Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Julie Elliott Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 3rd July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Julie Elliott (Sunderland Central) (Lab)]

It is an honour to rise to oppose this Bill in the strongest possible terms. I was very disappointed in how the Bill was presented by the Secretary of State, who left his place without even listening to other Front-Bench speeches. I was incredibly encouraged, however, by the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns), who gave a reasoned and constructive speech, and, of course, by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge). She comes to these issues from a different place from me, but I agreed with every word she said.

I want to cover three main areas: the unprecedented powers that the Bill gives the Secretary of State and, by implication, the removal of balanced decision making from those in local government who have been elected to serve their local communities; the incompatibility of the Bill with international law and the conflation of the UK’s long-standing cross-party position in respect of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the Golan Heights with the state of Israel; and the exposure of the UK Government to extended and repeated legal challenge, which would take away money that, as the right hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Sir Simon Clarke) said, needs to be spent in our local communities.

Let me go through those three points. The Government have often stated their commitment to devolution, and they have delivered it in many areas, allowing as much decision making as possible to take place near the people whom politicians are elected to serve. This Bill flies in the face of that claim. It will act as a gagging order on local authorities in a way that no other piece of legislation does. Many in local government have raised huge concerns about the impact of the Bill, including the Local Government Chronicle, the Local Government Association and the TUC. Particular concerns have been raised about the Bill’s impact on the 6 million local government pensioners. Is that really the Government’s intention? The Bill will ban public bodies—mainly local authorities but also universities and others—from working within current procurement rules and making their own decisions appropriate to their own areas. If we look to history to inform the future, we will see that the most effective example in my lifetime was the successful campaign against the apartheid regime in South Africa. That undoubtedly helped bring down that regime and led to democracy in South Africa, which is something that the international community and the UK should be proud of. Are we really suggesting that we should not be allowed to take such a position again?

I turn to the Bill’s incompatibility with international law and the UK’s long-standing cross-party position in respect of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the Golan Heights, which are being conflated with the state of Israel. Why does the Bill highlight those three areas? On the face of it, it looks as though the Secretary of State wishes to penalise councils that have acted not against the state of Israel but against illegal settlements built on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in flagrant defiance of successive UN Security Council resolutions, which the UK helped draft and voted in favour of. It seems to me that the UK Government are throwing all sense to the wind. We all wish to see this part of the world living in peace. The violence that has erupted today is an example of how crucial it is to bring peace to this area. The failure to distinguish between the sovereign territory of Israel and the territories occupied in 1967, as outlined in UN Security Council resolution 2334, is an alarming deviation from the long-standing UK policy. I ask the Secretary of State to look again and remove the most contentions parts of the Bill. Those who push this Bill make a very dangerous conflation between legitimate criticism of illegal Israeli actions and the horror of antisemitism, which we all abhor.

Finally, and briefly—I am going to stick to the time limit—this Bill, if it goes through in its current state, will result in an appalling waste of money. It will undoubtedly lead to not one, not two but numerous legal challenges, with each costing the Government, and therefore the British taxpayer, an enormous amount of money. In the current economic climate, throwing things to the wind and rushing headlong into such a Bill, which does not solve the problem that it sets out to solve, is absolutely irresponsible in the first degree. I ask the Government to either look again and remove the contentious clauses, or start again and bring to the House a Bill that actually does what it sets out to do and that sorts out the problem and does not cause utter chaos in this area of policy making.