European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Graham Stringer and Kelvin Hopkins

Monday 7th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) and to be a member of the European Scrutiny Committee. Basically, I agree with him that it would have been a lot better to have had no tampering with section 125, and that we should have left it as it was and abided by the legislation that was enacted all those years ago.

I want to speak strongly in support of what the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) said. He chose his words carefully and wisely. I was pleased to be a member of his Select Committee, to participate in the discussions and to listen to the advice that we were given. I have signed his amendment (a), and I am pleased that the Government have accepted it. I am also pleased that our Front-Bench team is going along with the attempts to modify the Government’s position. As I have said, it would have been much better to have had none of this debate and to have accepted the legislation as it was. I had a slight qualm about one thing that the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex said, and that is that my enthusiasm for Tony Blair is rather more muted than his. I will say no more than that.

It is important that somebody from the Labour Back Benches says a few words in support of the shift that has taken place in the Government. It seems to be supported by all sides even though it does not go as far as I would like. That is very important, because, whichever way this referendum goes, if there is a sense that it is not fair, it will devalue the whole result. I am of a certain age and I remember well the 1975 referendum, in which I participated strongly, as I have mentioned before. I was the chair of the “Vote no” committee in Luton and the agent for the “Vote no” position in Bedfordshire at the time, so I know what happened very well. It was unfair, and the resources piled into the yes side compared with the puny resources on the no side were unbelievable. That was a travesty of democracy. When we are voting on fundamental constitutional positions, it is important that referendums are regarded as fair by all sides.

The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), who is no longer in his place, implied that no one takes referendums seriously and that after the result whoever loses always thinks that they have been treated unfairly. I do not think that is true. Some years ago, referendums on the European constitution took place abroad. The political establishments in France and Holland put massive resources into ensuring that there was a yes vote, but on both occasions there was a no vote. I do not think that they thought that the result was unfair, even though the big resources were on the losing side. They had to come up with another way of dealing with the matter and, of course, they introduced very similar constitutional changes into the European Union.

It is important that we ensure that the purdah period is seen to be fair, that no cheating takes place and that the Government cannot use their resources to pour in propaganda on their own side, whatever that might be. One assumes that the Government will come back and say that they have made a wonderful deal in the European Union and that we should all vote in favour of it. If that is the case, we want to have a fair debate that is seen to be fair by all sides.

Like the hon. Member for Stone, I have deep reservations about the European Union. We have constant talk about Europe, and I have to say over and again that this is about not Europe but the European Union, which is a political structure imposed on some of the countries of Europe. Europe is a wonderful place that I love dearly. I am very Eurocentric: I go there for my holidays, I drink European wine, and I love European culture, history, language—everything. But it is Europe I love, not the European Union.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I agree with my hon. Friend’s line of argument. It would have been better had section 125 been left in its entirety. I take a more optimistic view than some Members. The benefit of this debate is that it has exposed the Government trying to do something underhand. That debate has been had and now, during the referendum, they will have not only to follow the rules but to be seen to be following the rules of purdah. This debate has almost certainly ensured a much fairer referendum campaign.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I broadly agree with my hon. Friend. The debate has largely cleared the air and I look forward to a much fairer referendum than might have taken place if we had not had it or these changes.

Before I conclude, I should apologise for not being in the Chamber for the beginning of the Minister’s speech. I heard the meat of it and the important points that he made, however.

European Union (Referendum) Bill

Debate between Graham Stringer and Kelvin Hopkins

Friday 5th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

There have been many articulate and clever speeches during this debate. I exclude the last speech from that.

It seems to me a straightforward matter. This House, by signing various treaties, has taken away from the British people the right to throw out the rascals who are making their laws. It is time, after those treaties, that the people were given a chance to have that say in a referendum. My party’s position on a referendum can, I hope, be improved. We can have no principled objections to a referendum: it was the Labour party that first gave the people the chance to vote on the then EEC. We said in our 2005 manifesto that people would have a vote on the European constitution. Unfortunately, when the name of that constitution was changed to the Lisbon treaty, the vote was denied them. That was a huge mistake and is one of the reasons why the people of this country have lost trust.

In the argument against those who say we do not need a referendum, three or four reasons have been given for why we need a referendum. One is uncertainty. That is the most perverse reason. There is uncertainty because 80% of the British people want a referendum and they are surprised that we cannot come to a conclusion about when that referendum should be and what the question should be. The debate would not go away and the uncertainty would not decrease if we opposed the Bill today.

