to international aid, then went and made cuts himself. The question is: will the new Prime Minister make the same decision? Will he hold to it or reverse it? I do not know—this Chamber does not know, and that is the point.
The DIP hits our domestic policies too. The funding needed to defend our nation and ensure that we are protected from the likes of Iran must mean a capital expenditure cut, which will be 1% in health and 1% in education. Which frontline services in health are going? Which hospitals in the hospital programme will not be built? There was a negotiation between the US and the UK on pharmaceuticals in our trade deal. That was signed off with the US, which has a tendency to use leverage on us when it comes to international issues such as Iran and tariffs. We still do not know from this Government where that funding will come from, but it has to come from the frontline when it comes to the NHS. I would love to ask the new Prime Minister what that looks like and how he will fund the new drugs that we need, but, alas, we will sadly not get that opportunity.
What does the 1% off education look like for school budgets? When it comes to education, especially when we have the likes of VAT on private schools, which has meant that 100 schools have closed and we have less teachers than when this Government came in—
Dr Evans
Thank you—I will ensure Hansard corrects that.
Let me point out that there are 1,900 fewer teachers under this Department for Education. I pose a question to the right hon. Member for Makerfield: how does that factor into the Iranian debate when it comes to defence and having to make cuts and other considerations?
What about the reporting on Iran? The BBC has been reporting on Iran. What is the vision of the right hon. Member for Makerfield for the BBC, given that the end of the charter is coming up? We do not know the answers to these questions. We have not had the chance to ask him, and that chance was kiboshed yesterday. We could have extended parliamentary time to pose these very pertinent questions to him.
On that point, Iran is one of the best reasons for having this debate, because it shows the scrutiny that we need to place on the incoming Prime Minister. I am shocked, I tell you, to hear from others outside this Chamber that the Government are falsifying information and changing the rules to be able to hide from scrutiny. They are using the fog of war to dull the light of scrutiny when it comes to the new Prime Minister. I will not have that, because I trust that they surely would not be that stupid or Machiavellian. Surely they would not make the naive decision to give the public the perception that the new Prime Minister does not want to take scrutiny when it comes to topics like Iran.
We are going to go six weeks without the chance to debate the likes of Iran. We have had a red carpet rolled out for a coronation, but it could appear that the green Benches have been rolled up for those six weeks to allow the king in the north to come down to his United Kingdom. At some point, he will have to face his subjects and tell us how he will deal with domestic issues, international issues and Iran.
Chris Vince
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and I absolutely do, and I will add to that too. I wanted somehow to shoehorn in my support for the BBC World Service and ask Members to bear with me as I am going to do that, because it is also important that we recognise the malign influence of the Iran regime in this country. It was touched on earlier by my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns) in terms of the use of bad state actors and malign influences in social media. The BBC World Service is a really important tool in our armoury to tackle that disinformation. Going slightly off on a tangent, when the BBC World Service and BBC Monitoring have been withdrawn from certain countries, Russian media sources have taken that space. It is important that we absolutely condemn the behaviour of the Iranian regime and its proxies, but also that we recognise the malign influence of the Iranian regime in this country, and we need to be prepared to tackle that.
Gareth Snell
My hon. Friend is absolutely right about the malign influence. Following some of the attacks in Iran and the Iranian people seeking to change their leadership, he will have seen the same report as I saw that when the Iranian Government turned off aspects of their domestic internet, hundreds of X accounts in this country, purporting to support far-right activity but also Scottish independence, fell silent. That is hugely important, and we need to look at how malign disinformation accounts in the UK are pursuing domestic political agendas in the UK and being funded and operated by non-existent people—bots—in Iran.
Chris Vince
My hon. Friend makes a really important point. I do not mean this response to sound jokey, but if I, for example, wanted to promote Harlow to be the UK capital of culture—sadly, we got rejected—the way to achieve that might not just be to directly say to people, “Come on, let’s get behind Harlow.” I am not suggesting that these bad actors are pro-Scottish independence necessarily, but you use views that are not your own to slowly manipulate people. [Interruption.] I see a Scottish National party Member on the Benches opposite. I am not trying to suggest that they are trying to promote Scottish independence—[Interruption.] Okay, maybe they are. What I am saying is that—[Interruption.] I have started an argument. If you want to try and—
Gareth Snell
I believe the point my hon. Friend is making is that the Iranian state is sponsoring these bot farms that are pumping out political points in the UK, which are a perfectly legitimate debate point, but are not underpinned by real people expressing real views. They are done in the most reductive way to stimulate dissent rather than discussion.