Debate on the Address

Sammy Wilson Excerpts

Wednesday 18th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Angus Robertson]

Well, he does. He could of course intervene on me and outline the plans that he did not give earlier. I see that he does not want to take the opportunity—that is fine. We do of course have the right to take interventions, although I will be happy to follow your guidance, Mr Speaker.

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Angus Robertson]

May I make a little progress? I will be happy to come back to the hon. Gentleman.

The SNP’s alternative Queen’s Speech would deliver a Scottish home rule Bill, which would involve a strong package of powers for the Scottish Parliament. The wording is quite important, because of course the people of Scotland were promised home rule and near federalism. My degree is in politics, and I have had a look at federal systems around the world. There are a number of parties in the House that favour federalism, but we do not live in a federal state in the UK, and nothing in the Scotland Act comes remotely close to “near federalism”. That was not in the Queen’s Speech. It would have been good to see it there; perhaps the Government might think about it, but I hae ma doots—“I have my doubts,” he says, looking at the poor Hansard writers.

The Government are unlikely to deliver a Scottish home rule Bill, but perhaps, given the unhappiness on the Treasury Bench about the House of Lords for the first time in a long while, the time has come for even the Conservative party to realise that there is a need for parliamentary reform. Let us be serious. We work in a Parliament where the second Chamber is not elected by anyone. Let me say that again: the second Chamber of the Parliament described as the mother of all Parliaments is made up of people elected by nobody. This is the 21st century. Please let us get on with replacing the House of Lords.

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[Angus Robertson]

There are things in politics about which there should be no disagreement between mainstream political parties. Very much in the spirit of what the right hon. Gentleman says, I would hope the proposals the Government bring forward can garner the maximum support. That is why, only a few short weeks ago, I raised with the Prime Minister the death of an Ahmadiyya Muslim in Glasgow. That is why I went to visit the Ahmadiyya Muslim community here in London—incidentally, the oldest mosque in London is an Ahmadiyya Muslim mosque—and why I am meeting the British Jewish community next week. This is not just about issues of intolerance towards or between different parts of the Islamic community; it impacts on the UK Jewish community. Sadly, there are a whole range of other forms of intolerance for which we should have no tolerance. I hope the Prime Minister and his colleagues bring forward something that can command support across the House. We will look as closely at that as possible. A Conservative Member asked a very difficult question earlier, one with which we would all grapple: at what point does the radicalisation process become so problematic that the law is tripped?

There is also a really big challenge for all of us in this age of modern technology. There are many examples—this is a matter of public record—of people becoming radicalised very, very quickly. We know our security services are having to grapple—as, unfortunately, security services in Belgium and France have had to recently—with the dangers of terrorist group operations. The difference between flash and bang—between the thought and the terrorist act—is extremely short. These are very difficult questions for all of us. I hope this is an area on which we can find cross-party agreement.

I would like to conclude, Mr Speaker, without reaching the 41-minute mark. Sadly, the Queen’s Speech is in many respects anaemic. It contains many pre-announced proposals for measures that have been carried over. There is a very strong focus on legislation for England and Wales. Of itself, that is not a bad thing—we wish our colleagues in England, Wales and the rest of the United Kingdom success—but it has crowded out alternatives, many of which have been proposed by the SNP.

[Sammy Wilson]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Angus Robertson]

I am concluding.

Surely what the UK requires is strong action on encouraging productivity and export growth in the economy; surely what the UK requires is support for the most vulnerable through progressive action on work and pensions; and surely what Scotland requires is the meaningful devolution we were promised. That is what the SNP’s alternative Queen’s Speech proposes. I commend it to the House.

