Overseas Electors Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Mark Tami

Friday 22nd March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I am not entirely sure what is up with that part of the Opposition Benches. The hon. Members for Oldham West and Royton and for Reading East (Matt Rodda) seem determined to talk about anything other than the Bill and the new clause that we are discussing. The hon. Member for Reading East appeared to be saying that it was all very well for me to talk about new clause 1—and I took it from what he said that he agreed with it, not least because it is the new clause that his hon. Friend the hon. Member for City of Chester introduced in Committee, so I would like to think that even on that basis he has a bit of trust in it—but that, notwithstanding the merits or otherwise of new clause 1, I should be talking about something completely unrelated to the Bill, namely the issue of domestic voters. I am sure, Mr Deputy Speaker, that if I launched into a speech about how we should deal with UK voters who happen to move to another UK location, it would not be long before you told me, “You are out of the scope of the Bill, and you are deviating from the subject,” and I am surprised that the hon. Gentleman is encouraging me to do so.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way, on that point?

[Philip Davies]

I will give those on that Bench one last go.

[Mark Tami]

It is clear that a great deal of effort and money is going into dealing with overseas voters, while the large number of people in this country who could be registered much more easily are being totally ignored. Thousands of people have completed part of the forms but may not have included their national insurance numbers, for instance, but little effort has gone into ensuring that they get on to the register.

[Philip Davies]

It was clearly a forlorn hope to expect the right hon. Gentleman to stick to the Bill. All I can say, to try to clear the matter up, is that I did not table this Bill. It is not my Bill. Whether he thinks that we should be concentrating on this Bill or that some other Bill would have been a better use of the House’s time, this is out of my control. I found out that this Bill was top of the pops for today, and I decided to try to do what I think is the duty of Members. Explanations are usually aimed at people outside the House, but it seems that today we are having to give them to people inside the House. The purpose at this point—the Report stage—is to scrutinise the merits or otherwise of this Bill and to see whether it can be improved in some way. It is not to decide whether or not this Bill should be first on the agenda, which is a question over which I have no control.

Whether or not this is the most important Bill that should come before the House is a matter of debate that is not particularly relevant on Report. It is not my Bill. I did not choose for it to be debated. I am simply picking it up and trying to make the best of it and trying to improve it, and the improvements that I am suggesting have largely been suggested by Labour Members. I should have thought that the right hon. Gentleman would be encouraging me to try to improve it in the way that his own party wants it to be improved.

Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Mark Tami

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 27th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I am delighted to support the Bill today—a Bill that I have supported from the outset. I am pleased to be one of its sponsors. May I start by congratulating the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) on getting his Bill to this point and on using his customary charm to do so? I also congratulate the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch), who has played an invaluable role in supporting the hon. Gentleman in getting the Bill to where it is today. As we all know, she is a doughty supporter of the police, and I know that they appreciate her support greatly. While I am at it, may I thank the Minister, who has played a crucial role in ensuring that the Bill has got to this stage? We are all very grateful for the constructive way in which Ministers have engaged with the process.

My amendments begin with new clauses 1 and 2. I have quite a few to go through, but I will rattle through them as quickly as possible. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] Well, everything is relative. I will also ensure that I do my amendments justice.

New clause 1 would make assaults on police constables carry the same penalty as the new offence in the Bill, not just the six months currently available to the courts. New clause 2, which I will discuss together with new clause 1, would make assaults on police constables carry a greater penalty than the new offence and ensure that Crown courts had greater powers of sentencing for the offence than magistrates courts. The two new clauses are alternatives—people may consider which one they think would do the job. I would be perfectly content with either.

In an ideal world, I would like to see the highest sentences possible given for offences against the police. Assaulting a police officer is currently a summary only offence that cannot usually be dealt with by the Crown court, and certainly no more than a six-month sentence can be given. I appreciate that assaults against police officers can be charged as other non-police offences of violence, but that is another story. It is relevant to the new clauses, but not something I want to dwell on. I believe that if we have an offence of assault against a police officer, it should attract a robust sentence, because in reality a lot of assaults against the police will be charged in this way.

