Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Bone Excerpts

Wednesday 7th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

As the hon. Gentleman will know, we have the strictest controls of almost any developed economy in the world governing the conditions under which we can sell arms to other countries. Nothing that we do in promoting our arms industry, which employs thousands of people in this country, impedes our ability to tell allies and other Governments where we have real concerns about their human rights record, democratic record or civil liberties record, and that is exactly what the Prime Minister has been doing this week.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

I sometimes think the Deputy Prime Minister would like to send me to a jungle in Australia for a month, but does he agree that when two different parties get together in the national interest to clear up the mess that Labour left us, we are doing the right thing, in particular by driving unemployment down? Let me just pick one constituency: in Corby, it went down 4.6% last month.

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

For the first time in my parliamentary career I wholeheartedly agree with the hon. Gentleman. Let us savour and treasure this moment, because I suspect it will be very, very rare indeed. Like him, when I heard that the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries) had been sent to a jungle to eat insects, I thought that, despite the appearance of civility from our new Chief Whip, it indicated a new disciplinarian approach in our Whips Office. I totally agree with the hon. Gentleman: we are doing the great job together of fixing the economy and creating jobs for people in the future, and that is a great shared endeavour.