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[Tim Farron]

The hon. Gentleman earlier described himself as a convert to reform of the House of Lords. It is a pity he was not so in the last Parliament, when we could have done something about it. I will not take any lectures from him on Lords reform, given that the Liberal Democrats are the only people who have doggedly stuck with it for the best part of a century. We do not agree with first past the post for this place, but we still stand. It is the system we have, and rather than take notice of an old convention between two establishment parties, I will take the side of the people, and if we can stop tax credit cuts by using the other place, we will jolly well use it, and if he wants to reform the House of Lords, we will be with him in the Lobbies. We heard the Leader of the Opposition’s response earlier on. I worked out that it lasted 30 seconds longer than the entirety of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, the album by The Beatles. He did not take any interventions from either the Government Benches or from those behind him. Maybe he was scared of a little help from his friends.

With this utterly threadbare Queen’s Speech, it seems as though the Government are running out of steam before anyone has even bothered to fill the kettle. Of the 30 announcements in the Government’s legislative agenda, we have heard 28 of them before. I am especially delighted that the Government have announced the Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Bill, which has been waiting to get on the statute book since December 1954. It would be easy for Opposition politicians to stand up and say everything is terrible, but it is not, so I will not. I welcome the better markets Bill, for example, just as I did when Ed Davey announced it two years ago, as well as the criminal finances Bill announced by Danny Alexander in February last year, the national citizen service piloted by the coalition in 2011, the pensions Bill announced by Steve Webb in 2014, the soft drinks levy announced in the Budget and the commitment to build 1 million homes, as featured in last year’s Queen’s Speech. Just in case we did not hear them the first time, they clearly needed to be said twice.

The Prime Minister has my support on much of what he says about boosting education in prisons, adoption and transparency on mobile phone and broadband speeds, although a universal service obligation for broadband, for which I have been calling for many years, will only be any good if the speed designated is quick enough to help rural communities in particular. I understand that 10 megabits per second is being talked about. A 10-megabits-per-second download speed probably means a 1-meg upload speed, and that is no good for rural communities or business. But mostly, this is a Queen’s Speech with more repeats than ITV3—more repeats, indeed, than Dave. The higher education Bill was in November’s Green Paper. The education Bill has already been a White Paper. Broadband was announced last November. The NHS charges are already happening.

The right hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) mentioned the Government’s obsession with scrapping the Human Rights Act, an idea that has now made its third appearance in the Queen’s Speech. He said it was akin to a demented moth flitting about a lampshade. I wonder whether I can stretch his analogy and say that now is the time we got a nice big copy of “Erskine May” and squashed that moth. The Human Rights Act enshrines fundamental liberties such as the right to free speech, protest and assembly, and the right to live a life free of torture. Which of those freedoms does the Conservative party want to oppose? The devolved settlements for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have the European convention and the Human Rights Act hardwired into them. This Tory Government seem obsessed with unravelling the Union by their actions, all for the sake of appeasing their Back Benchers.

[Sammy Wilson]

Does the hon. Gentleman also accept that human rights legislation has been used to protect some of the worst criminals and allow them to walk the streets, which has angered many people across the United Kingdom? That is why it needs reform.

[Tim Farron]

There will always be outcomes that displease people. If there is a process of adjudicating against the Human Rights Act, it is right that it should be left to the judiciary. It is wrong for politicians to meddle, because the reality is that for every person we read about on the front page of a tabloid newspaper having been exonerated in some way because of the Human Rights Act in a way that people would perhaps disagree with, there are hundreds upon hundreds of less glamorous cases, which we never hear of and which nobody writes about, involving people who have been protected by the Human Rights Act. Let us ask ourselves this question: when we stand up to Vladimir Putin and others who threaten human rights in their own countries and others, what leg do we have to stand on if we undermine human rights here at home? The Government should ditch these ill-thought-out plans or risk them falling flat on their face when they are introduced in Parliament.

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[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

I know that the hour is late, but the previous speaker, the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady), brought more energy into the debate. I agree with very little of what he said, but I want to start in the same vein as he did, by welcoming the election of the First Minister in Northern Ireland, who also happens to be a woman—it seems that women are taking over that position in the devolved Administrations—although she is very different from the two women to whom the hon. Gentleman referred, in the sense that she wants to strengthen the Union, not break it, and to take back powers from Europe, not hand more over. That is the kind of woman I want to see leading Northern Ireland.

