John Bercow
Main Page: John Bercow (Speaker - Buckingham)Department Debates - View all John Bercow's debates with the Home Office
(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Keith Vaz
I am happy to agree with the hon. Gentleman, who is also a fellow member of the Home Affairs Committee; he is absolutely right. The EU looks at these issues only within the confines of the EU. Because Turkey is not a member, it is not included in any aspects of co-operation. An example of that is the way the RABITs were deployed in Greece to deal with illegal immigration. Because the UK was not part of Schengen, we were not allowed to be a formal part of the activity of the RABITs. As a result, we were left marginalised.
Mr Speaker, I can see that you are about to tell me that I am out of order. [Interruption.] Oh, you are not. You were frowning, Mr Speaker, and I have known you long enough to know that a frown may have indicated that you were about to stop my flow. Let me go back to the original reason behind this debate. I was tempted along the other path by the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless).
Mr Speaker
Order. I am sorry if the right hon. Gentleman was concerned that I was frowning. Perhaps I can satisfy simultaneously his curiosity and that of the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). I have made inquiries, as the hon. Member for North East Somerset would expect, and I am now in a position to tell him and the House that the word in question, maximal, is the penultimate word in the second column of page 1,720 of the new “Shorter Oxford English Dictionary”. I know that the hon. Gentleman already knew that, but I am just reminding him.
Keith Vaz
I am enormously grateful that my speech will go down in history as the one in which you made such an important ruling, Mr Speaker, and thank you very much for choosing my speech in which to do it.
Let me conclude by saying that I hope the Minister will use the time available to the Government to make sure that the structures I have described are used to their maximum to ensure that we get the greatest amount of co-operation.
