Business of the House

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

I will be briefer than the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) in quickly raising two issues.

The first is the proposal—inappropriate in many people’s eyes—to collocate a learning centre with the holocaust memorial proposed for Victoria Tower gardens.

Can the Government publish a paper showing their comparison of the merits there with those of the Imperial War Museum and how the present proposal matches the specification in the national Holocaust Memorial Foundation specification of September 2015?

I shall speak briefly to a separate issue, but one that matters to one person and many watching. Kweku Adoboli is 38. He was last in Ghana aged 4, when his father, as a senior United Nations official, was expelled from some other place. Kweku, until he came here aged 11—he has been here continuously since then—lived in Israel, Syria and Iraq.

How is it public purpose that someone that age when he was last in Ghana should be expelled there as a consequence of the offence for which he was convicted?

[Andrea Leadsom]

On my hon. Friend’s last point, if he would like to write to me with the details, I could take it up with the Home Office or the Foreign Office, as appropriate. With regards to his first point, I think we are all very excited about the holocaust memorial. I understand that a consultation is going on at the moment in Church House, and he should make his views known there. Again, if he would like to write to me on that point, I can take it up.