I have been helpfully informed by the West Yorkshire Police Federation of the number of such assaults in West Yorkshire. Perhaps, in passing, I might praise Nick Smart from the West Yorkshire Police Federation, who does a fantastic job of representing the interests of his members. He is absolutely first class and has done a brilliant job in helping with this Bill. He gave me the Home Office figures that had been collated for April 2016 to March 2017, which showed that there were 1,240 recorded assaults on West Yorkshire police officers in one year. Those figures are not deemed 100% accurate, but they certainly give an idea of the number of assaults going on. The West Yorkshire police figures, based on recorded crime, show that there were 1,729 recorded assaults on police officers from April 2017 to March 2018.

I am sure everybody would appreciate that those are very high figures. They mean that nearly five West Yorkshire police officers are assaulted every day. To me, that is completely and utterly unacceptable, and it is one reason why the Bill is so worthy and important.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman talks about recorded cases, but does he accept that in their normal line of duty, there is an acceptance that police officers are roughed up and pushed around? Much of that is not even taken into account.

[Philip Davies]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The official figures and the recorded figures are likely to be the tip of an iceberg. Many instances will go unreported and unrecorded. Even though the figures are extremely high, they almost certainly understate the issue.

EU Membership (Audit of Costs and Benefits) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and Mark Tami

Friday 26th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right. I have already covered economic and trade matters and regulations, and I know that other people want to speak so I shall not go on for too long. National security and immigration are crucial issues that are mentioned in clause 5 of the Bill. National security is a key area, and the remain campaign seems to think that it is one of its trump cards, and that we are more secure and safer from terrorist attacks within the European Union. I would love them to go and tell the people of Paris how much safer they were from terrorist attacks as a result of being in the European Union, but I suspect they would not get particularly far.

Last night in a debate at York University we hit a new low in the tactics of the remain campaign. I was making the point that we cannot stop people coming into the UK from the EU if they have a valid EU passport, and that that applied to everybody, whether law-abiding people or criminals. But would you believe what the remain campaign announced last night? Perhaps the Minister can confirm it. I am on the Justice Committee, but I was not aware of it. It emerged last night during the debate that, apparently, when an EU national comes to the UK, our robust border controls mean that we check who people are. Apparently, when passports are scanned—this was a new one on me—it flags up whether or not a person has criminal convictions in their home nation, which enables us to stop them entering the United Kingdom. If only that were the case. The most generous thing I can say about that claim is that it is an absolutely blatant lie, because no system exists across the European Union to scan passports, trigger a huge list of criminal convictions and enable us to stop people coming into the country. That claim is simply untrue—I cannot be any clearer than that. The Minister may want to confirm or deny that when he comments, but let us please have an honest debate about these things. That system does not exist.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Philip Davies]

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will repeat that claim.

[Mark Tami]

I am not going to repeat it. However, the hon. Gentleman should make it clear that a lot of terrorism is actually home-grown. We should not suggest that this is just about people coming from outside—the UK faces a much bigger problem than that.

[Philip Davies]

I invite people to look at the transcript of what I said—I am not sure I did say that terrorism came only from other parts of the European Union and that it could not be home-grown. Of course it can be—it is both. We cannot stop British people from living in Britain, and I do not think that anybody has ever proposed that we should, but the fact that we have home-grown terrorists is surely no reason to let in people from other countries who may want to cause us harm.

If people think that this robust system is in place, perhaps they would like to explain why so many crimes in the UK each year are committed by EU nationals and why the UK prison population of EU nationals has gone through the roof since we had free movement of people. The reason why it has gone through the roof since we had free movement of people is that a lot of those people have taken advantage of that arrangement to come here to commit their crimes. That is the fact of the matter; it may be an inconvenient fact, but nobody can deny that that is what has happened.

Every quarter, the Ministry of Justice publishes the prison population figures broken down by nationality. I invite anybody to look back over a few years at the figures for each nationality, because they will see a huge increase in the number of EU nationals in our prisons. That is because these people are coming to the UK under the free movement of people to commit crimes. As a result, we are creating lots of unnecessary victims of crime in the UK. People who want to remain in the EU should be honest about the fact that that is one of the downsides. They should not pretend that there is some miracle passport control system that stops these people coming into the UK, which, as I say, is a blatant lie.

