Anniversary of 7 October Attacks: Middle East

Robert Jenrick Excerpts

Monday 7th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I addressed that in my statement: we need to get more humanitarian aid in; it is desperately needed, and has been needed for a very long time. That is why we continue to press for that aid to go in, and for the protection to go in for those who will be delivering it once the aid gets into Gaza, as is desperately needed.

[Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)]

Since the barbaric attack on 7 October, we have seen an explosion in antisemitism and extremism on the streets of our own country. Only on Saturday, we saw people flagrantly valorising Hezbollah in London. We must root out those who despise our country and our values. What will the Prime Minister do to revoke the visas, where appropriate, of those in the UK who are conducting themselves in this manner, to encourage the police to enforce our existing laws without fear or favour, and to further ban and proscribe organisations such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps which do not support the UK, our values, and the way we wish to conduct ourselves in the world?

[The Prime Minister]

We are proud of the democratic right to protest in this country, but supporting a proscribed terrorist group is unacceptable, and we need to be very clear about that and give the police our full support in taking the action they need to take in relation to that, wherever it is in the United Kingdom.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report

Robert Jenrick Excerpts

Wednesday 4th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)]

I thank the Prime Minister for his statement today. The Grenfell fire was an unimaginable tragedy but, as he rightly said, it was also a comprehensive failure by the British state, and in many respects that comprehensive failure persists today. I am grateful for the words that he said about giving all resource and support to the police and the Crown Prosecution Service, because clearly the victims, the survivors and the community of North Kensington want the insights and the answers that they have partly had today, but they also want justice, and that needs to be delivered as soon as possible.

Equally, I fully support the effort that the Prime Minister is going to make to see if further regulatory changes are required. They need to be made in a proportionate and effective way, and there are lessons to be learned from changes that we have made in the recent past. But when making those changes, can I urge him to look in particular at the status of the testing facility—the Building Research Establishment—and at the way it operates, which I think has failed significantly, as is laid out in the report?

Finally, I concur with the broader point that the Prime Minister made today, which is that when one speaks to the victims and their families, one is left with a very strong sense that many people in social housing in our country feel that they are second-class citizens and that they are being treated with disrespect. That must end. Will he take forward the work that began with the social housing White Paper to ensure that that never happens again?

[The Prime Minister]

Yes, all support will be given to the police and the CPS, and I absolutely agree that this must be done as swiftly as possible. I think the police made a statement in relation to that earlier today. I will look at the particular point the right hon. Gentleman raises in relation to testing. I think the whole House needs to come together to recognise that in social housing there has been a profound disrespect for a very long time across a number of communities, and we have to turn a corner on that.

Debate on the Address

Robert Jenrick Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)]

May I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Bolton North East (Kirith Entwistle) on her maiden speech? It is clearly a real achievement to be the first to make a maiden speech in this Parliament, and I am sure that Members on both sides of the House will join me in congratulating her and wishing her well in the years ahead here in Parliament.

I welcome all new Members to this House, not least because some of them make me look older, which I have been looking forward to for some time. I remember when I was first sworn into the House. I entered at a by-election and so swore in on my own, in a class of one. There was a real heckle on that occasion from the beast of Bolsover. He asked if I was here on work experience and everyone laughed. I have a few more grey hairs now, 10 years on, and have just been through a difficult general election in north Nottinghamshire. I want to begin by saying a special thank you to my constituents for doing me the great honour and privilege of re-electing me, all the more so on what was clearly a difficult night for my party. During this Parliament, I will represent my constituents with all of my vim and vigour.

Having served as a Minister under each of the last five Prime Ministers, I know what a special privilege it is to serve as a Minister, so I wish our successors in office all best wishes and good luck in the years ahead. As patriots, we all know that this Government’s success is our success, and we want them to tackle the great challenges facing our country. I want them to enjoy their time in ministerial office as much as I did.

The general election made a number of things clear to me. I am deeply proud of many of our Government’s achievements, which I will fiercely defend in the months and years ahead. We took a bankrupt country and righted our public services and public finances. We ensured a decade of good employment after inheriting high unemployment, particularly among young people. We led Europe in the defence of Ukraine. We reformed our education system, and we now outstrip countries all over the world in the literacy and numeracy of our children. We were one of the world’s greatest countries in tackling environmental challenges, decarbonising faster than any other G7 country. For those and other reasons, I will always defend the record of the last Conservative Government, but I will come on to some of the lessons I have learned from their failings.

[Neil Coyle]

Is the right hon. Gentleman suggesting that voters were ungrateful on 4 July?

[Robert Jenrick]

I cannot quite hear the hon. Gentleman. If he is asking whether the electorate were wrong, the answer is no. No politician should ever doubt the electorate, but it is right that we defend the things we did well in government so that there is a proper diagnosis of what we got right and what we got wrong.

