Deep Sea Mining Bill

John Bercow Excerpts

Friday 6th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, and it should be considered. Again, the Minister may be able to address it.

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The hon. Gentleman is making a conscientious application to serve on the Bill Committee, where that matter, among many others to which he has briefly alluded, can be explored in further detail.

[Philip Davies]

I am very grateful to you for highlighting my pitch for me, in a far more eloquent way than I was, Mr Speaker, so that nobody could be in any doubt that I would, obviously, be delighted to serve on the Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

That is an exciting way of looking at it—to adopt a real free-market approach, which allows companies to go out to prospect, as they did in California in the 19th century, and as Cecil Rhodes did when he went to South Africa. He found great acres of space and he made a claim and he dug and he dug and he dug, and he found gold, diamonds and platinum, and he put them into a great company, and he made millions—in modern money, billions—of pounds by doing that. That was not through state regulation, not through international bodies, not through the United Nations reaching an agreement to say, “You may do this,” or “You may do that,” but by enterprise, hard work and energy—by all those great British virtues of which we should be so proud. Why not say that of the oceans? Why not mount expeditions? We could launch one together, Mr Speaker, to try and find the lost city of Atlantis, which we would expect to have all sorts of valuables—metals, gold, excitements—in it.

We could have other companies, perhaps, doing more careful geological surveys to locate those metals—the rare earth metals. An interesting fact about rare earth metals is that they are not particularly rare. The Chinese sold them very cheaply to start with, but they became a monopolist and then they raised the price. In doing so, they showed absolutely classic monopolistic behaviour. Those metals are not particularly rare, although they are quite expensive to gather together. People could go off as a free-enterprise endeavour, without having to pay for licences and regulations.

Every pound that is spent on a licence is a pound that cannot be spent on exploration, or on exploitation of the asset once it is found. How relieved I was to hear from Mining Weekly about the speed with which the sea bed—the mighty sea bed—restores itself to pristine condition after someone has been down and done a little digging. That conjures up wonderful images. I was delighted to hear my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Sheryll Murray) say that there is always a Cornish miner involved, and that they go down and dig, even at the depths of the ocean, to find valuable assets that we may be able to exploit for the benefit of the British people. That is a free-enterprise endeavour.

Interestingly, those who spoke in the debates in the early ’80s thought there would be a great expansion of activity at the depths of the ocean. Why did that not happen? Is it not obvious, Mr Speaker? The dead hand of legislation and bureaucracy came crushing down on those who wanted to be enterprising in their prospecting activities. So there was no equivalent of the Californian gold rush. There was no shout of, “There’s gold in them there hills,” or anything of that kind, of the undersea hills.

As we are talking about geology, it is worth mentioning that the great father of geology, a Mr Smith, started all his work in North East Somerset, in the village of High Littleton. Going down in a mineshaft, he saw the different layers of the earth and worked out—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I am all agog at the racy and intoxicating oration that the hon. Gentleman is delivering to the House, but I have two concerns. First, if the hon. Gentleman leads a lengthy sojourn, either accompanied or unaccompanied, in the terms that he describes, he may be sorely missed in North East Somerset. Secondly, I feel sure that, ere long, notwithstanding the quite legendary eloquence that the hon. Gentleman has thus far deployed, he will turn his attention to the contents of the Deep Sea Mining Bill itself.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Because so many other Members are keen to speak in the debate, I shall keep my remarks short. I know the Benches are not currently filled, but people are waiting in their offices to come racing down into the Chamber the minute the Minister has said a few words, such is their excitement to talk about the details of the Bill.

The details of the Bill are of course crucial. Its worst aspect is that it removes the Secretary of State’s ability to repeal legislation. If there is one thing that I take particular exception to, it is the idea that legislation that was temporary and could be removed is now to become a permanent burden on our statute book. When we look, in the No Lobby, at the statutes of this great nation, we see one volume covering the first few hundred years of the existence of Parliament, and now we see a volume barely doing a Session of Parliament. How glorious it would be if more Bills gave Secretaries of State power to take them off the statute book—to deregulate. I would urge that the Bill should have a more deregulatory ambition, and therefore in the early stages of its consideration we should delete the conversion of the 1981 Act from temporary to permanent, because the temporary nature of legislation is one of the pious hopes that all legislators should have. We should wish our legislation to deal with a temporary problem and then restore the liberties of the British subject as soon as possible. That would be my first concern over the Bill and the regulations within it.