Article 50 Extension
Debate between Tom Brake and Jo Swinson(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
At Prime Minister’s questions, the Prime Minister accused the House of navel-gazing on the subject of Europe, which is rich from a party that, for the past 30 years or more, has spent all its time navel-gazing—some might say digging around in its navel or, indeed, picking the scabs of Europe. That has left us in the current position. It has always been about the Tory interest in relation to Europe and never the interests of the country.
That is best reflected in the fact that it has required a Standing Order No. 24 application to be granted to enable us to debate something that the Prime Minister should have brought to the House, particularly given the de facto deputy Prime Minister’s comments, which many hon. Members have repeated, about how reckless it would be to seek a short extension.
I am afraid to say that the Prime Minister’s letter immediately fails two basic tests. First, it does not explain the purpose of the extension she seeks. Even worse, as we heard from the right hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson), it was not submitted in time. The Government’s incompetence is unparalleled. They did not submit their letter seeking an extension in time for it to be considered at this European Council meeting.
I make it clear to the Minister why the Liberal Democrats and, indeed, other Opposition parties are seeking an extension to article 50. First, the extension should be longer than the three months that the Government are apparently seeking, and it should be for a very simple purpose, which is to allow time for a people’s vote. If that requires European elections to be fought, we will fight them. We could well be, perhaps for the first time in British history, fighting European elections on the values and principles of the EU. We may have Nigel Farage’s Brexit party, funded by who knows whom, from who knows where, fighting that campaign, but the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National party, the Labour party—one would hope—the Greens and so on may well be fighting the European Parliament elections on the basis of the values of the EU. These are the values that have ensured security and peace, and have ensured that the EU can deal collectively with issues such as climate change in a positive way. If we have those elections, bring them on. We would welcome the opportunity to talk positively about what the EU has done.
There is not very much positive about Brexit, but the one silver lining that I hope Members from nearly all parties—not the Democratic Unionist party but all the other parties in this place—have found is that the issue of Brexit has brought together Members of different parties who often have never worked together before. That has happened in a collegiate way, whereby we are willing to work together. As I understand it, that is how the Danes were able to get themselves out of the hole they had dug for themselves in 1992 with the Maastricht treaty. They resolved that by bringing the parties together and finding a way out of it together. That is not what our Prime Minister has done. Bearing in mind that we are 1,000 days after the vote of 23 June 2016, what she attempted, for a brief flash about 100 days ago, was to organise a series of one-off meetings with party leaders and with other members of those parties. She ticked that box and said, “I have talked to the other parties. It is all dealt with.” I am not sure what is happening today, but I am not sure it will add much to the sum total of her connections with the other parties.
Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)
I hear what my right hon. Friend says about the Brexit situation bringing people together from different parties to work together. Does he accept that it has brought people together up and down the country? In this country we now have one of the largest pro-European movements in Europe, and we will see that on the streets of London this Saturday.
Russian Interference in UK Politics
Debate between Tom Brake and Jo Swinson(6 years, 4 months ago)
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Tom Brake
That is a very good point, which I will come back to. The Minister now has advance notice that he needs to be prepared to answer that question, because it is clearly a source of concern.
There is no soft power in Putin’s eyes and, as far as he is concerned, the use of social media to interfere in foreign states is a vital, weaponised tool. The covert interference I referred to is supplemented by more overt attempts to create a media counter-narrative. I am now talking about RT. The RT chief editor, Margarita Simonyan, is on the record comparing RT to the Ministry of Defence, saying in 2008:
“We were fighting the information war against the whole of the Western world”.
She referred to “the information weapon”, which is used in “critical moments”, and said that RT’s task in peacetime is to build an audience, so they can fight the information war better next time. Not surprisingly, therefore, Chatham House and the Henry Jackson Society see RT as a tool of destabilisation from the Kremlin.
