Lobby and Media Briefings: Journalists' Access Debate
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Charlotte Nichols
Main Page: Charlotte Nichols (Labour - Warrington North)Department Debates - View all Charlotte Nichols's debates with the Cabinet Office
Lobby and Media Briefings: Journalists' Access
Charlotte Nichols Excerpts(4 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Chloe Smith
I have already answered that point a few times. Again, the answer is that, under the lobby arrangements, any member of the lobby with a press pass is more than welcome to put any question to the Government. That goes for journalists from any corner of our United Kingdom. We on the Government Benches are a Unionist party, and we think that that it should be more than possible to run that kind of practice across the nations of our wonderful country. We welcome close co-operation between the people and the press of Scotland and every other part of our United Kingdom, which I hope will stay united. Again, all of that is supplemented by what we are offering as technical briefings, which I hope can be read as spreading across the Union in that way.
Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)
I was interested to hear the Minister refer to the people’s PMQs on Facebook and engagement on social media as some sort of alternative to proper scrutiny of the Government’s decisions by the press lobby. The Prime Minister cannot even answer what shampoo he uses in the people’s PMQs on Facebook. Why is he running scared?