The second reason given, which is related to the uncertainty argument, is that British business is opposed to a referendum and jobs would go. That would be a more compelling case if I had not heard exactly those arguments about joining the euro—that all the car factories would go if we did not join the euro.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Graham Stringer]

I will give way briefly and only this time.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I thank my hon. Friend. The economic arguments that I have heard today are nonsense. We have a gigantic trade deficit with the rest of the European Union, equivalent to a million jobs. We must do something about it and we will not do that simply by giving in to the European Union.

[Graham Stringer]

I agree. The arguments lack quantification—that would be one way of putting it. On the notion that the European Union is an unalloyed good idea for jobs, have people not been watching what the euro is doing not just to those countries that are in the euro, which are getting into a competitive deflationary situation, but to countries such as ours which trade with Europe? Hundreds of thousands and millions of jobs are being destroyed by the European Union. It is not helpful to our economy. A referendum would be the start of saying to the European Union, “This cannot carry on. You are damaging the whole of the European Union’s economy.”

Dyslexia

Debate between Graham Stringer and Kelvin Hopkins

Wednesday 14th December 2011 Westminster Hall

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Weir, possibly for the first time. Forgive me if I am wrong.

This debate on dyslexia was initiated following a meeting of the all-party parliamentary group on dyslexia and specific learning difficulties, which raised three particular concerns: first, the changes to the examination access arrangements issued by the Joint Council for Qualifications; secondly, the Green Paper—I will not read out its title—of which we are aware; and thirdly, the continued need to include in initial teacher training the teaching of children with dyslexia.

I am pleased to lead the debate. Dyslexia is an important subject and is of concern to millions of our fellow citizens and constituents. Astonishingly, one in 10 of the population experiences dyslexia to some degree. The condition stays with people for life. Some people can accommodate it to an extent on occasions; others find that more difficult. Like colour blindness, it is a condition that is hidden and sometimes not even recognised. I am sure we all have friends, relatives and certainly many constituents who are dyslexic. The lives of millions of adults have been affected by dyslexia.

Even now, many people live with their dyslexia unrecognised, particularly those of my generation. I suspect I am the oldest person in the room. In my day, it was a strange word; nobody in my experience knew the word dyslexia. There were no doubt children in classes when I was at school who were constantly punished and treated rather cruelly sometimes because they could not spell or read. There was no understanding that they had an inherent difficulty or disability.

Dyslexia affects people across the ability range; it is not limited to people with learning difficulties. Many famous and celebrated people suffer from dyslexia, and it can affect people who are highly intelligent. I give as an example one of my relatives. He failed the 11-plus, essentially because he was dyslexic, yet he finished up studying physics at Imperial college later in life. He is clearly a man of considerable intelligence who could not pass the 11-plus because he was dyslexic. Our concern today is that teachers often lack the skills to identify and support dyslexic children, who need to be diagnosed and given extra support.

As a member of the all-party group, I was pleased when my right hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls), Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families in the previous Parliament and now shadow Chancellor, commissioned a report on education and dyslexia, which became the Rose review. Rose recommended that initial teacher training should include dyslexia and special learning difficulties. However, currently there is no mandatory level of dyslexia training that must be provided in initial teacher training courses.

It is of great concern that little action has so far been taken to implement fully the recommendations of the Rose report. Indeed, the situation is worse, in that thousands of academically gifted teenagers with conditions such as dyslexia have lost the right to extra and other help in A-level and GCSE papers, under a crackdown by exam bodies introduced by the Joint Council for Qualifications.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

Has my hon. Friend read the report of the Science and Technology Committee on literacy interventions from two years ago? If he has not, I will quickly read two quotes from it:

“The Rose report’s definition of dyslexia is exceedingly broad and says that dyslexia is a continuum with no clear cut-off points. The definition is so broad and blurred at the edges that it is difficult to see how it could be useful in any diagnostic sense.

The Government’s focus on dyslexia, from a policy perspective, was led by pressure from the dyslexia lobby rather than the evidence, which is clear that educational interventions are the same for all poor readers, whether they have been diagnosed with dyslexia or not.”

Will my hon. Friend take a look at that report? I am sure it would help him in his work on the Committee.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I thank my hon. Friend for his helpful intervention. We are aware that there is an enormously broad spectrum, from slight spelling difficulties to almost an inability to read. At the same time, there is a definite difference between those who have a degree of dyslexia and those who just have difficulty learning to read, perhaps because they are educationally challenged. Clearly, we need rigorous teaching of reading. In a completely separate context, I am strongly in favour of more rigour in the way we teach young people to read and to learn mathematics and other subjects. I take note of what my hon. Friend said. No doubt the Minister and my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) will also respond to his points.