One significant point about this Queen’s Speech is that it contained no reference to preparing for terrorist outrages, economic meltdown, firms fleeing the United Kingdom, mass unemployment, huge movements in our export trade, or even world war three. I think that is an indication that the Prime Minister, despite the hysterical rhetoric we have heard from him, knows that after 23 June none of those things will happen, even though the people of the United Kingdom seem to be moving towards deciding that that will be the day on which we regain our independence. There were no such preparations in the Queen’s Speech, so those who listened to it today ought to take some comfort from the fact that even the Government do not believe their own rhetoric on the consequences of the UK voting to leave the European Union.

The Scottish nationalists have talked about this almost being a Queen’s Speech for English devolution. It contained a lot of Bills that do not apply to Scotland or Northern Ireland, but the reason—I would have thought that the Scottish nationalists rejoiced about this—is that the powers have been devolved to Scotland and Northern Ireland. Many Bills applying to Scotland and Northern Ireland, on which we would have had a direct input here, are no longer going through this place, and some of the legislation applies only to England and Wales. That should be a cause for rejoicing by those who believe in devolution and want to see more of it, not a cause for further complaint. At the same time, of course, the Scottish nationalists are arguing that they want to see more of these things done not in Scotland, but in Europe. I am confused. They want to see more Bills about Scotland here, but they also want more devolution. They want more devolution for Scotland, but they also want to give powers to Europe. Where indeed do they stand on the issue of where sovereignty should rest?

It has been reported that one of the measures that will not apply to Northern Ireland is the one on driverless cars. We seems to be the only part of the United Kingdom that will not have legislation for driverless cars, so we will not be able to make telephone calls or read our newspapers while driving—well, not without getting penalty points, as I have found out on occasion. We will not be able to be backseat drivers; we will have to drive our own cars. That is no bad thing, as far as I am concerned, so I am not particularly worried about whether or not Northern Ireland will have legislation on driverless cars.

Some Government Members have been honest that this is probably a holding Queen’s Speech, because the Government’s attention is taken up with other issues. However, I think that there are big issues that needed to be addressed in this Queen’s Speech but have not been—at least, no serious attempt has been made to do so. One of the issues that I would like to have seen addressed is: what do the Government intend to do to ensure that there is more even economic growth, activity and development across the United Kingdom? Yes, of course we have devolved some of the economic powers to the Assembly in Northern Ireland and the Parliament in Scotland, but the fact remains that even with those powers being devolved many of the macroeconomic decisions that are made here then have an impact on the regions of the United Kingdom.

There needs to be a greater recognition by the Government that far too much economic activity is concentrated in one area. That is to the detriment of the country as a whole. It wastes resources. It means that infrastructure is left working to less than full capacity. It means that there have to be movements of people from Northern Ireland and the north-east and north-west of England to the south-east of England, causing the kinds of pressures that we discuss in this House almost every week—house prices and so on—and money needing to be spent on infrastructure to facilitate all this. Serious consideration needs to be given to how we spread economic growth more evenly. As other Members have pointed out, some of the policies that the Government are following exacerbate the problem by concentrating some public services here in the south-east of England and taking them away from places like Northern Ireland, to the extent that that sometimes conflicts with other Government objectives. For example, the closure of tax offices in Northern Ireland means that criminals will be able to get away with more tax fraud. Something needs to be done about that.

The second big issue that is not dealt with is energy policy. The better markets Bill will enable people, through competition, to lower their energy bills. However, the whole issue of energy costs is caused not just by the lack of competition but by the Government’s bigger policy of decarbonising energy and greater use of renewables, and the cost that that imposes on industry. I sympathise with many of the points that Labour Members have made about the decline of the steel industry and many of the other high-energy industries that have been lost in Labour heartlands, but this is partly due to an energy policy that is designed to chase those very industries out of the United Kingdom and towards places where the same policies are not in place. That is another area where I would like to see more imagination and the Government doing more.

