G20 Summit

Mel Stride Excerpts

Monday 25th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

That is a perfectly fair question. My judgment was that having done the G8 and NATO summits, then the G20 and an important bilateral visit to Mexico—we should be linking up with the fastest-growing economies in the world—it was better to ask the Deputy Prime Minister to attend the Rio summit, which I believe made some important progress. This Government believe that, as well as GDP, we should be thinking about other measures of sustainability and well-being, and we are measuring those things for the first time in this country, which is giving something of a lead to others.

[Mel Stride (Central Devon) (Con)]

I warmly welcome my right hon. Friend’s support for free trade at the G20, and like him I believe that the free movement of peoples is important to free trade, but does he agree that it was a great dereliction of responsibility by the previous Government not to introduce transition arrangements in relation to those states that joined the EU in 2004?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. It was the Conservative Opposition who warned that it was a bad decision to allow unencumbered access to British labour markets from countries such as Poland. We well remember being told, “You can’t talk about these things”, that it is somehow racist to discuss immigration, and all the rest of it. Year after year we had to put up with that nonsense, and to get a half-baked apology now is simply not good enough.