Privilege: Conduct of Right Hon. Boris Johnson

Debate between Nigel Evans and Bob Seely

Monday 19th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Bob Seely]

It is a debate worthy of parliamentary time, but when I held a debate on the use of Imperial modelling, not a single Labour Member turned up apart from the shadow Minister. The point I am trying to make is that there were scandals and other important things about lockdown. One of the things we are criticised for, as the shadow Leader of the House will know, is having an obsession with ourselves when there are other great and important things to be discussed about covid and lockdown, not only whether Downing Street had—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. We have to remember what we are discussing today, without going too wide, because there are 14 other Members who want to contribute to the debate, and I think they want to talk about what is in the report.

[Bob Seely]

Mr Deputy Speaker, I will wind up if you think I am speaking out of turn or too widely. However, I was going to say that our mental health crisis is a scandal worth reporting. The fact is that this cost £400 billion, and the fact is that science was misused and trust abused. Lockdown was an experiment, and I do sometimes think that focusing the lockdown debate on the behaviour of the then Prime Minister is too narrow and does not do this House a service.

I will vote to support the Privileges Committee report, but I do wish that the same level of interest, especially from the Opposition, would sometimes focus on the stuff that actually made a difference in lockdown, not just on vindictively going after Boris Johnson.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Nigel Evans and Bob Seely

Report stage
Wednesday 23rd November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Following the last speaker, we will move on to the ministerial response.

[Bob Seely]

I am going to speak to new clause 34, and may make some broader points, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) did—I thank her for her great work and leadership on this issue. There are many good ideas that we have been discussing on all sides of the House today, and it is great to see such a brilliant Minister in her role and dealing with this Bill. Indeed, quite a few Ministers have been dealing with it, but I am glad that the buck has stopped with her. I welcome all and any measures to support levelling up.

The Isle of Wight is rich in so many ways, but economically is not necessarily one of them. We have a wonderful sense of community and a wonderful quality of life, but if I can achieve one thing in this place, it is to improve Islanders’ life chances and opportunities. I am delighted that in the last five years the Government have been listening more than they have done previously. We have got £120 million of additional investment. There is £48 million for the NHS—the build at St Mary’s is due to start in the next two weeks—and £26 million to rebuild the Island line. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago I was at Ryde Pier with my little hard hat on—a Boris look-alike or whatever—because the rebuild of the railway pier is now happening as well.

The hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) asked what levelling up has done. Actually, we have got a 240-ton-lift crane in East Cowes for our shipyard, which will drive dozens of new jobs and apprenticeships in shipbuilding on the Isle of Wight. The clippers that we see going up and down the Thames are made on the Island. We have lots of great things, including in training for Isle of Wight College.

One of the many things said by the former Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), which really sticks with me is that, “Talent is shared out equality in our nation, but opportunity isn’t.” We feel that, in a poorer part of a rich area.

I turn to compulsory purchase. If we go to any town or city in this country, apart from brownfield—I will come to that—we see long-term empty, derelict buildings. In coastal areas, as the Minister will know—it is fantastic that she has agreed to come to the Island and we very much look forward to hosting her—that problem is especially acute, particularly with former hotels. In Sandown, which is a town with a really lovely, wonderful community, some of our most important and valuable sites have stood empty for years. The Grand hotel is owned by a developer who seems to be unwilling to develop his own properties. The technical ownership of the Ocean hotel seems to change every month as it is flipped through a series of highly questionable companies. It is one of the most important sites in Sandown, and it is derelict and vandalised. We need the compulsory purchase powers. I respect property rights, but actually we need those powers to be as strong as possible so that communities such as mine and the Isle of Wight Council can use them to do good.

I am going to try this argument: I want to be able to get the Isle of Wight Council to compulsory purchase from the Government. Camp Hill prison site—the third prison site on the Island—has been empty for nine years. For five years I have been asking for a decision on Camp Hill. The Government cannot decide whether they want to turn it back into a prison, give us the land, sell it privately and so on. If they can give us that land at a price that we can afford, we can do real good with it, and we can build homes.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet made the point that we want to propose good stuff. That is why, among 20 amendments and new clauses that we tabled, we have proposed new clause 34. There is an incredibly trite conversation around the issue, suggesting that those who object to top-down targets and the entirely depressing reliance on out-of-town, car-dependent housing estates plonked down in the middle of nowhere are somehow anti-young people or nimbys—a nimby is a local patriot, in my opinion—shouting, “No, no, no,” with their heads in the ground like ostriches. Actually, we are saying, “Yes, yes, yes” to so many ideas—we are trying to give the Government so many ideas—because we want planning and housing to be a success. We want to protect communities and, at the same time, we recognise that we need to build, but we want a system that is community-centred, environment-centred—environmentally friendly—and regeneration-centred.

