Hospice Funding

Debate between Martin Docherty-Hughes and Nigel Evans

Monday 22nd April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Martin Docherty-Hughes]

I want to push the hon. Gentleman on the point I made to the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate, because I have heard this notion of symbiosis with the NHS, but they are two very distinct approaches to care. From my perspective, the palliative care sector is at its best when it is run as a voluntary local body. Would he expand a wee bit more on what he means by that kind of convergence with the NHS? There is a fear among those in the voluntary hospice sector that what they are doing to push palliative care forward could be held back by more physical integration in the NHS.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Before the hon. Member continues, I just remind everybody that there is quite a bit of interest in this debate. If we could ensure self-discipline in the length of speeches, that would be very helpful.

Hong Kong Security Legislation

Debate between Martin Docherty-Hughes and Nigel Evans

Wednesday 20th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I call the Scottish National party spokesperson.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

I thank the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) for securing the urgent question. Let me try to get some answers from the Government about a response to what communist China has done, and critically what we can do in the UK about Confucius Institutes. Back in May 2022, the Open University bragged about being the first online Confucius Institute. Until 2023, the Government were allocating at least £27 million to Mandarin-language teaching, channelled through university-based Confucius Institutes. Will the Minister confirm that that has stopped? There is some confusion about that.

In relation to the comments made by the shadow Foreign Secretary, the Governments of countries such as the United States and others believe that sanctions are possible. The Netherlands and Germany have discouraged their universities from engaging with the Confucius Institutes; Sweden has gone as far as I would, by banning them. On providing answers, there are practical things that the United Kingdom can do about what is going on in Hong Kong. Will the Government consider ending the rights of Confucius Institutes in the UK? And will the Minister clarify the Government’s allocation of funding to Mandarin-language teaching through those institutes?

Points of Order

Debate between Martin Docherty-Hughes and Nigel Evans

Monday 11th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I thank the hon. Lady for her point of order and her forward notice of it. Let us be fair: she has just done it, in an amazing way.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. On 20 July this year, I and more than 70 right hon. and hon. Members from all parties wrote to the Prime Minister regarding the case of my constituent Jagtar Singh Johal. Questions were addressed directly to the Prime Minister on whether he would raise the case of my constituent when he met his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, at last weekend’s G20 summit, and on whether he would ask for his release, given the plethora of organisations, including the United Nations, that have deemed his detention to be arbitrary.

I do not come to the House today to complain about the tardy ministerial response; instead, my grievance lies in the fact that it was not the Prime Minister who replied to me but a junior Minister from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office who sits in the other House. Only the Prime Minister would be in a position to answer, because only he was in the room with Prime Minister Modi and in a position to ask the questions about Jagtar. What recourse do we have as Members, Mr Deputy Speaker, when correspondence with His Majesty’s Government, including the primus inter pares, who is also a Member of the House, is treated with such disrespect?

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for his point of order and his forward notice of it. It is not for the Chair but for the Government to decide which Ministers reply to a particular piece of correspondence, but I know how assiduously the hon. Member pursues this matter and I am sure that he will continue to find ways to ensure that it is on the Prime Minister’s agenda.

Points of Order

Debate between Martin Docherty-Hughes and Nigel Evans

Wednesday 1st February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

I thank the hon. Lady for her point of order. It now stands on the record.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. An essential part of being a Member of this House is to represent and support our constituents when they approach us for assistance. Members on all sides engage, or hope to engage, with UK Visas and Immigration on a regular basis through what is called the MP engagement team. My team and I have been seeking to engage with the MP engagement team since September 2022, without a single response. Given that it is my duty, and that of Members across the House, to support our constituents in their engagement with UKVI, what would you advise me and other Members to do on behalf of our constituents when there is an utter lack of engagement from UKVI’s MP engagement team?

Achieving Economic Growth

Debate between Martin Docherty-Hughes and Nigel Evans

Wednesday 18th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

There is something liberating about coming in at nearly the end of the debate, Mr Deputy Speaker. Knowing that you do not have much time to get your points across, you tend to get right to it, so I will.

I want to talk about not only economic growth, which we all understand the importance of, but the sustainability of that growth and the type of economy that it seeks to create, which is similar to what the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) was talking about earlier in the debate.

The cost of living is the order of the day, as it should be, but for all the talk of economic shocks and external factors that we cannot avoid, many of the largest price rises have come in areas where the Government on these islands have decided they no longer have a role to play, abdicating their national responsibility. I think in particular of energy storage and transportation—I say that as my attention has been to the news that Russia has decided to stop energy exports to Finland the day after it announced its intention to join NATO. That decision was met with a shrug by the Finns, who had been planning for such an eventuality and have avoided the Russian energy trap that so many other European states have sleepwalked into. Resilience is built into Finnish society, and its economy plays as much of a role in the defence of the homeland as its military. That is key to avoiding the temptation to fall back on the easy gains of what some call balance-sheet capitalism.

If the House will indulge me, I will quote a paragraph from the introduction to Brett Christophers’ excellent overview of the modern UK economy, “Rentier Capitalism”, which nicely encapsulates the quandary that this place will find itself in when trying to legislate for inclusive and sustained growth:

“A form of capitalism geared principally to doing pays heed to the balance sheet only to the extent that assets facilitate and liabilities mitigate profitable making or providing, or whatever else a business does. For a form of capitalism structured by contrast around ‘having’—rentier capitalism, in other words: a mode of economic organisation in which success is based principally on what you control, not what you do—the balance sheet is the be-all and end-all.”

In this political state, as successive Governments—blue and red—have sought to keep the City of London onside, unthinking deregulation has been the order of the day, and a rentier capitalist system has been created. That may have kept stakeholders happy, but as we stare down the barrel of massive utility price rises, I am not sure that our constituents, including mine in West Dunbartonshire, always have been. A Government who own and maintain the fundamental pieces of infrastructure that allow entrepreneurs to proliferate and thrive is one who can keep an eye on the horizon and ensure that our fundamental national interests are upheld, and the temptation to put shareholder interests ahead of citizen interests is avoided.

My contribution to this area is a paper published with Stuart Evers by the Progressive Policy Research Group last year regarding the ownership and regulation of telecoms infrastructure. As we get our head around the challenges that have been mentioned and the opportunities presented to us by the new digital economy, it is imperative that the keystone industries of the economy are kept principally in public hands, not only because extracting private rents from them is unfair but because that allows us to get back to focusing on an economy that actually does things. It will surprise no one in the House if I say that I cannot see a way in which this political state can extract itself from under the dead hand of the UK’s rentier economy, so I draw the conclusion that so many of my fellow Scots increasingly do: it is only through independence that Scotland can create an economy that is fairer for all of us, in which growth is sustainable and whose foundations are resilient enough to face the economic headwinds we are heading into. I only hope that the Government will allow us to make that decision for ourselves.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Tahir Ali will be the last Back Bencher to speak before the wind-ups, so any Member who has participated in the debate should make their way back to the Chamber for the wind-ups.