I think we did get some things wrong. We promised to get Brexit done when we stood in 2019, and we did. We got Brexit done and restored our sovereignty as a nation, which is a great and lasting achievement, but we also promised that we would secure our borders and that we would ensure a strong economy, lower taxes and a strong NHS and public services, which the public rightly expect. On those counts, we did not deliver the public services, the lower taxes, the economic growth and the migration system that we promised and the public rightly expect.

The baton now passes to this Labour Government. Where they succeed, I will welcome and support them; and where they fall short, I will challenge them. We want to ensure that the great issues facing our country are properly addressed. We live in one of the greatest times to be alive, but it is a time of immense change. There is a power shift from west to east, and new technology, like artificial intelligence, is upending old industries. It is an age of mass migration, which is challenging the pace of change in our country, creating huge pressures on housing, public services and integration, and making it harder to build the united country that we all want to see.

I worry that this King’s Speech falls short on some of those great challenges. There are undoubtedly Bills that I welcome, and I am delighted that the new Government are taking forward the Bill for a Holocaust memorial, a project in which I have been involved for many years. Some of the Bills are radical, such as the changes to our energy policy, and I worry that they are radical for all the wrong reasons. Despite having decarbonised faster than other countries, and despite being responsible for only 1% of global emissions, we now find ourselves with a Government pursuing, for ideological reasons, a net zero policy that will make it harder for our own consumers to afford their bills. The policy will further erode our industrial base and leave us in hock to Chinese technology. We are trading dependence on Russian hydrocarbons for dependence on Chinese electric vehicles, smart meters and solar panels that will despoil our countryside. New quangos, such as Great British Energy, will spring up, serving no apparent purpose and taking inspiration from predecessors such as Robin Hood Energy in Nottingham, in my part of the world. That failed project wasted £50 million of taxpayers’ money.

I worry that 200,000 jobs in the oil and gas sector have been put in danger in the first few days of this Government, at a time when they are rightly saying that they want to fuel our economy, create jobs and change the dynamics that the country has seen since the 2008 financial crash and after 20 or 30 years of low productivity growth and unsatisfactory economic growth. We should all be working to find ways to do that and to make that possible.

I worry about the message we are hearing on the economy. We want economic growth, but economic growth is founded on harnessing the entrepreneurship of our people. It is about creating a start-up country and helping small business people to found businesses around their kitchen tables, like my parents did. It is not a statist vision of this country. It is not about using new quangos or a national wealth fund, which is an oxymoron because it is going to borrow the money it seeks to invest. It is not about changing our employment laws, which will make us less competitive and drive the kind of higher structural levels of unemployment we see in Europe that we have mercifully avoided over the last 10 years.

And I worry about immigration, because we live in an age of mass migration. I have been honest—painfully honest—about the failings of the last Government on this topic, but I worry that the same or worse mistakes are about to be made again. What we are seeing in the channel is a national security emergency. We are seeing tens of thousands of people about whom we know next to nothing crossing into our country, breaking into our country, in flagrant abuse of our laws. Some of them are subjects of interest being followed by our security services. This has to stop. Scrapping the only known credible deterrent, with nothing else to put in its place, is going to surrender to the people smuggling gangs. That is wrong, it is a mistake and I worry that we are going to rue the day that we did that.

I also hope that the Government will take legal migration seriously. We have to accept that the public in most parts of our country have been voting for 20 or 30 years, in elections and referendums, for Governments that promise to control and reduce the level of legal migration, only for Governments of all political colours to do precisely the opposite. That is immensely corrosive to public trust and confidence in politics and in democracy. As one of our colleagues said earlier, about the rise of far-right parties around the world, if we centrist parties on the left and the right do nothing about this, we will see the rise of far-right parties in this country. That would be a great mistake.

I hope the reforms I started, to reduce the number of people coming into this country legally, are taken forward, and that we further reduce those numbers. We could have used the King’s Speech today to implement a legal cap on net migration, embedded by Parliament in law. We have not done that, which will mean further pressure on housing, public services and the pace of change.

Let me close with this: the Prime Minister has said he wants this to be a new era, in which politics is defined by service. I think we will all agree on that point—it should be—but the question is who do we serve. I do not think we come to this place to serve the interests of new quangos, commissions and reviews, the legal fraternity in contested notions of international law, or the new and worrying rise in sectarian politics, represented in this House for the first time in my lifetime, which again should worry us. We are sent here to serve the interests of our constituents. I choose them; I choose to ensure the working people of Newark and Nottinghamshire are always represented. They sent me here with a few clear messages: secure our border; reduce immigration; lower our taxes; stop the crime; build homes; build a more united country, cohesive and integrated, not riddled by the poison of left-wing identity politics. That is what I am here to fight. Where this Government do that and live up to that test, I will support them. Where they do not, I will fiercely challenge them.