When we have acre after acre of brownfield sites in towns and cities up and down the country, what on earth is the point of being reliant on developers lazily building on greenfield sites? That alienates older people in communities—they have their dog-walking routes and views ruined—yet so often, and especially in the home counties, those houses cannot be afforded by young people. All that happens is people move out of London. That is a problem in Essex, Kent and Hampshire. On the Island, the dynamic is slightly different because people retire to us, but either way, despite having increased our population by 50% in 50 years, one of the most depressing facts is that we still export our young people too often.

New clause 34, which would give us compulsory powers to act in the public good, is only one of a series of, I hope, good ideas supported by my right hon. Friend, me and many people. For example, I think that for new clause 21, on top-down targets, we have more than 55 colleagues. Regardless of what the Labour party does, we need to work together. We want to work together with the Government in a spirit of co-operation, but can they please trust us and listen to us?

Another example of a good idea, apart from new clause 34, is the new clause on having a “Use it or lose it” rule to stop planners land-banking. I respectfully suggest to the Minister that a fundamental problem is not that planners do not give out permissions—80% get passed—or that pesky nimbys stop everything, because we know that is a load of rubbish. The fundamental problem is that developers have a vested interest in only releasing land for housing slowly, because that keeps the value of land high, house prices high, share prices high and bosses’ bonuses high. I sound a bit like I should be on the Opposition Benches. I am a big fan of capitalism, but I want capitalism to work. I want the developer industry to serve the people of this country, not its bosses.

We will achieve that by getting a system that works, so we want a new clause for “Use it or lose it.” We want a new clause that says, “Okay, you will have a time here and if you do not build out, you’re paying council tax on that 200-house estate. If you haven’t built it, you’re still paying council tax come what may.” We want bigger sticks. We want some nice carrots for brownfield, but we want bigger sticks for developers, so that when someone gets a 1,000-acre site they actually have to do something with it, and they cannot just sit on it and inflate their share price.

We want what is in the public interest. As soon as some people become Ministers, they think they know best—I am sure that this Minister does not think that—and they want top-down stuff, because that is where they drive reform. However, we know that a community with a neighbourhood plan is more likely to welcome development. Why? Because they get to shape it. All the so-called nimbys actually think, “Okay, here’s a home for my kids, a home for my daughter and son-in-law, a home for my grandkids.” They buy into it.

That is why top-down targets fundamentally do not work. They create an incredibly divisive battle. The Government say, “You have to build this many houses.” We get ridiculous, absurd numbers for the Isle of Wight, considering that our indigenous population is meant to decline by 9,000 over the next 15 years. We get targets and local government is put under pressure. The developers then start plonking down greenfield permissions, because they cannot be bothered to look at brownfield sites, which alienates communities. It becomes fundamentally divisive and adversarial.

Changing economic incentives would revolutionise development in this country, so that it becomes a win-win for communities. We could create more disincentives for greenfield sites—a super-tax—so that every plot on a greenfield site has to pay twice the amount as those on a brownfield site. Some brownfield sites are dirtier than others, but if we had a tax that said, “Okay, you are giving up 1,000 acres of greenfield site in Cambridgeshire, Kent or Hampshire, but you are getting 2,000 acres of cleaned-up brownfield site” that would be a win. That is something we could accept. We need to think in much more creative terms and to move away from an adversarial system. That is why another amendment—along with new clause 34, which we love—asks the Government to look at the creation of incentives for brownfield and greater disincentives for greenfield.

Fundamentally, with the exception of one or two things, the Government are going in the right direction, but they need to go further. Another example is the new clause on character tests. Some shoddy developers have criminal records. They intimidate people, do not treat communities properly, never build out or build poorly. Why can that not be a reason to object? Do we not want to clean up the development industry? Do we not want socially responsible developers who do the right thing for their communities and actually make an effort? They can be rewarded by us supporting their development planning applications and we can stop people who want to build caravan parks in the wrong place but use loopholes. That is another of our amendments—it is a great amendment—which would do real good, so why are the Government not accepting it?

