Foreign Affairs Committee

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Lindsay Hoyle

Tuesday 19th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I seek your guidance, following the comments you have made so far. We are debating the motion on the Order Paper about the selection of Committee members, but I am interested in the context of how we got there. I seek your guidance on what weight we should put on the context of where we are today, as well as what it is in the motion.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

The motion is quite simple: it is about the replacement of people on the Foreign Affairs Committee. It is as narrow as that. This is not a witch hunt of certain individuals. [Interruption.] No, it is not. As tempting as it may be, that is not what the debate is about. There has been a little leeway, and I understand the frustration, but it cannot be about that. It is about the replacement of names. I have a job to do. I have to rule on the debate we are having.

Budget Resolutions

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Lindsay Hoyle

Monday 27th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

I do not remember saying that Britain does not have a role to play in the world. What I said, and I will say it again, is that the role in the world the UK Government appear to have decided for Britain is not a role that the people of Scotland will be comfortable following. Nobody would deny that any country in the world has a role to play. If the Official Report shows that I said anything different, I will withdraw it. [Interruption.]

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. The Front Benchers have had a good go tonight. If they are going to intervene, it has to be with very short interventions. I am very sorry but, if people give way, others might fall off the list.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

My Conservative colleagues simply do not recognise what the hon. Member for Glenrothes has just said as a fact in Scotland. There is only one party on the rise in Scotland, and it is not the SNP.

The reality is that our country and this Government can stand proud of our work on the world stage. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan). The whole House recognises that she is a credit to the medical profession, and it is a credit to this House that she took time to go out to see the Rohingya crisis at first hand—it is a terrible situation. I recognise what she said about babies, as I heard the reports on “From Our Own Correspondent”. I cannot imagine the pain she must have been through. I pay tribute to her, because she is a credit to this House and to her profession.

That represents what this country is good at, which is helping in the world. I am proud that more money has been spent by Britain alone than by all the other European countries added together to help the Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. We have been taking refugees, too—not to the extent that other nations have, fair enough, but we have been doing our bit. More importantly, we are putting resources on the ground. I simply do not recognise the view that this Government, however people want to describe them, are setting this country out as a place with which nobody wants to be associated, because that is not true.

It was the Royal Navy that was in the hurricane-torn areas of the Caribbean. Going back a few years, it was the Royal Navy that sorted out the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone. This Government have committed to raising the defence budget by 0.5 percentage points over inflation year on year, because we recognise the need to invest in our armed forces.

Yes, only a few nations spend 2% or more of GDP on defence, but we are one of even fewer nations to spend more than 20% of our defence budget on capital infrastructure within our armed forces. That shows the renewal of our Royal Navy under this Government and our investment in other areas of defence. There is much on the global economy and global Britain of which we can be proud.

We have heard many people, and we will hear more this evening, talk about Brexit and where Brexit is, but Labour Members cannot carry on talking about Brexit without coming to one fundamental decision: we cannot nationalise if we are in the single market, so for Labour Members to say that they feel the Government should maintain our membership of the single market is totally at odds with the manifesto they stood on. I do not think we should be nationalising, which is looking backwards, but the reality is that we simply cannot nationalise under state aid rules if we are in the single market. I therefore seek some clarity tonight. Is it the Labour party’s position that it definitely wants to leave the single market?

Business of the House

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Lindsay Hoyle

Thursday 13th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

I call “Our Man in Havana”—Alec Shelbrooke.

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. In the previous Parliament, I introduced a private Member’s Bill to ban unpaid internships. The Matthew Taylor report outlined this week that they are indeed damaging to social mobility and an abuse of power by employers. May we have a debate in this Chamber on all aspects of the Matthew Taylor report? For all the crowing on the other side, no Opposition Member bothered to turn up to debate the private Member’s Bill.