International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and James Gray

Friday 12th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her intervention. I do not doubt that she is taken to all the successful programmes there have been, but I wonder whether she was taken to the following one. I wonder whether she was taken to Kenya. Forget about poverty and all this kind of thing, because apparently the most important priority in Kenya is graffiti. We gave to a £6.7 million aid project called Making All Voices Count, which pays for political graffiti in Nairobi. The spray murals are said to be useful as they

“engage with artists to spread data-based information in slums in order to empower citizens to make data-driven arguments”.

They are, apparently, also justified because they target police corruption through awareness. You couldn’t make it up: we are literally spraying money away. With £16.5 million of aid allegedly being stolen by Kenyan Ministers and officials in the past few years, it is nonsensical to suggest that all of this aid budget is going round doing all this good. A load of old nonsense is going on.

Let me talk about a project in Ethiopia. It is not about creating life opportunities through work or educating people. It empowers women through music, and we gave money to the so-called “Ethiopian Spice Girls”, a five-strong girl group called Yegna. That may bring a smile to people’s faces, until we realise that this is part of a bigger programme called the Girl Hub, to which DFID handed over £3.8 million. As a justification for that excessive expenditure the point was made that Ethiopian girls

“faced challenges such as forced marriage, violence, teen pregnancy, and dropping out of school”.

Of course they do—we all agree with that—but I think I must be out of touch because I thought the best way of tackling those things was to target those issues; I did not realise that the way to tackle them was to finance a girl group to sing about those problems. You could not make this up, but it is true.

It all goes to show that DFID has so much money that it does not know what to do with it, so it is scratting around for any kind of nonsensical, politically correct project to throw its money away on. But it is not throwing away its own money—this is our money. It is our constituents’ money that DFID is throwing away with gay abandon. It might make DFID feel good, but it does not do a great deal for my constituents who are seeing their money go up in smoke. What I want to know is who in DFID actually sits around a table and says, “I know, I think we should fund the ‘Ethiopian Spice Girls’. I think that is a good use of public money.” We can just imagine the discussion in the Department, where everyone around the table says, “I think that is a marvellous idea.” Does nobody in these Departments say, “Do you not think that’s a crass way to spend taxpayers’ money?” Is nobody there speaking up for taxpayers? I do not believe anybody is. This is just being done to satisfy the egos of politicians; it is not about doing anything to alleviate poverty.

[Mr Gray]

I have been listening carefully to my hon. Friend’s speech. I am concerned that he is conflating those who are opposed to the Bill, as I am, because they think it is bad from a constitutional standpoint with the people who are genuinely opposed to aid. I am strongly in favour of the 0.7% target, but I just do not believe the Bill is the right way to achieve it. I am concerned that he is mixing up being opposed to aid in general with being opposed to the Bill.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend has a perfectly legitimate point of view, and I agree with much of it. As he has rightly identified, someone can support 0.7% of the budget going in overseas aid without supporting this Bill, because it already happens. We are supposed to pass laws here because we actually need a law to help something or prevent something that is very bad. He has rightly identified that the Bill is a solution looking for a problem, but I do not agree with him that we should be spending 0.7% of our budget on it. [Hon. Members: “Ah!”] I do not agree with that. I would like to think that I have made that abundantly clear. We cannot afford to spend that. There is no evidence that it is being well spent, so I agree with him.

This Government have made such an effort to stop welfare dependency at home, and I support everything that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has done to try to stop a culture of welfare dependency in this country. People cannot expect to sit and wait for their next handout from the state. How on earth can a Government who have done so much on welfare dependency—[Interruption.]

London Local Authorities Bill [Lords]

Debate between Philip Davies and James Gray

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I do not accept what the hon. Gentleman said. He may think that all this is for the benefit of council tax payers and local residents, but I do not agree. Businesses pay lots of money through rates and so on, and they expect a service in return. The Bill wants businesses to cough up for the council to provide services. At the end of the day, the council can say, “By the way, even though you have coughed up for services, we don’t want to provide you with any services. We’ll get you to pay extra on top for anything that you might ever want to use.” That is an unfair system. If the hon. Gentleman is advocating that we scrap the rates that businesses pay and hold them responsible for anything that goes on, I might have a bit of sympathy, but he is trying to have the best of both worlds.

It seems as if we are doing this for the benefit of council officials who do not want to spend time trying to identify the individual responsible because they file that under “Too difficult”. They want to make businesses generally be responsible for anything that goes on anywhere near their premises—in that way, they can crack the problem and do not have to do anything.

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

I have been listening carefully to my hon. Friend. This is the first occasion on which I have debated the Bill, and I am puzzled on two counts. First, if the hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson) is right that there is a means of reducing the burden on local authorities, presumably, at the expense of businesses, why should that be the case? Secondly—and forgive me for mentioning this, Madam Deputy Speaker—why should such a measure apply in London when there is no such provision in the rest of the UK? The legislation cited by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) covers every other metropolis in England, so why should London receive special treatment?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and gets neatly to the nub of the issue in the clause and the Bill. If this is such a big issue—the hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson) may even think that it is a big issue in his part of the world—the problem exists to the same extent across the country. If we are going to introduce measures to tackle it, regardless of whether it is a problem or not, the solution in the House is to introduce legislation that applies to every single local authority. If the problem is as the hon. Gentleman describes it—and perhaps he will try to square the circle—why should the measure apply only in London, but not in any other part of the country, including his own?

