Home Affairs and Justice

Philip Davies Excerpts

Thursday 28th May 2015 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I will try and bear it in mind that it is not Friday today and take your instructions in the spirit in which they are intended.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) on a marvellous maiden speech. He said that it would take him a while to get his feet under the table, but based on the speech that I have just heard, I do not think that it will take any time at all. That was a most accomplished performance. The hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) spoke earlier in the debate. Both maiden speeches were excellent, and although I may not agree with much of what the SNP says, there is clearly no doubt about the ability of the SNP people who were elected or about the passion with which they argue their cause. I welcome them to the House of Commons in that spirit.

The maiden speeches from the two Edinburgh Members were of exceptional quality, and so were the other maiden speeches that I have heard today. The hon. Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) made a wonderful maiden speech from the Labour Benches, as did the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips). She said that her children were in the Public Gallery watching, and I am sure that they did so with an amazing amount of pride because she made a passionate and accomplished maiden speech.

I do not want the moment to pass without mentioning my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Craig Mackinlay), because he, too, made a brilliant maiden speech, which certainly bodes well for his future in the House. I think it is well known that one of the things that the Prime Minister and I agree about is that I should never be promoted. On the basis of the speech from my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet, I do not think it will be long before he finds favour with the powers that be, in a way that I never will.

I am told by Professor Philip Cowley that it is a matter of record that I was the second most rebellious MP in the last Parliament. Now that we have a Conservative majority, I hope that I do not need to continue in that vein. I was a rebel against the coalition Government, much of which I did not support. With a Conservative majority, I hope that I will not need to rebel so often. As I always say to the Whips, if the Government pursue Conservative policies, they will not have to worry about me rebelling. It is when they veer from that track that I shall be there to rebel.

I can tell the Government now that the majority may well be small, but if the need arises, I will always do what I believe is the right thing for my constituents and the right thing for the country. My duty as an MP is to hold the Government of the day to account. I could not care what colour the Government is; whichever Government are in power, I will hold them vigorously to account. I should make it clear right at the outset that those usual rules will apply in this Parliament, too. I just live in hope that the need will not arise quite as often as it did during the last Parliament.

I want to touch on just a few subjects in my brief remarks. The first is the Human Rights Act. The Secretary of State for Justice, whom I very much welcome to his position, will probably find me something of a nemesis in this Parliament. About 9%, I think it was, of all the parliamentary questions tabled in the last Parliament to the Ministry of Justice were from me personally, and I intend to continue with that, holding the Government to account on these issues in this Parliament, too. I welcome my right hon. Friend to his position and I have high hopes for him. I hope he will be able to reassure me and many of my colleagues who were enthusiastic supporters of repealing the Human Rights Act during the general election campaign—I found a great deal of support for that from my constituents—that the Government are not going soft on this issue and are not organising a retreat of any kind. I will be doing what I can, in my own modest way, to make sure they stick to their guns and do what they promised the electorate in the manifesto commitment on which we were elected.

This idea, which I heard earlier, particularly from the shadow Home Secretary, that doing that would turn us into a country like Belarus or take us back to being some medieval country is just for the birds. It really is absolute nonsense, to be perfectly frank. The idea that in this country we had no rights at all until 1998 is completely absurd. That is the argument that the Opposition parties try to portray. Our rights in this country go back centuries. They do not go back to 1998; our rights stem from things such as Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, through common law and case law. That is where our rights and our freedoms come from in this country. They do not come from the Human Rights Act. This idea that we had no human rights and then, all of a sudden, in 1998 they all appeared out of nowhere is just complete nonsense, and the people who argue that case must know in their heart of hearts that it is nonsense.

The Human Rights Act has become a charter for illegal immigrants to avoid deportation, for criminals to avoid what was the will of this House when laws were set, and to allow prisoners to pursue vexatious complaints completely needlessly and at taxpayers’ expense. That is really what the Human Rights Act has delivered. I am not aware of any of my genuine, law-abiding constituents who have ever needed to use the Human Rights Act to defend their freedoms. The Human Rights Act has been abused by people whom it was never intended to support in the first place. We cannot just sit idly by and allow that to continue. When we have seen that happen, it is quite right that this Parliament should act to make sure that the laws are in place as we intended and that we do not have those unintended consequences and unintended abuses going unchecked.

As it happens, there has been a lot of talk about how that relates to the European convention on human rights. Personally, I would like to see us withdraw from that too, to be perfectly honest, because the European Court of Human Rights is no more than a joke. It is full of judges, many of whom are not even legally qualified—they are not actually real judges; they are pseudo-judges—who are political appointees from the member states who have been sent to make political decisions, not legal decisions. They have overstepped their authority on many occasions, a prime example being a ruling that prisoners should have the right to vote, when clearly the right to universal suffrage was not one of the rights in the European convention that we signed up to; we in this country have never allowed prisoners to vote. That is just one example of where they have exceeded their remit and overstepped the mark. We should not be a part of something we did not sign up to.

People say that the European convention was a British invention. It may well be, but how it is being interpreted today is not what Britain intended when the convention first came into being. We cannot sit back and just allow our own courts to be overruled, willy-nilly, by pseudo-judges who are political appointees making political decisions based on what they think the law should be, rather than what the law actually is. In this country we believe in the rule of law, which means that the law should be applied as it is, not as political appointees in those Courts think it should be. The Government need to do something about that and not just allow it continue—hopefully, by seeing through the repeal of the Human Rights Act.