Members will know that RT was found in breach by Ofcom in September 2015 for stories about Assad and chemical weapons. However, as I understand it, Ofcom has not always enforced sanctions as and when appropriate. According to the Library, Sputnik has never been found in breach by Ofcom. Ofcom imposed 84 sanctions against 57 broadcasters in the 10 years up to March 2017—RT was not the subject of a sanction during that time—and found broadcasters in breach of the broadcasting code more than 2,500 times
I am certainly not advocating shutting down RT, and I do not think anyone else is. I just want to ensure that it abides by the broadcasting rules and that appropriate action is taken by Ofcom every time it does not. Is the Minister happy with Ofcom’s actions? Does it consistently pursue RT for breaches in the way he would like? As an aside, I would like Ofcom to be much more active in pursuing a number of other TV channels that are broadcast here, in particular when threats are made to the Ahmadi Muslim community on some of those channels.
No British parliamentarian should be taking money from RT. In fact, I would go one step further and say that, frankly, no British parliamentarian should appear on RT. The only exception to that rule might be if they have complete control and are completely unedited—if they can go on the channel and say what they want, knowing that it will not be chopped, edited and cut by RT. Apart from that, no one here or in the House of Lords should ever appear on that channel. The only time that RT ever contacts me is when I have said something critical about the Government. Well, I am happy to say critical things about the Government on the BBC, but RT is trying to create an agenda that is about attacking the Government at every turn, and I will not facilitate that process.
The next issue is the question of whether the Russians are infiltrating or leaking content from political party systems. Well, we know what they did regarding the Democrats. Incidentally, they also hacked the Republicans, but they only released the information on the Democrats. We also know that they attempted to infiltrate Macron’s team by setting up a number of websites with pseudo-official titles that would email Macron’s members of staff, trying to get them to click on links and provide back-door access to their systems. As I understand it, Macron managed to defeat that, mainly by inserting some fake news into the content that the Russians were trying to access so that the story was demolished because of the inconsistencies within it.
As Members will know, Monsieur Macron had a more aggressive and muscular stance towards Russia than any other parties in that French presidential election, and I believe that that is why he was targeted in a way in which the others were not. As I understand it, the other French political parties were targeted, but the Russians were clearly interested in releasing information that related to Macron in particular. Mr Putin has said that these hackers may not be associated with the Government and that they may be “patriotic” hackers. Well, they may be patriotic hackers as far as he is concerned, but one has to suspect that they have the Government’s endorsement, because I am sure that the Russian Government could clamp down on these so-called patriotic hackers if they wanted to do so.
I am trying to make my questions very clear because I know that the officials in the Box can then provide a written answer for the Minister to read out and get on the record straightaway, so I have another easy question for him. Will he consider making UK political parties part of the critical national infrastructure, and what are the implications of taking such a step?
To be able to ascertain the level of threat, we have to assess it accurately, otherwise I risk coming across as a conspiracy theorist. I know that I do already in relation to Brexit, but I do not want to become the person known for conspiracy theories in this place. The difficulty we have is that we do not really know the extent of the activity because, frankly, no one has investigated it properly yet. It is only when that has been done that we will know. I regret that it took so long for the Intelligence and Security Committee to be reconstituted, but I welcome the fact that it has stated that Russia will be a topic that it will focus on. Does the Minister think that the Committee should give priority to the subject? Would he also want the ISC to work effectively with the Electoral Commission so that it can go to places that the Electoral Commission cannot? An ISC inquiry would help us to establish accurately the level of threat.
To pick up on an earlier intervention, we know that Facebook was asked by the Electoral Commission to look at examples of paid ads from Russia, but it was not asked to look at the use of bots or trolls, so the picture we are going to get will, at best, be very incomplete. The response the commission has had—that the Russians apparently spent £7.50 on advertising—does not quite sound right to me.
Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing the debate. We are not talking just about a few Twitter or Facebook accounts with no picture avatar and 10 followers. The David Jones account had more than 100,000 followers and was listed as one of the most influential Twitter accounts during the last general election. It purports to be from Southampton, yet it tweets exclusively in office hours in a Russian time zone. Surely the social media companies have a greater role to play in identifying fake accounts—which are pretending to be something they are not—for the integrity of the debate we should all enjoy online.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Tom Brake and Jo Swinson(6 years, 4 months ago)
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Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)
Tom Brake
Professor Childs recommended a target of a representative parliamentary Press Gallery—Lobby journalists—such that neither women nor men should be in receipt of less than 40% of Lobby passes by 2020. As of 6 December, 25.6% of the 246 valid Lobby passes on issue were for women. As a result of my hon. Friend’s question, I will seek the best means of publishing those figures on a regular basis.