The JCQ rules clearly discriminate in that the measurement scores they use affect some youngsters and not others; some are excluded from help and others get help, because of an arbitrary decision by the JCQ on what their needs are. Complaints have been made about that by parents and teachers across the country, including Helen Wright, president of the Girls’ Schools Association, who said that a number of sixth-formers, without being given extra time for exams or other help, would

“definitely fail, and unfairly so”.

There are those who will suffer from the application of the rules who would otherwise do better. I hope the Minister will respond and give further consideration to the question of the arbitrary cut-off point.

Many thousands of children across the whole ability range are not getting the help they need, and are not even being diagnosed, because of the lack of specific training for teachers. There are no doubt some who, even today, do not recognise dyslexia, thinking it is just about youngsters who are not very good at reading, and do not recognise it as a specific and identifiable problem for some people. The problems experienced by those youngsters are distressing for them but they are also damaging to the economy and society as a whole. Clearly if youngsters are becoming disillusioned with education because of their dyslexia difficulties they drop out of school, education or training or have difficulty with apprenticeships and so on. That is damaging not just to their lives but to the economy and society in general. Help for dyslexics to succeed in education at whatever level is a matter, therefore, for national concern and Government action. The Rose review should be implemented in full and the JCQ rules withdrawn.

Although I am not dyslexic, I have taken a particular interest in the phenomenon. I know that it is not easily overcome, but a variety of coping strategies can be enormously beneficial. The academically gifted can perhaps apply those more readily, but there are millions for whom it is more of a struggle. I was recently approached by a group of Labour councillors from Thanet, not because I am their Member of Parliament, but because I happen to be a Labour member of the all-party group on dyslexia. They gave me some interesting statistics from their area. They are concerned that youngsters from the most deprived areas of the constituency were not getting the help they needed and were falling further behind, exaggerating the educational gulf between their achievement levels and others, even those who might have dyslexia. They want the Rose recommendations implemented as a matter of urgency to address those problems.

The Rose review proposed among other things the training of 4,000 specialist teachers in dyslexia over a two-year period. That is quite a tall order, but that is what he recommended. If we are going to approach and attack the problem seriously, we need to follow that recommendation. Other recommendations were to boost early identification from year 1 and effective intervention for pupils with dyslexic difficulties, to make provision for dyslexia-awareness training for existing teachers, to put more special educational needs training into initial teacher training courses and to acknowledge the need for specialist teachers and one-to-one interventions for severely dyslexic pupils. The review also recommended that schools build a positive dialogue with parents and provide them with relevant information, and provide support for children with dyslexia on transfer to secondary school, and that there should be continuing helpline advice for parents and teachers.

Dyslexic children have just as much right as any other child to be educated by teachers who understand them and their condition. We have made enormous progress in recognising dyslexia since the dark days of my childhood, but we must now demand the necessary support and resources for our dyslexic children, and only the Government can provide them.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Graham Stringer and Kelvin Hopkins

Tuesday 2nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

rose—

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

rose—

UK Parliamentary Sovereignty and the EU

Debate between Graham Stringer and Kelvin Hopkins

Tuesday 15th June 2010 Westminster Hall

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that positive intervention. In a few weeks I shall be sojourning in Provence, sampling wonderful European wine, listening to music and so on. Europe is a wonderful place, but the European Union is deeply flawed.

The hon. Gentleman has said that even this week the European Union is trying to interfere and to impose its will on Britain’s decisions about its budgetary situation and economic policies. That was reported yesterday in the Evening Standard, so it is not going away. I hope and trust that the new Government will tell the European Union in no uncertain terms that decisions about our budgetary and economic policies will be decided by the British Government, who will be accountable to the British Parliament, and will not be determined by the European Union. Perhaps the EU is under the illusion that it can manage Britain as well as it has managed the eurozone. That would lead us pretty much into disaster.

