Industrial Strategy

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. Making new discoveries is something that we have a deserved reputation for, and we must not take that for granted. We must reinforce that success. Where we have been less successful, however, is in translating those discoveries into practice and, in particular, in creating manufacturing jobs here. That is why medical manufacturing has an important role to play in the life sciences sector deal, and I am thrilled that on the basis of that industrial strategy, major investments have been announced today from the American company MSD and the German company Qiagen, to reinforce the success of that important sector.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

How many pages of the Secretary of State’s strategy deal with the immense value of tidal power? It is non-carbon, it is green, it is British, it is eternal in its duration and, unlike other renewables, it is entirely predictable. Will he temper his manic enthusiasm and optimism by reading the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee reports on Hinkley Point, which say that it will cost us £30 billion in subsidies that will be paid for by the poorest consumers?

[Greg Clark]

I am not going to temper my enthusiasm; quite the opposite, in fact. We have many opportunities in clean energy, with many breakthroughs in prospect. As was pointed out earlier, we have to ensure that the cost to consumers is taken into account, and that is the judgment that we need to make when it comes to projects such as the one the hon. Gentleman has just described.

Money Laundering and Tax Evasion (Azerbaijan)

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Thursday 19th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

I do, and I will come to that later in my speech.

Our corporate rules and our weak regulatory framework are a gift to villains. Far from being proud, we should be ashamed. Today, I want to try to convince the Minister and the Government to act urgently to destroy the opportunities we are allowing, which are exploited by criminals and make us complicit in their crimes. We can stop this, but at the moment we are choosing not to do so.

Azerbaijan is well-known as a corrupt kleptocracy. It comes 123rd out of the 176 countries assessed on Transparency International’s index of corruption. Heydar Aliyev, the father of the current President, was head of the KGB in Azerbaijan in 1967, when Azerbaijan was part of the Soviet Union, and he became a full member of the Soviet Politburo in 1982. When Russia broke up, he moved seamlessly to become Azerbaijan’s ruling President in 1993, and he cracked down viciously on all opposition voices. He passed the presidency on to his son 10 years later, and Ilham Aliyev then pushed through constitutional changes to abolish the limit on the number of times one person could stand for office and to extend each term of office to seven years.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

Will my right hon. Friend send a copy of her speech to all the new delegates to the Council of Europe from this place, because there are examples in the recent past of Members of this House giving tacit support to and acting as apologists for the den of thieves that is Azerbaijan?

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

I welcome that suggestion and will do that.

Ilham Aliyev remains President to this day, and in February this year he appointed his wife Mehriban as First Vice-President, in effect anointing her his successor. According to Human Rights Watch, the ruling élite

“continues to wage a vicious crackdown on critics and dissenting voices”.

But the Azerbaijani Government do want to be respected by the international community, in part because they want to sell us their oil and gas. That is why they worked to become full members of the Council of Europe, why winning the Eurovision song contest mattered and why hosting the European games in Baku was important. The so-called Azerbaijan laundromat that we are discussing today was a scheme designed to launder money out of Azerbaijan—money used to curry influence and bribe European politicians, lobbyists and apologists, and further to line the pockets of the Aliyev family and their cronies.

The scheme was revealed by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, working internationally with newspapers, including The Guardian. The leaked documents covered payments over a two-year period from June 2012 until the end of 2014. The payments amounted to €2.9 billion.

Petroleum Licensing (Exploration and Production) (Landward Areas) (Amendment) (England and Wales) Regulations 2016

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Wednesday 1st March 2017 General Committees

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to be called to speak. This has been a very informative debate. The main problem before us is that the SI is yesterday’s solution to tomorrow’s problem. A huge amount of nonsense—on both sides of the argument—has contributed to the public’s perception of fracking. Public opinion was possibly initially shaped by a short piece of film of a sink catching fire, shown universally many times. We now know that that was nothing to do with fracking; that had to do with naturally occurring methane gas. The film was everywhere and is mentioned by people as an example of the dangers of fracking, but that is false; it is not true. The other influence is the earthquakes that took place during test drilling; they were of such a minor nature, but people are naturally alarmed about the prospect of an earthquake.

I am intrigued by the concept of a lovable mini-fracking that is house-trained, family-friendly and benign to all concerned. I do not understand that, but I am baffled by the fact that our objections are limited to national parks. The national parks of the South Downs and the Lake District have a geography in which one would think it was impossible to frack. As one travels across the United States from the Rockies to the Atlantic, one notices the hills, but a huge area is flat. That is reproduced in the geology deep underground, with layers that are suitable for fracking because they are even. Below our country—in particular, below the national parks—the layers are fractured and go in different ways. That is why the hills stand higher than the plain. Our geography in the United Kingdom is therefore not friendly towards fracking, but there is a great deal of fuss and excitement about the issue.

Fracking results in a carbon-producing source of energy, which we should be turning our backs on. Although it is not as damaging to the environment as other forms of carbon-producing energy, we should remember that we have an environmental vandal in charge of the United States who is likely to add to our problems of global warming, and the best reason for opposing this SI is that it will increase the dangers to our children and grandchildren. We should concentrate on those forms of energy production that are carbon-free. The one that is by far the most promising, according to a recent Government report by a former Minister, which warned that we should turn our backs on carbon-producing energy sources, is tidal power. There is immense power in the tides, which wash up and down my constituency—

[The Chair]

Albeit that they are beyond the scope of the SI.

[Paul Flynn]

They still have to do with the SI, because its whole purpose is to increase our carbon load, but the best way to proceed is via sources of power that are carbon-neutral. The case for tidal power is that it is eternal, predictable, clean, British and immense in its wasted energy. It has long been neglected. By opposing the SI and putting obstacles in the way of fracking, we will accelerate support for tidal power.

Industrial Strategy Consultation

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

It runs through every page of the strategy.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

Newport has suffered grievously from the neglect of steel, but it is now having a mini-revival with the reopening of the site. Steel does not travel well or cheaply. Does the Secretary of State agree that if a new prosperity for manufacturing industry is to be created, it must be constructed on foundations of steel?

[Greg Clark]

Steel is a very important sector, and it needs to compete in the world in which we find ourselves. The discussions that I have been having with the steel industry are based around a strategy that it is pulling together to make British steel competitive in the years ahead.