Jo Swinson
Diversity matters in our democracy— both in this House and also up there in the Press Gallery, among those who create the lens through which our politics is viewed. I am glad that the Commission will look to publish diversity data on the journalists covering Parliament, but I encourage it to implement recommendation 4 of “The Good Parliament” review in full by publishing data not only on gender, but on other characteristics; by breaking down the data by media organisation; and by setting clear targets so that, by 2020, men and women each have no fewer than 40% of passes for the journalists’ Lobby on the estate.
Tom Brake
My hon. Friend may be aware that currently neither the Commons Reference Group on Representation and Inclusion, nor the Commission, has considered the recommendation of “The Good Parliament” report. However, following her question, I will certainly ensure that they do as soon as possible, and I will look specifically at ensuring that the extensive level of detail that she has requested is reflected in future reports.
Budget Resolutions
Debate between Tom Brake and Jo Swinson(6 years, 5 months ago)
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Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)
The British economy today faces three key challenges. First, we have low productivity, with the associated wage stagnation that comes with it, and of course the reduced tax receipts. Secondly, we have high public sector debt. We must recognise the constraints that that places on what is possible economically, and be honest about some of the hard choices that need to be made. Thirdly, there is Brexit, which has already been described as the elephant in the room. We see the uncertainty it is creating for businesses and investment in the country, its impact on our economy, and the opportunity cost of all the energy and money being spent on preparing for it that could otherwise be directed elsewhere.
The Chancellor is a serious man. We had significant differences in coalition but in recent months he has appeared to be one of the few voices of reason in the Cabinet on Brexit. He had an unenviable task coming to the House today, given the picture of higher inflation, lower growth, lower productivity and high levels of debt. It really is bleak. The economy will be £45 billion smaller in 2021 than had been projected just in March this year, so his attempts to paint a cheerful vision of the future were rather less successful than his jokes. The truth is, as the Chancellor knows, that this Budget, the next one, the Budget after that and all future Budgets are made all the more difficult because of Brexit and the extreme approach to it that this Government are pursuing. Making it clear that an exit from the single market and the customs union is a red line for the Government—this is aided and abetted by the Labour Front-Bench team—imperils the future of the UK economy, and the Chancellor knows it.
The right hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) rightly said that there is no pot of gold at the end of the Brexit rainbow, although the more appropriate metaphor is that of a thunderstorm. We learned today that the cost of Brexit preparations is not just the £700 million already allocated but a further £3 billion, which is more than the extra money that could be found for the NHS, and that tells its own story. We need to add to that the exit bill, and who knows what that will be—£20 billion, £30 billion, £40 billion? In addition, there is the overall hit to the economy, which the OECD has suggested could be £40 billion. It is no surprise that these figures were not stuck on the side of a bus in the referendum campaign.
To promote the health of our economy we have long needed to use the advantage of low borrowing rates to increase investment in the economy, so I welcome some of the measures set out today to unlock new house building. However, they are not ambitious enough. As ever in Budgets, the devil is in the detail. The headline figure touted was £44 billion, but only £15 billion of that was new and just £6 billion of it was extra for increasing the housing supply. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) said, there was next to no help for extra social housing, which of course is badly needed as part of the mix.
On the NHS, Simon Stevens had asked for £4 billion next year, but the Chancellor’s response does not come close. The new revenue peaks at £1.9 billion next year and then drops to £1.1 billion. As I say, Liberal Democrat Members appreciate that hard choices need to be made, and if we want to resource our NHS and social care properly we need to look at how to find the funds. That is why we have proposed an increase in income tax of one penny in the pound specifically for the NHS and social care. It is worth noting that social care was something the Chancellor did not even think worth mentioning in his remarks.
Jo Swinson
Next year, £1.9 billion, so the Chancellor has fallen significantly short. I am sure the Foreign Secretary will be beating a path to his door to try to make that bus happen—or perhaps not.
On social care, we need serious responses and serious cross-party work to find long-term solutions instead of the half-baked policies, cooked up in secret, that the Government offered at the last election. On taxation, there was a missed opportunity not only to increase income tax in the way my party has suggested to fund the NHS, but to increase capital gains tax and corporation tax. Instead of this race to the bottom of trying to get to 17%, we could keep that a competitive rate of 20% and get the additional funding that that would generate.