Use of the Chamber (Youth Parliament)

Debate between Philip Davies and Mark Tami

Tuesday 23rd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

If my hon. Friend is chastising me for being consistent, that is a chastisement I will take. I know it is a novel concept in politics to actually stick to your guns about something and believe in something and not change your opinion in response to the prevailing political wind. My hon. Friend may think it is a great thing to change one’s mind every five minutes, depending on the prevailing political mood. I rather think that being consistent is a virtue in politics, even if he disagrees.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

Should we not do everything we can to encourage more younger people to be interested in this place, and to prevent them from thinking of it as something distant that they should not be involved in?

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful for the interventions of the hon. Gentleman and my hon. Friend. We were told originally that the Youth Parliament was different because we needed to get more young people interested in politics. By definition, the Members of the Youth Parliament are already interested in politics and political issues and are taking the lead on these things. If we want to find a group of young people that are not already involved in the political process and inspire them to get involved, we should invite everybody other than the Youth Parliament to come and sit on these Benches, because presumably they are the ones we need to reach. Those in the Youth Parliament seem to be the last people we should invite to sit on these Benches if our reason for doing so is to get more people involved and interested in politics. So I am afraid the hon. Gentleman’s arguments disintegrate straightaway.

What we have here is the usual rather sad charade of middle-aged Members of Parliament trying to curry favour with the youth and with the young vote. They ask themselves, “How can we give youthful voters the impression that we are trendy?” Basically, one way is to advocate motherhood and apple-pie tripe like this. They think that by doing these sorts of things they will prove that they are in touch with the youth and are really trendy, and that young voters will all go out and vote for them. I do not think young people are as stupid as hon. Members seem to think they are—that just because they are allowed to sit here once a year, they will all go flooding in and vote for those Members when the election comes. Hope is triumphing over reality, and it does not make them look trendy at all.

Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill [Lords]

Debate between Philip Davies and Mark Tami

Tuesday 26th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

New clause 1 stands in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall).

I do not want you to think, Mr Speaker, that my speech would be better suited to a debate on Second or Third Reading, but it is important that I give some context as to why new clauses 1, 2 and 3—which all stand in my name—are important.

I do not have any interest to declare, but I do have considerable experience that is relevant to the Bill. Before entering Parliament in 2005 I spent the previous 12 years working for Asda. I spent four years working in-store and eight years working at the head office in Leeds, so I have first-hand knowledge of how the supermarket industry works. To be perfectly honest, it works in a completely different way from the way in which people might be forgiven for thinking it works if they listened to previous debates on the matter. We have been given to believe that terrible, shocking, awful, nasty supermarkets care nothing about their suppliers, that their only role in life is to screw their suppliers into the ground and leave them destitute—bankrupt, if we are to believe previous debates—and that the only way to prevent that from happening is to have this ridiculous adjudicator, which is the Bill’s premise. That argument is complete and utter nonsense—that is not how it works at all.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

I think that I have raised this point with the hon. Gentleman in the past, but the supermarkets’ power means that they are able to tell suppliers, “Provide this product at this price or do two-for-one offers at your cost, or we will go somewhere else.” Does the hon. Gentleman not accept that that is an unacceptable power in some cases?

[Philip Davies]

I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman is highlighting the misconceptions. The Office of Fair Trading is already able to enforce a grocery code of practice. It is already in place. It is not being introduced by this Bill. The code of practice already exists under the auspices of the OFT. If the hon. Gentleman has any concerns about how supermarkets are operating with regard to their suppliers, he can take his complaint to the OFT and ask it to investigate it. The adjudicator is not supposed to introduce a new code of practice, although we fear that they might. The code of practice already exists. If the hon. Gentleman has evidence of supermarkets breaking the code of practice, I would be happy for him to come forward and tell me about it. If anybody has evidence of supermarkets breaking the code of practice, let us hear about it today and we can all decide what the best course of action is. However, there is no evidence that the code of practice is being breached.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. If he has a big problem with the middleman, so to speak, for example in the dairy industry, he should pursue his complaint with the middleman, rather than having a go at the supermarket.

The hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) made a point about special offers. There is a view that supermarkets have been forcing suppliers against their will to do special offers, such as buy one, get one free or buy three for two. Let me tell the House, as somebody who has worked in this environment, what happens in the real world, rather than in the invented world that people want to talk about.

My hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mark Menzies) is here and he will know what happens as well as I do because he worked for Asda at the same time as I did. He will recall that, before I left, Asda decided that it did not want to do special offers any more and that it would have no special offers in its stores. It did not want any buy one, get one frees or three for twos. It asked its suppliers instead to just sell it the product at an everyday low price and to put what they would have invested in a promotion into providing that price. It was not companies such as Asda that were forcing suppliers to do buy one, get one frees; suppliers were falling over themselves to do special offers in the supermarkets and to get their products in the promotional areas.

Some of those firms have massive marketing budgets. They have marketing budgets that supermarkets would love to have. They use that budget to do offers such as buy one get one free or three for the price of two. They are trying to persuade people who buy Daz for their washing, for example, to move to Persil. To persuade people to do so, they give them a buy-one-get-one-free offer.

[Mark Tami]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Philip Davies]

I will in a second, because it was the hon. Gentleman who started me off discussing this misconception in the first place, so I will happily let him come back in.

A special offer such as “Buy one, get one free” on Persil is intended to encourage people to buy Persil in the hope that by the time the special offer ends, they will stick to that brand. It is a way of promoting a brand, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the supermarket.

[Mark Tami]

The hon. Gentleman is talking about very large companies, but does he accept that some smaller companies are almost totally reliant on the supermarkets for their business, and whatever the supermarket says goes? Does he also accept that one thing that we have to recognise from the horsemeat scandal is that if we keep driving prices down, some suppliers will look to cut costs by whatever means they can in order to survive?

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, because he seems to have indicated—I will take it as such—that he will support my new clause 1 or new clause 2. He gets to the nub of the point, although I suspect he has not even bothered to read the new clauses, because if he had he would not have led with his chin in the way that he just has.

I wish to make it clear at this point that, with your permission, Mr Speaker, I would prefer to press new clause 2 to a Division than new clause 1, but I will be guided by you later on that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I have no doubt that the hon. Gentleman does not believe in the free market—that is why he sits on the Labour side of the House. I have no quibble with Opposition Members agreeing with this nonsensical Bill. He was elected to try and introduce this kind of interventionist nonsense. What I object to is Government Members believing in this kind of stuff. I have no quibble with him believing it.

[Mark Tami]

The hon. Gentleman has painted a picture, which no doubt he actually believes in, where the supermarkets are fair and always have everyone’s best interests at heart. What would they have to fear, regardless of the size of the companies that could take them through this process? According to him, they have never done, and will never do anything wrong.

[Philip Davies]

In a Westminster Hall debate I heard one of my hon. Friends, who is in favour of the Bill, make it abundantly clear that he thought the adjudicator would have nothing to do, and that it would, in effect, be a sinecure post. The adjudicator would just be there in case he was needed at some point. It is unnecessary, and I do not believe in creating unnecessary bureaucracies. They end up empire building. They start off small and targeted, but of course once they find out that they have nothing to do they find something to do, even when it is not necessary.

London Local Authorities Bill [Lords]

Debate between Philip Davies and Mark Tami

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that clarification, but he is not taking into account the evidence that was given to the Communities and Local Government Committee. It is not only people with disabilities who are a major worry in relation to clause 6, but people with buggies or pushchairs and people with a lot of luggage. There may well be other people who will be affected.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

Another important point, besides whether there are turnstiles, is that far too often toilets are closed or left in a bad state by the local authority.

[Philip Davies]

That may well be true. Perhaps local authorities ought to sharpen up their act before they try to pass such legislation. The point is that these toilets will be closed to even more people if we have clause 6. If people have a lot of luggage or a big pushchair and cannot get through the turnstile, they will not be able to get in whether the toilet is open or closed. For some people, these toilets will be closed permanently.