On infrastructure, we still have no indication from this Queen’s Speech of when we are going to know the future of air transport and the air hub for the United Kingdom. That holds up many of our exporters and affects our trade.

I welcome the commitment to improving broadband provision. I represent an area that is 40% rural, and almost every week I have people with me who want to operate businesses from home in rural areas who are now required, if they are farmers, to submit many of the forms that are required by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs using the internet, and cannot get a signal. Despite the massive amounts of money that have already been put into improving broadband and the vast sums given to BT, which have not always been used well—in fact, one sometimes wonders whether they have been used at all for that purpose—we are still struggling. We are not scrutinising these proposals in detail this evening, but I want to see a timescale for this commitment and an indication of how the Government intend to meet it. Is the commitment to 10 megabytes sufficient?

What help will be given to those who cannot access fibre-optic broadband? What contribution will they be expected to make? Will they be penalised for living in rural areas? Are the Government prepared to find ways of introducing new competition and new technologies? Many technologies are being held up by the existing provider simply because it does not want that degree of competition. This is about having a dynamic economy. It is not just about people having the internet in their houses so that they can download music; this is vital for small businesses across the whole of the United Kingdom. Not all the businesses in question are in rural areas. My constituency has two industrial parks in the middle of urban areas that do not have the access to fast-speed broadband that businesses depend on.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds) has already mentioned counter-extremism. In Northern Ireland we understand the way in which terrorism works. It is not just about physically stopping people with guns and bombs; it is also about ensuring that a community does not have a mentality that encourages people to give them cover, protect them, hide them, lie for them and provide them with the kind of community support they require.

We fully understand the need for an approach that changes people’s minds and ensures that they are not poisoned by those who wish to engage in terror. We must also acknowledge, however, that such legislation can have unintended consequences. We will look very closely at any proposals relating to how authorities deal with unregulated education settings. They should not include the work that goes on in churches, as suggested by the head of Ofsted. If people are unable to express and teach the tenets of their faith because of interference by the authorities, we will move away from counter-terrorism to a society in which political correctness stifles people’s real religious beliefs and their faith.

It is good that the Government are considering how those on low incomes can be encouraged to save. Nevertheless, it is one thing to encourage and give people incentives to save, but if other economic actions are making it impossible for them to do so, the proposed legislation will not have the desired effect. That is one of the failings of this Queen’s Speech: how do we ensure that the economic growth we are experiencing is spread not just across regions, but across different income bands? Many actions are hitting the poorest.

The Government’s objective of prison reform is commendable. No one wants to see people who leave prison recommitting crimes and going back again. We have to give consideration to the impact of that not just on the individuals, but on society. However, I do not think that the proposed reforms will be possible without considerable expenditure. When people commit horrendous crimes, society expects them to be punished properly. The balance between trying to rehabilitate those who have committed crimes and ensuring that they are punished properly is a delicate one, and the Government must tread carefully.

There are many things in the Queen’s Speech, such as looking after and providing for children in care, prison reform, the digital economy, the infrastructure developments and creating better markets, that will cost money at a time when the Government are trying to find ways of saving money. I make one suggestion to Members of the House who are sceptical about how they should vote on 23 June. On 23 June, there is an opportunity to release to the public purse in the UK £10 billion that could be used to deliver those kinds of reforms and to destroy the influence of Europe on our affairs. If the Government are serious about defending the sovereignty of Parliament and the primacy of the House of Commons, the way to do it is to encourage people to vote leave on 23 June. It will release money for the reforms contained in the Queen’s Speech and deliver sovereignty back to Parliament.

Ordered, That the debate be now adjourned.—(Simon Kirby.)

Debate to be resumed tomorrow.