Debate on the Address

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Wednesday 27th May 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Gillan]

I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman, who has done an awful lot of work in this area. I notice that his Committee was time-limited and has now been rolled in to the Public Administration Committee, which now again covers the constitution. I had the pleasure of serving on the latter Committee in the last Parliament. If I have the pleasure of serving on it again, I can assure him that we will scrutinise this area very carefully, and I believe that that would show the House at its best. We do not want to throw out the baby with the bathwater in this instance.

After the election, I sensed great relief at the result among many of the people I talked to, and—as we would expect from a Conservative Government—the Queen’s speech proposes many important measures to ensure greater accountability and people’s security and safety. We are also offering people the opportunity to improve their lives. Job creation, job security and tax certainty lie at the heart of much of our legislative programme, but the Queen’s Speech also pays attention to the whole picture, relaxing and relieving the burdens on the lowest paid and the smallest businesses, widening home ownership and securing retirement prospects. There is no area that the Queen’s Speech does not touch.

The Gracious Speech also recognises our place on the world stage, and specifically our responsibilities to Ukraine and Iraq. The challenges that we face from extremism and increasing population movement will continue to occupy Government and the House for the whole of the next five years, not just this Session. I appreciate that some of our new neighbours will always be looking for opportunities to find the differences between us, but I hope that they will also look for opportunities to find common purpose, as we face a common enemy and protect the interests of the whole of this country.

I was a fresh starter, in both senses of the word, back in the 1990s, when the Maastricht treaty was debated in this House and the EU had only 12 members. The European Union referendum Bill will give new Members the opportunity early in their careers to reflect on our relationship with the now 27 other countries of the EU. In truth, every country would like to see some reforms, and like many of my constituents I look forward to seeing what the Prime Minister can achieve before putting the question to a public UK-wide vote. I hope the Government will resist the attempts to dilute the opinion of the UK electorate by introducing a four-country hurdle, as suggested by the SNP. It is the UK as a whole that is the member state, not the individual nations. I hope also that the Prime Minister will resist the temptation substantially to change the franchise in any way for the referendum.

I think every Government starts with an education Bill, and the present Government are no different. We have excellent schools in Chesham and Amersham, as we do in the rest of Buckinghamshire, and I share the Government’s determination to drive up standards and declare war on mediocrity and failure; but our schools in Buckinghamshire are not funded as well as those in other parts of the country and we do not receive the same level of grant from the Government. The national average per pupil is now £4,611 and we receive only £4,297, so I hope the Government will revisit what amounts to unfair funding. In our case, the unfairness is exacerbated by the fact that of the three elements that make up the funding in Buckinghamshire—the schools block, the early years block and the high needs block—we received no increase in early years or high needs funding, although there are increasing demands.

During the election, it became even more obvious to me that we are not engaging our young people in politics, no matter where they live. I want a new civic studies course or element to be introduced in the national curriculum, so that students can learn about the structures and relevance of our administrative systems and governance. As some parties are keen to change the franchise to include 16-year-olds, I would have expected universal support across the House for some real education in this area. It would also help me to explain to some of my constituents why they cannot vote for Nicola Sturgeon or Leanne Wood.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making a very cogent speech. May I say how much I agree with her that we need more constitutional studies in our schools? Many of the youngsters I came across during the election said they were not going to vote, and when I asked why, they replied, “Because we don’t know enough about this political system—how it works in this country.” We need our youngsters to be better informed.

[Mrs Gillan]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s support. I know how much you have done, Mr Speaker, to improve the education of young people across the country, and I hope that this would be a natural sequitur to the work we do here in Parliament.

In Buckinghamshire, we have seen close-up the ongoing fallout from the terrible activities of one Jimmy Savile in child sexual grooming in cases such as the successful prosecution of the former head of Caldicott school. I hope the Government will now look again at securing mandatory reporting in regulated activities, so that we can increase the safeguarding surrounding our young people and schoolchildren.

I have had my brush with devolution, and devolution features quite strongly in this Queen’s Speech. I, like many others with shire constituencies, will study the city devolution Bill very carefully. It is all very well to hand more power to the city regions and I am supportive of the principle of putting decisions closer to people, provided that the consequences for other parts of the country are carefully considered. For example, I have a democratic deficit in Chesham and Amersham as a consequence of the governance of London, because Transport for London and London Underground own my stations, and to try to get step-free access at Amersham station involves an almighty battle, because the money is usually wanted elsewhere in London and not in my area, which does not have a vote in the London Assembly. In addition, we need to ensure that in implementing the new policy, the shire counties and other areas of the country not directly within or in the area of a city region do not have their funding squeezed or get forced into alliances that take decisions further away from their electorate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for allowing me to catch your eye in this important Gracious Speech debate. May I welcome you back to your Chair, may I thank the people of The Cotswolds for electing me in ever greater numbers, and may I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister on succeeding for the first time in almost 20 years in getting an overall majority? I suspect he will have to play his cards carefully, because although he will have a honeymoon period for a month, even a year, after that time impediments will no doubt get in his way. I suggest that he get on and do the controversial legislation first.

It is almost déjà vu for me, because in 1992 I was immediately pitched into the all-night Maastricht debates, and today we are likely to be pitched into debates on the European Union. I suspect it will be a very different experience from 1992, because one thing I have learned on the many thousands of doorsteps I stood on in the last five weeks is that there is a huge division of opinion on Europe. Some people are radically in favour of remaining in the EU, while others are violently opposed to remaining in the EU. For that reason I believe a referendum on Europe is absolutely essential, so that we can have the arguments and the debates and then a vote, and live with that verdict, whatever it happens to be—and I think at the moment it is very close.