The Chancellor was right to say that international action is needed to create fairer taxation, but he failed to address the role of the overseas territories. We should require them to comply with UK standards on transparency, or companies registered there should be prevented from doing business in the UK. In the spirit of being transparent, I ought to be transparent about the fact that my husband works for Transparency International UK. In the context of rocketing executive pay, it is impossible to escape the contrasts between the rich, who can hide their assets and avoid tax, those on middle incomes in both the public and private sectors, who are facing real-terms pay cuts, and the poor, many of whom, whether they are working or not, rely on benefits to make ends meet.
The right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) mentioned the £12 billion of cuts to benefits that are still to come—£12 billion of cuts that the Liberal Democrats blocked in the coalition. The rise in the income tax threshold, although welcome, contrasts with the continued freeze in benefits. That was bad enough last year or the year before, but in the face of inflation of 3% it will cause real hardship. We see some changes to universal credit, but the wider problems have been ignored, not least the £3 billion of cuts that were introduced in 2015. Universal credit needs to be paused while the problems are ironed out. There is merit in having a simpler system, but using the new system to make deep cuts fools no one and undermines the important principles that underlie universal credit.
On the environment, I welcome the consideration of new charges on single-use plastics—a Lib Dem idea—but there is precious little else to demonstrate that the Government appreciate the scale of the climate threat we face. They have scrapped rules for zero-carbon homes, cut subsidies for solar and renewable heat, privatised the green investment bank and scrapped the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Today, we saw no new resource for tidal, waste from energy or carbon capture and storage. The Government do not have a strong record on the environment.
On a positive note, I welcome a couple of things in the Budget. I welcome the investment in technology, such as artificial intelligence, driverless cars and geospatial data. I was going to make the point that ethics need to be at the heart of how we proceed, because whether we can do something is not the same as whether we should do something. I was therefore delighted to read on page 45 of the Red Book that the Government intend to establish a centre for data ethics and innovation. That is urgently needed and we should lead the way in that area. On that issue, I say well done to the Government and I look forward to exploring it further with Ministers.
I also welcome the national retraining scheme, in particular the partnership with the CBI and the TUC to make that work, with the focus on digital and construction skills in the first instance. However, I would say, particularly in the context of the automation challenge to our workforce, that we should be looking more at the care sector. There are certain things that robots will not be able to do in the near, or indeed the distant, future. One such thing is caring and human empathy. We also face a demographic time bomb, so we need to be upskilling and investing in the care sector to change it from a low-status profession to one that we recognise as high-skilled. We should therefore ensure that it is properly resourced.
In conclusion, our country faces big challenges and opportunities. There is a bleak economic outlook, low productivity, the threat of climate change, the pace of technological change and the impact of automation on work. Those challenges are enough to keep any Government awake at night. They need attention, innovation and new ideas. Instead, we have a Government obsessed and consumed by Brexit, and they are not even doing that competently. The economic picture outlined by the Chancellor today makes it clearer than ever that we need an exit from Brexit.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Tom Brake and Jo Swinson(6 years, 6 months ago)
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Tom Brake
The expectation is that once the shadow sponsor board and the delivery authority have been established, it might take them something of the order of 12 to 18 months to consider the options for decanting. That would therefore add to the timescales. I welcome the fact that we are going to have the debate by the end of this year. We really need that, because meanwhile the fabric of the building continues to deteriorate and the very high maintenance costs that we incur as a result also continue apace.
Jo Swinson
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the public might be somewhat puzzled at the thought of a further 12 to 18 months’ delay while options that have already been assessed are discussed yet again? When works are considered urgent for structural and safety reasons, surely we should choose the option that maximises the ability to carry out those works efficiently while minimising the cost to the public purse without any further delay.
Tom Brake
I thank my hon. Friend for that question. Since the original Joint Committee report, the idea of creating a contingency Chamber and perhaps doing more works around the northern estate have changed the picture slightly. The sponsor board and the delivery authority will be established according to the timescale set out, and I hope that she and others will take advantage of the engagement programme that the Government have launched, with three separate dates on 14, 21 and 28 November, and that Members will avail themselves of the opportunity to go on the tour of the basements to see why these works are needed.