My right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet and I, the 55 colleagues who signed new clause 21 on top-down housing targets, and many others, including the—I think—30 colleagues who signed new clause 34 on compulsory purchase, all want to say yes to this stuff. We want our communities to feel that development works for them—that it works for the old and young folks in communities, that it works to regenerate and that it works to protect our environment, which is so important to our future and which helps the whole process of community-led regeneration. In that spirit, we tabled new clause 34 and all the other wonderful amendments, which we look forward to discussing with the Government when they come up with a second date. My plea is for the Government to work with us on this issue, because want to make this a win-win, not a lose-lose.

Russia’s Grand Strategy

Debate between Nigel Evans and Bob Seely

Thursday 6th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I will crack on through as many points as I can in the next few minutes. To answer the central question of the debate about Russian grand strategy, in the realm of Europe at any rate, it is probably down to four things: first, the reabsorption of Ukraine and Belarus into Russia’s sphere of interest and control; secondly, the shattering of NATO; thirdly, the establishment of a sphere of influence line from Kaliningrad in the north to the Baltic and Transnistria in the Balkans, to the east of which is Russia’s sphere of interest out of which it will fight to push any western influence, including from Russia, Belarus—obviously, by now—and potentially the Baltic republics in future; and fourthly, the re-establishment by President Putin of a Russia that is virulently illiberal, hostile to the western interest and, in the Russian historical term, a Slavophile rather than a westernising nation.

The idea peddled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), who to be fair, made some valid points, that that was inevitable, is simply nonsense. It was not inevitable at all and it is incredibly tragic that it has happened. More broadly, as several hon. Members have said, there is a battle this century between open and closed societies. Open societies are not yet prepared, but China and Russia are effectively engaged in forms of hybrid conflict—I will come to that term, if I may, because I think we are slightly misusing it—with the west. It is non-military at the moment, but there is no doubt that it is happening.

Some people say that Russia is a great mystery—as if we need to have some great cosmic understanding of it—but to be fair to the Russians, they signal clearly. Putin’s essay this summer on the historical unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people was a signal that he does not respect Ukraine’s borders—it is a no-brainer.

To return to the point about hybrid war, if anyone wants to understand what the Russians think contemporary Russian warfare is, I respectfully suggest that they read the Russian military doctrine that is available on the Russian MOD website in English and Russian. If they fancy a weekend project reading it, they will understand that the first characteristic of contemporary warfare, which we sometimes call hybrid war, is the combination of military and non-military effects in the service of state power with popular protests and special operations, combining the economic, political and military. It is all there written down. It is not a secret and we do not have to interpret it.

Hybrid war, as laid out by Frank Hoffman when he was originally talking about Hezbollah about 25 years ago, is the combination of military and non-military. It is not the non-military or the grey zone war, which is different to hybrid war. The purpose of hybrid war—the true definition that is used in academic circles—is the combination of military and other tools.

To be fair to my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and to President Putin, the Russians are under intense threat. In the past two political generations, they have experienced profound shock: the loss of the Warsaw pact, the loss of their buffer territory, the loss of former Soviet republics, two putsches, absolute economic decline and an utter change in their world. Since the end of the cold war, our view has been a rather woolly liberal internationalism. Their view has become a hardened aggressive zero-sum realist game. They sleep well when others do not. The great strategic conundrum is how to overcome that in the next two decades without war.

I have run out of time, because other hon. Members spoke for more than 10 minutes, which is a shame, so I will wind up with three points about Russian strategic culture. Historically, most historians and strategists would say that there are three elements of Russian strategic culture or three pressures that feed Russian strategic cultural thinking.

First, there is the sense of external threat—to put it bluntly, no borders. To be fair to them, they have been invaded by the Tartars, the Swedes, the Poles, the French and the Russians. Nowadays, that sense of threat is not only physical but more psychological, hence the need to control the internet and shut down non-governmental organisations that are pro-western or funded by the west. The sense of psychological threat is sadly reaching paranoid conspiracy theory levels among the Russian elites. Secondly, there is the defence of its autocratic political system. Thirdly, there is its desire to be a great power.

Those pressures feed into the nexus that is Ukraine, because without Ukraine, Russia feels less of a great power. It is threatened because if democracy works in Kiev, it can work in Moscow, and it is losing its buffer territory. For those three strategic reasons, so much of Russia’s strategic angst is focused on Ukraine. I will leave it there.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

To resume his seat no later than 4.30 pm, I call Daniel Kawczynski.