I warmly welcome the EU referendum. It will not come as a great surprise to anyone here to hear that I will campaign enthusiastically for us to leave the European Union when the referendum takes place. Nine years ago, I launched the Better Off Out group in Parliament with a very small number of colleagues and, it is fair to say, long before it was fashionable to argue that we should leave the EU. I am delighted with the progress made since then. We are on the cusp of being able to make the historic decision to leave the European Union, which I would warmly support.

The idea that we need to be in the EU to trade with the EU is complete nonsense. People say that 3 million jobs depend on our trading with the EU. Of course they do—I do not deny that for one minute. But about 5 million jobs in Europe depend on trade with the UK, so there is no way they are going to stop. Does anyone seriously think that BMW, Mercedes, Citroën, Renault and Audi, and all the winemakers of France are going to say, “Well, it’s the principle of the thing. We don’t want to trade with the UK. We don’t want to access its market anymore.” Of course they want access to our market; we are too big a market for them to ignore. We were trading with Europe long before the European Union came into existence, and we will be trading with Europe long after the European Union has gone out of existence. If we sell good product at the right price, people will want to buy it, wherever they are in the world. I have not noticed China having great problems trading with the EU, and China is clearly not a member. The idea that one has to be in the EU to trade with the EU is palpable nonsense.

Those who argue most vociferously that it would be a disaster if we were to leave the EU are all the same people who argued that it would be a disaster if we did not join the euro. Why on earth anyone would listen to those people anymore, the Lord only knows. Tony Blair’s is one name that springs to mind. Hopefully no one will listen to them or be fooled by that nonsense. Those people have been proved wrong before and they will be proved wrong again. I look forward to taking on those arguments during the EU referendum debate and campaign.

I believe that those of us who want to leave the EU can win that campaign, not least because—I come to home affairs, which we are debating today—of the thorny issue of immigration. In the last Parliament, I was highly critical of the Government’s efforts—if one could call them that—to control immigration. The Prime Minister promised that we would reduce immigration to the tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands. I do not doubt the Prime Minister’s sincerity when he made that promise, and I am perfectly happy to accept that he could not have foreseen our creating so many jobs in this country—more than in the rest of the EU put together—which led more and more people to want to come here. In that sense, we were a victim of our own success, but the fact remains that the Prime Minister made a promise that he was not entitled to make, because we cannot control the number of people coming into this country while we remain a member of the EU. That is a fact and we may as well be honest about it. People want the Government to control immigration, yes, but they also want the Government to be honest about immigration. While we are in the EU we cannot control the numbers coming in. The EU will never give up on the free movement of people. We know that, so let us be honest.

We cannot keep going with the numbers of people coming into this country each year. It is unsustainable. We do not have the land available to build all the houses needed to accommodate all those people. Even if we had, we do not have the wherewithal to build all the houses that would need building for the number of people coming into this country each year. It is just not feasible and we should be honest about that. If people want to stay in the EU and have unlimited immigration, that is fine. It is a perfectly respectable position to hold; it just happens to be one with which I disagree. If that is what people want, let them be honest with the public that that is the consequence of voting to stay in the EU. I do not mind what people’s argument about the EU is, as long as they are honest about their opinion.

I shall make some final brief points, if I may. The first is about the police. I am a big supporter of the police and I voted against cuts to the police budget throughout the previous Parliament. I will continue to do that, if the need arises, during this Parliament. The police do a superb job. They face an awful lot of problems, not least the Government taking lots of people off the DNA database, which made the job of the police even harder unnecessarily. I hope the Government will give the police the resources they need to do what they are dedicated to doing—catching criminals and bringing them to justice. The first duty of the Government is to keep the public safe. That means providing the police with adequate resources to make sure that dangerous criminals are where they belong, which is behind bars. I hope that the Secretary of State for Justice will take to heart the fact that we want to see more criminals in prison. A doubling of the prison population would suit me fine, if the Secretary of State is looking for a rough estimate of how many people should be there.

The final issues are metro Mayors and HS2. All this stuff is basically about lots of people down south pretending that they know and care about the north and bringing forward proposals that nobody in the north is interested in, thereby highlighting how out of touch they are with people in the north. I rarely find anybody in the north who is interested in HS2. I have never yet come across a businessman who says, “Unless you get me to London 20 minutes earlier, I’m out of here.” What we need is better infrastructure in the north and across the north. HS3 is a far better idea than HS2, which is just a grotesque waste of money. I will continue voting against HS2, as I did in the previous Parliament.

As for metro Mayors, I have no idea where that idea comes from. The idea that we want to give more and more power to councillors like the people who run Bradford council, for example, and that they should get more powers over affairs affecting Shipley—how anyone could think that is a good idea, Lord only knows. My constituents want Bradford council to have fewer powers, not more powers. In fact, we want to get out of Bradford council altogether and set up our own council separate from Bradford’s. Why on earth do the Government think it is a good idea to put more and more powers on these people, who were elected on such a low turnout? Why do we think they have a great democratic mandate to make decisions when they are elected on something like a 30% turnout, whereas MPs are elected on something like a 70% turnout? If the Government want to bring more localism into effect, they should give more powers to the people who got the mandate from their constituents, not to people who were elected by hardly anybody turning out to vote, as we saw with police and crime commissioners, which was another waste of time.

I broadly welcome the Queen’s Speech. That would be a fair summary of where I am. I am open to anybody reinterpreting my remarks, but I have got it down as broad support for the Gracious Speech. I hope the Government will see through the promises that they have made on the EU referendum—I have every confidence that they will—and on the Human Rights Act. I want them to be aware that on matters such as metro Mayors, HS2 and other nonsense that they may come up with from time to time, I will be prepared, however reluctantly, to vote against them to keep them honest and true to true Conservative principles.