Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Mitchell Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Ed Miliband]

We do have a defence and security partnership with the European Union, but my hon. Friend speaks eloquently about these issues. As I said in an earlier answer, we want to do more work with the European Union on questions of information, and we will say more about that in the coming weeks. My hon. Friend also raised wider issues. Hybrid warfare is not just about information and misinformation; as we know from the recent incident in Leipzig, it is about sabotage, espionage, cyber-attacks and a range of other issues, and we need to be extremely vigilant about it.

[Sir Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)]

In the discussions that the Foreign Secretary is holding with European countries, is he also emphasising the vital role that soft power and the international development budget play in promoting security? Does he realise that since this Government’s cuts in spending on international development, we now allocate less for Africa from the development budget than we allocate to UK postcodes from that same budget for first-year asylum seeker costs?

[Ed Miliband]

The right hon. Gentleman speaks with enormous authority about these issues and has a proud record in that regard, and I could not agree with him more on the substantive part of his question about the role that international development plays. He may know that as part of our G20 presidency next year we have committed ourselves, in fiscally constrained times, to seeking to do more about the combination of the debt burden, climate breakdown, and the need to bring about growth and tackle poverty in developing countries. We must accept the fiscal constraints that we face, but that does not mean we cannot act through, for instance, the multilateral development banks. I look forward to working on these issues with the right hon. Gentleman, and with other Members on both sides of the House.