Public Health

Debate between Nigel Evans and Bob Seely

Tuesday 30th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bob Seely]

The hon. Gentleman makes the point most eloquently. Politicians then become fearful. They think, “What if the worst-case scenario is right?”, and lose faith in more balanced predictions.

John Ioannides from Stanford University said of Ferguson’s modelling that

“major assumptions and estimates that are built in the calculations seem to be substantially inflated”.

He is a serious customer, Professor Ferguson, and Imperial has an impeccable reputation. I pay respect, overall, to their work, and I do not seek to criticise for the sake of it; I want to highlight that bad forecasting and bad modelling drives bad Government decisions that then become illiberal and intolerant of other people who have more balanced views.

More recently, in July 2021, Ferguson predicted 100,000 cases, saying that it was “almost inevitable”. Yet we got nowhere near there. The US forecaster Nate Silver, who is very good at predicting US elections, said:

“I don’t care that the prediction is wrong, I’m sure this stuff is hard to predict. It’s that he’s consistently so overconfident.”



The political scientist Professor Philip Tetlock agreed with Nate Silver, adding:

“Expect even top forecasters to make lots of mistakes…When smart forecasters are consistently over-confident, start suspecting”

other factors in play, such as

“publicity or policy-advocacy games”.

I make no such allegations.

More recently, I understand that this summer Professor Ferguson predicted upwards of 100,000 cases. They topped at just over 30,000. In an interview with The Times, the good professor said that his prediction was off because the football messed up his modelling. That for me comes to the essence of the problem with forecasting. When someone can predict 100 million deaths and no one dies but someone gets a sore thumb, they can say mitigations were taken by Government. When a forecaster’s work becomes verifiable, we can see when he predicts and gets it wrong. When that forecast comes up against reality, reality kicks in and makes a fool of the forecast and sometimes, sadly, a fool of the forecaster. Every time Professor Ferguson’s forecasts have been verifiable, they have been seen to be very badly flawed, and this is a serious man and a serious university.

To sum up, if we look at the forecasts made about covid, just like the forecasts for so many other things, reality changes those forecasts and very often undermines their credibility, so we need another set of factors to guide us. Members on the Opposition Benches and on this side have said we need principles. We need a precautionary principle, but we need a sense of balance so that we do not overstep the mark, damage our society, damage our young people and damage poorer people by seeking to control when we need to learn to live with this. My final question to the Minister is: will the Government look into forecasting and perhaps hold an inquiry into the success of forecasting and what we can learn from it, so that we do it less badly in future?

Finally, going from the theoretical to the very practicable, and on a point related to the Isle of Wight, we are not getting the boosters in the Riverside Centre. My hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) raised a specific point about his constituency, and in the same way, will the Minister please look at getting more booster jabs to the Isle of Wight and our Riverside Centre?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

The last contribution before the Minister responds is from Dr Andrew Murrison.

Strengthening Standards in Public Life

Debate between Nigel Evans and Bob Seely

Wednesday 17th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bob Seely]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. As a statement of fact, let me say that the Isle of Wight Patrons Club is completely unaffiliated to the Conservative party and the Isle of Wight Conservative Association.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

That is not a point of order for the Chair.

Human Rights: Xinjiang

Debate between Nigel Evans and Bob Seely

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani) on securing this important debate. I pay tribute to the wonderful and important work that she has been doing on this issue. Human rights abuses in Xinjiang are abhorrent, and I listened painfully to what my hon. Friend said about the disgusting forced sterilisation, and to what my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) said about the equally repugnant organ harvesting. My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) spoke with perpetual eloquence on Tibet and other issues related to China.

In the time available, I would like to speak to three brief points: first, the importance of recognising what is happening; secondly, specifically for the Minister, the importance of developing a policy in an inconsistent world that is morally and practically defensible; and, thirdly, what the UK is often very good at, which is building alliances around the world to protect what one might call ethical sustainability for the 21st century.

On the first point—I will be wary of time, Mr Deputy Speaker—we need to recognise the systematic suffering of other human beings whose lives are being damaged because they are being targeted en masse. That is important in itself. As certain Members have already said, we do it for the same reason that we did it in the Balkans and in Syria in recent years. We have done it in past decades in the holocaust and now have started to do with the Ukrainian holodomor—the mass starvation of the Ukrainians in the 1930s by Stalin.

