Points of Order

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 27th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

The short answer to the hon. Lady’s question is that every Member of this House, including Ministers, must take responsibility for the veracity or otherwise of what he or she says. If somebody thinks the House has been inadvertently misled by a Member, the Member is responsible for correcting the record. That is the first point. The second point is that the recourse available to the hon. Lady lies in the Order Paper and the advice proffered by the Table Office. What I mean by that is that persistence pays, and if the hon. Lady thinks she has a good point, she should repeat it. She will have heard me make the observation that repetition is not a novel phenomenon in the House of Commons, and if she wants to keep making her point, she can take advice from the welter of sagacious and experienced colleagues around her as to how best to do so; most of them are very practised at the art, as I am sure the hon. Lady will be, too.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The House will have heard many tributes made to Holocaust Memorial Day today and the Holocaust Educational Trust campaign, “Don’t stand by.” In the light of that and in that spirit, do you agree that it was inappropriate for the Prime Minister, in referring to the refugee crisis in Europe, to use language such as “a bunch of migrants”? Do you think that it would be appropriate for the House to ask the Prime Minister to withdraw that language and use much more statesmanlike language about the need to build a cross-party consensus on such a complex and sensitive issue?

[Mr Speaker]

The right hon. Lady speaks with enormous experience in this House and I respect what she says. I completely identify and empathise with her observations about the Holocaust Memorial Day, which she and I on other occasions have marked at events together, so I take what she says extremely seriously. I do have to say to her and the House, however, that the observation in question was not disorderly; it was not unparliamentary. Everybody must take responsibility for the remarks he or she makes in this House and it is very clear that the right hon. Lady would not have used that term. It is open to the Prime Minister to comment on it if he wishes, but I am not entitled to try to oblige him to say anything on the matter. The right hon. Lady has made her point very clearly, however; it is on the record and people will make their own assessments of this matter.