While I am on the question of the European Union’s recent policies, I shall mention enlargement. It is interesting that the hon. Gentleman mentioned Edward Heath. I listened to one of his last speeches to Parliament before he retired 10 years ago, and he made a strong point to the effect that enlargement would not work. He was against it. I do not speak for or against it today, but Edward Heath was strongly opposed to it because he thought that a European Union covering more than the developed nations of western Europe would not work. He wanted a deeper and stronger European Union, possibly with a single currency, but he believed that it could not work if it were to be widely enlarged. One of the reasons I have supported enlargement is that I believed it could weaken the European Union. That may be a cynical view, but I thought that over time people would realise that ramming countries or nation states together in that way would not ultimately work. Therefore I have gone along with enlargement. I think it is a way of ensuring that in the end people come to their senses.

I am not against international alliances or co-operative relationships with all our neighbours. Indeed, those are vital. I am sure that everyone would be in favour of those things if they were based on democratic Governments agreeing to work together for mutual benefit on behalf of their peoples. That is what the European Union should become, in my view. We must stop the drive towards a federal Europe now, retain what sovereignty we have, and begin to roll things back: the EU and what it has taken over from Britain and other member states.

I have often mentioned my concern about the common fisheries policy, which is completely barmy. I think that Edward Heath decided at the last minute that we should go into that, but it has been disastrous. Some of the biggest fisheries in Europe are Britain’s, and the EU itself has reported, in the past week or two, that 30 per cent. of fish stocks are at the point of collapse, and all fisheries are being overfished. The only way to overcome that is for fisheries to be restored to member states, which will then have the sense of ownership and responsibility for managing the areas in question. Then fish stocks can start to recover. Reforms have taken place and there are non-fishing areas, but it will not work until member states take over responsibility for their historic fisheries and husband them as they did in the past.

The costs of agriculture are enormous and every member state in the European Union has its own approach. Some are more agricultural than others. We are one of the most efficient agricultural nations, but that is only a small part of our economy. Other countries are overwhelmed by agricultural costs and inefficient, small-scale agriculture, but it is up to those member states to manage their own agriculture. If we need to transfer revenues between member states, that can be done on a voluntary basis, and if poorer states need to be sustained by richer states perhaps fiscal transfers can take care of that. The common agricultural policy distorts the whole of agriculture and operates in an inequitable way. Some member states pay more than they should and some receive more than they should, in a way that bears little relationship to their relative wealth. We should start to roll back agricultural policy.

I hope that the Government will give notice that we want to return to a world in which member states manage their own fisheries—an abandonment of the common fisheries policy. If other member states or the European Union refuse, Britain should give notice that, after a period, we would re-establish control of our historic fishing grounds. I hope that that would put sufficient pressure on the EU to make some sense of it.

The real question is one of democracy—of whether the populations of the various member states have control of their own destinies and can choose to be free market capitalist or democratic socialist countries. I have campaigned all my life for a democratic socialist Britain, and I do not want that possibility to be taken away by EU bureaucrats. Equally, some want to see a more free market capitalist world in Britain. We will not want bureaucrats in Brussels telling us that we cannot do things if the people of Britain have chosen to go in those directions. It is about democracy. One of the great advantages of our system of government is that when the population gets fed up with the Government or do not like what they are doing, it can kick them out and put in another Government with a different view. The essence of democracy is a real choice of policy in how people are governed.

British economic policy should be decided by British Governments that are elected by the British electorate. As and when we need to co-operate with other member states and other nations, we should do so on a democratically agreed basis. I am sure that that would be most agreeable to everyone, as well as being beneficial. It would also help us resist the tendency to nationalism. If people become frustrated about the EU and the lack of democracy, they may turn to other forms of politics, some of which would be much more unpleasant—one such is nationalism—and there is talk, even in Germany, of serious disorder if things are not made democratic. If the Germans and the Greeks can decide their future, so can we. Although we have friendly relations with other member states, if we rather than the European Commission and the European Union were able to decide our future, everyone would be a lot happier. The danger of extreme politics would go.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I am listening carefully to my hon. Friend, and I share most of his views. Does he agree that one of the mistakes made by our trade union and labour movement—it was a historic and democratic mistake—was to be persuaded by Delors that we could more easily get a shift to the left and more trade union rights via the back door of the European Union, then the Common Market, than by winning the argument in this country?

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. The fear was that the only way to roll back what was then described as Thatcherism was by going along with the European Union. The TUC flip-flopped right over from being critical and sceptical about Europe to being enthusiastic. Subsequently, however, judgments have been made by the European Court against trade unions and in favour of employers, because it thinks that they interfere with how the market should operate. The trade unions, and even John Monks, a great enthusiast for the European Union, are becoming more sceptical.