Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Douglas Alexander and Nick Timothy(3 days, 20 hours ago)
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Mr Alexander
In substantive terms, the hon. Gentleman’s point is important: we should be looking to reduce unnecessary barriers to trade between the United Kingdom and our friends, neighbours and partners in the European Union. However, on a political level, it is worth recognising that, had Scotland voted in 2014 to leave the United Kingdom, it would also have left the European Union. There is a certain irony in being told that a politics of flags, borders and manufactured grievances are wrong in one context, when his party continues to argue for them in another.
Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)
According to reports in The Guardian, Government sources have said that issues around visas have been resolved as part of the Government’s free trade agreement negotiations with India. Will the Secretary of State rule out visa liberalisation as part of those negotiations?
US Steel Import Tariffs
Debate between Douglas Alexander and Nick Timothy(2 months, 3 weeks ago)
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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
Mr Alexander
My hon. Friend is a doughty defender of the interests of Peterborough and of his constituents, and he is right to recognise that pride in steel making extends beyond Port Talbot, Scunthorpe, historically Motherwell and other locations of significant steel capability. On the specific point he raises, of course there remains a residual power available to individual companies under the Trade Remedies Authority to take action on dumping perceived to be happening. However, I reassure the House that the UK’s steel safeguards do and will remain in place until the end of June 2026, and I hope that offers him some comfort.
Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)
The attacks on the last Conservative Government might carry more weight if this Government were not planning to equalise our carbon price with the European carbon price, but that is by the by.
Given the conduct of China over the years, measures to hold down production costs in other countries and now President Trump’s tariffs, will the Minister accept that, if international free trade was not always a myth, it certainly is dead today, and will he commit to abandoning the theories and policies that follow his logic? Comparative advantage is used as intellectual cover for outsourcing production jobs and prosperity to countries that cheat the system. So can we see some trade realism and a strategy—a real strategy—to cut industrial energy costs, keep us making virgin steel, and get us manufacturing and exporting more?
Mr Alexander
If the hon. Gentleman has an appetite for trade realism, let us get real: the Prime Minister for whom he worked failed to do a US-UK trade deal. Let us also get real about the fact that the central underpinnings of the party of which he is a member at the time of the Brexit referendum—that we were in a less protectionist world, that we would have a functioning World Trade Organisation system and, indeed, that we would have major trading blocs seeking to take barriers down rather than put barriers up—have all been misplaced. His leader, the now Leader of the Opposition, generously conceded a couple of weeks ago that there was no growth plan following the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU. It is for this Government to clean up the mess that his Government left.