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I will agree with my hon. Friend on the first half of his point, but disagree with him on the second. If he follows the first half through to its logical conclusion he will disagree with himself on the second half. He said that he believes in the “polluter pays” principle, and that is a perfectly sound basis upon which to start. There may well be some exceptions, and I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) will think of some. But in this case, the polluter is not the theatre. Just because the theatre issues a ticket to a customer does not mean that, when that ticket finds itself on a London street, it is the theatre that is the polluter. Surely my hon. Friend would accept that the polluter is the individual who dropped the litter, not the theatre. My hon. Friend is a very sound man, and I am sure that he believes as much as I do in individual responsibility. If so, he must accept that this is the responsibility of the individual, not the theatre.

[Mr Gray]

On reflection, I will disagree with myself and redisagree with the disagreement that I made against myself a moment ago, if my hon. Friend will forgive me for doing so. He is of course quite right. If the person who drops the litter is the person who pays the fine, as happens under the existing legislation without this clause, the polluter indeed pays. However, if the institution from which the polluter emerges pays, that is an entirely different principle under environmental law.

[Philip Davies]

I accept that. The point is that surely the problem would be worse. If individuals felt that they would not be held responsible for their actions but would get off scot-free, and that the theatre would take responsibility, we might end up with more litter, because individuals will feel free to throw it willy-nilly, knowing that they will not be pursued.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I commend my hon. Friend for being so eagle-eyed; I agree with him wholeheartedly on that point.

One of my problems with the Bill, and with this clause, is that they appear to intend to damage small businesses. We are in a terrible economic situation at the moment, and we know that small businesses are the engine of economic growth, so why on earth would the House want to pass measures that appear to have been designed to clobber small businesses? That is completely beyond me. These kinds of extra costs and bureaucracy are meat and drink to big businesses. I used to work for a large multinational company, and although these extra requirements were sometimes an irritation, we could afford to employ legions of people to deal with them. Many small businesses are struggling in the current climate, however, and they do not have the financial capability to deal with all the extra regulation and costs that the Bill seeks to impose on them. There seems to be a mindset that owning a small business is a licence to print money, that everyone who owns one has millions of pounds in the bank doing absolutely nothing, and that it is the job of a local authority to extract as much of that money as possible from them.

[Mr Gray]

My hon. Friend is speaking with great passion from his own libertarian standpoint, but I have to admit that, unless I have got this wrong, I shall have to divert from his stance. Is he seriously suggesting, for example, that cafés and pubs should be able to place their furniture on our high streets and throw litter on the ground in the sure and certain knowledge that the local authority would clear it up at its own cost? Surely the “polluter pays” principle should pertain in such circumstances. If a café has chairs and tables on the street, is it not reasonable to expect the proprietor, who is making a profit out of the enterprise, to take responsibility for clearing up the mess?

[Philip Davies]

I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) addressed that point. His local authority actively encouraged this kind of activity because it helped to keep the streets clean and tidy. The best thing I can say about the clause, which I am seeking to delete, is that it is a solution looking for a problem. My hon. Friend made it clear that there is not a problem, and that more businesses should be encouraged to make use of street furniture.

Use of the Chamber (United Kingdom Youth Parliament)

Debate between Philip Davies and James Gray

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

The hon. Lady seems to advance the argument that these seats are no more than furniture and that they of are no importance. She nods her head, so she clearly agrees that we are sitting on furniture that is neither here nor there. That may be her view, and it is perfectly respectable, but I do not share it. When she shows her constituents around this place, does she say to them, “We’ll not bother going into the main Chamber, because it’s just a row of seats, a few benches, a bit of furniture, to be honest. We’ve got furniture all over, and these seats are no more important than any other, so we’ll miss out the Chamber and go somewhere else because we’re not interested”? I suspect not, because these seats represent a bit more than what she just indicated—furniture.

[Mr Gray]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Philip Davies]

Of course. I shall give way to the hon. Member for Chippenham (Duncan Hames) in a second.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gray]

I disagree with my hon. Friend, but he is making a fine speech. The hon. Lady is being wholly illogical, is she not? If she is arguing that these Benches are merely bits of furniture and it does not matter who sits on them, why are they so special to the Youth Parliament? It could equally well sit in Westminster Hall, the House of Lords, Church House or anywhere else. The point about this Chamber is that it is an incredibly special place; it is an incredible privilege to be here; and, therefore, for the young people it is an incredible privilege to come here. To try to contend that these Benches are merely nothing seems to me to miss the logic of the argument altogether.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, and, although we approach the issue from different perspectives, I applaud at least the consistency of his argument. He is absolutely right to suggest that those people who say that, on the one hand, it is a special gesture to allow the UK Youth Parliament to sit here and, on the other, that it is just a row of benches, directly contradict themselves.