I congratulate the Scottish nationalists but I hope that they, as good democrats, will respect the result of their referendum in Scotland. They are going to get major devolutionary powers over tax raising and a host of other matters in this Parliament. I hope they will equally respect my constituents who want some form of English votes for English laws. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg): whatever solution we put in place—and I quite like the Standing Order solution because it is simple to enact and simple to get rid of—I hope it will only be operated in sparse and few circumstances.

There are two parts to this Queen’s Speech in my view: constitutional and financial. I am absolutely delighted that we are building in this Queen’s Speech on the financial improvements we made to this country in the last Parliament. Members have not mentioned jobs much so far in this debate. For me, jobs and public services are the two things we were really elected here for. If we do not have a sound economy, we cannot keep creating new jobs. I am particularly pleased that we are creating ever more jobs for youngsters, and ever more apprenticeships—2.2 million in the last Parliament and 3 million in this Parliament—as that is an admirable route for those who do not want, or are not able for one reason or another, to go to university.

I do not want to dwell on domestic matters this evening, however, and I have cover in the Queen’s Speech as Her Gracious Majesty did refer to Ukraine and other matters foreign. It is to those matters that I wish to devote my remaining time in this speech. I want to talk about Ukraine, ISIS in Iraq, Syria and, above all, stabilisation of the African countries so that we begin to solve the real problems we have got with migration into this country.

About two months ago I went to Ukraine and met its Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk. I discovered a very sad state of affairs: the country is bankrupt, almost devoid of all necessities, and certainly does not need a fighting war with Russia. I discussed this matter at a conference this weekend, and I met some very bitter Ukrainians who said to me in very stark terms, “The Americans, yourselves and the Russians signed the Budapest agreement in 1994.” That was not a military agreement, but it was an agreement that prevented aggression towards Ukraine in return for her giving up nuclear weapons. They felt very bitterly that we had not given them sufficient help to deter the Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine. There is no doubt that the Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine is going on at a pace. Every Minsk agreement has been broken almost to the day: the agreement in February was broken the day after by Russia reinforcing its troops within eastern Ukraine, and there have been instances of Russian artillery shelling Ukrainian positions from within Russia itself. We desperately need a strategy on Ukraine. We need, along with the EU and the Americans, to come up with a cohesive strategy that works and that deters the Russians. We have degraded their economy a bit through the sanctions, but we have not deterred their ambitions to take over the whole of eastern Ukraine. I put it to this House that if we do not deter the Russians in their ambitions in this respect, we will continue to have problems with Russian ambitions elsewhere.

[Jim Shannon]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I have very little time left and an awful lot to get through.

I want to move on to Iraq, and talk about ISIS. ISIS is one of the most vile terrorist organisations humanity has ever seen, yet, again, we do not have a concerted strategy to deal with it. We started with the Cyprus talks involving the Americans, the Germans, the French, ourselves, and the Russians. Wrongly, in my view, we did not include the Iranians, but that is another point. Unless we have a concerted strategy to deal with ISIS, it will undoubtedly take over more parts of the world than just Iraq. What worries me most about Iraq is that Iran, with its Shi’a militias, is doing our bidding against ISIS. If we are not careful we will come to a point where Iran—with its emerging nuclear ambitions, despite the agreement with the Americans—will simply take over Iraq. When I close my speech with the figures on oil production, the House will see how dangerous that is.

On Syria, I did a social action project in Gaziantep in south-east Turkey and was able to meet many Syrians in one of the refugee towns. They all—to a man, woman and child—told me they wanted to go back to a country that was at peace with itself. They wanted the international community to intervene and sort out the problems and restore their country to what it had been. It appears to me that the world does not have a concerted policy on Syria. It looks increasingly unlikely that the Free Syrian Army will be able to defeat the President’s regime, and it looks ever more likely that ISIS will play an ever bigger part—again, ISIS is only likely to be defeated by Iran in some form or another, probably backed by the Russians. The Syrian situation is extremely dangerous, and it is extremely bad for the poor people of Syria; 300,000 people have been killed in Syria, and over 2 million people have been displaced. What a human tragedy.

Finally, I want to talk about the Maghreb and the Sahel—north Africa. We are dealing with an unprecedented situation of migrants trying to leave Africa, mostly via Libya—the migrants are mostly not Libyans, but come from other countries—and to cross the Mediterranean to come to Europe. Ultimately this is unsustainable. However Europe decides to deal with the problem, we have to try to keep these people in their own countries, and in doing so we have to redirect our foreign aid. I was delighted to be able to argue during the election that we had kept to our 0.7% of GNI pledge, as that is absolutely right, and I am delighted to be saying this with the Minister of State, Department for International Development, my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Mr Swayne), on the Front Bench. We need to redirect that aid now to north Africa, to try and stabilise some of those countries: give them the help they need; stabilise their Governments and civil service; stabilise, and make sure we have, the infrastructure so that companies want to go into those countries and invest and provide jobs, so that the people are content to remain in those countries and do not have a desperate desire to leave them and come to better climes. These are very important matters that my right hon. Friend needs to deal with.

The trouble with the world today is that where we have very weak Governments, the forces of evil tend to move in. We are seeing it in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are certainly seeing it in some of the north African countries, in Libya, in Chad and in the Central African Republic. We are seeing it in those very weakly governed countries. We are seeing it in Nigeria, too, for goodness’ sake, with the activities of Boko Haram. I believe our aid must go towards trying to strengthen those countries, so that we can defeat and deter some of the dreadful human rights abuses.

I promised the House that I would give the world oil production figures: Iraq has 12% of the world’s oil reserves and Iran has 13%. If we allow Iran to take over Iraq, who would be happy with an emerging superpower, and a nuclear superpower at that, controlling a quarter—that is more than Saudi Arabia and more than Venezuela—of all the world’s oil reserves? I think that could lead to a very big danger for the world.