The painstaking recording of death, of lives cruelly ended and of human suffering speaks to a shared ethical core of humanity and our need to record what has happened to other human beings. We do that in memory of the dead, but we also do it in recognition of the living. In relation to Syria, for example, a lot of work done recently by good people tracing the deaths, the murders and the mass slaughters has been funded by the FCDO. I congratulate it on its foresight in that, but it prompts the question whether it will be doing the same in Xinjiang. Might it start doing the same in Tibet, too? That is the first point. We record these things because they need to be recorded.

Secondly, we need a practical policy towards China that is defensible in an inconsistent world. Many improvements have been made to our policy on China in recent years by this Government, and I give them credit. We have moved on from the embarrassment of George Osborne turning up in Xinjiang about 10 years ago—that was just awful. It is nice to have politicians with an ethical strain running through them.

Janus-like, we still have two conflicting policies. One from the Foreign Office pledges to put human rights at the heart of everything we do, but our trade policy seeks to trade without asking too many questions. We have Foreign Ministers, including the Secretary of State, eloquently criticising China while Trade Ministers in the other House ingratiate themselves and dismiss human rights. This is not consistent. We pontificate on Africa, but are strangely silent on central Asia and China. It makes us look foolish and as though our values are somewhat tradeable.

We have heard of the Confucius institutes problem, the endless issues we have with the universities, and the plying for covert influence that China and Russia do in this country. We need policy—domestically and in foreign affairs—that is practical and morally defensible. No one can unilaterally change the world, not even the United States or China and not the UK, but we do have influence, and we need to understand the importance of developing consistency. Okay, we trade with China, but we need to limit our dependency.

I did a report with the Henry Jackson Society. A quarter of our British supply chain is dominated by China. The problem is that if we go further down that route, we end up like New Zealand, in a hell of an ethical mess, with a Prime Minister who virtue-signals while crudely sucking up to China and backing out of the Five Eyes agreement, which is an appallingly short-sighted thing to be doing. On that point, we need to stand shoulder to shoulder with Australia. That is a tired cliché, but the Australians are calling out China, and doing so at trade risk. We need to make sure they do not pay an ethical price, and that brings me to the third point.

The one thing in our strategic culture that we are probably unique at—apart from being an island, which clearly shapes our geography and our outlook on the world—is that we have genuinely been better than any other nation on the planet at building alliances, whether that is from the colonial days or in the days of Europe and Protestants versus Catholics and all that. We need to build alliances for the 21st century. In the 21st century, there are two visions of humanity: there are open and free societies where political leaders are answerable to the people, and there are closed societies, which, through the use of artificial intelligence and big data, are becoming ever-more dominant and threatening to their people. We have to make sure our universal values survive, not only here but globally, so that, despite Russia, China and other regimes, they continue to be the go-to values for humanity for this century.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

We have 10 speakers left and there are about 45 minutes, so Members have four and a half minutes. Particularly if Members are speaking remotely, could they please keep an eye on timing devices and bring it in below five minutes?

Planning and House Building

Debate between Nigel Evans and Bob Seely

Thursday 8th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Bob Seely]

I read this morning that this was going to be a traditionalist rant, but actually it has been a very thoughtful debate, as we are trying to balance the needs of constituents and the needs of the environment with new housing. There is a clear message from this House, which I hope the Minister has heard from almost every single Government Member. My hon. Friends the Members for Bury South (Christian Wakeford), for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns), for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman), for East Devon (Simon Jupp), for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall), for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell) and for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken) would also like to state their support for this motion. If we get this wrong, we will do a great deal of harm, not just politically but environmentally, economically and socially. If we get this right, we can do a great deal of good, and I do not think we are there yet. I hope the Government will take that on board. I thank the Minister for his time.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House welcomes the Government’s levelling up agenda and supports appropriate housing development and the Government’s overall housing objectives; further welcomes the Government’s consultation, Planning for the Future, updated on 6 August 2020, as a chance to reform housing and land use for the public good; welcomes the Government’s commitment to protect and restore the natural environment and bio-diversity; and calls on the Government to delay any planned implementation of the changes to the standard method for assessing local housing need proposed by the Government’s consultation, Changes to the Current Planning System, published on 6 August 2020, and Proposal 4 of the Government’s consultation, Planning for the Future, on a standard method for establishing housing requirement, until this House has had the opportunity to hold a debate and meaningful vote on their introduction.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

We will suspend for three minutes for Members to exit safely and for the sanitisation of the Dispatch Boxes.