Business of the House

Kirsten Oswald Excerpts

Wednesday 30th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for her question. We want to get back to people’s participating physically as soon as possible. The House has been running an effective testing system for people who may have covid, and the question of flow testing has been considered, but other priorities have meant that the facilities are not there for that. Obviously, higher-risk Members of Parliament will be vaccinated in accordance with their turn.   That will begin to take effect and I assume that some of the older Members of the House are beginning to get appointments to be vaccinated or, indeed, possibly are being vaccinated. It is important, however, that we get back physically so that we have the proper cut and thrust of debate, operate in the normal way on behalf of our constituents, and are in the same state as the rest of the country.

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP) [V]]

It is a great shame that the UK Government elected to leave the Erasmus scheme, which has supported thousands of young Scottish people to study and work abroad, as well as youth work, adult education and vocational training. Many elements of Erasmus support are not replicated in the proposed new Turing scheme, so thousands will lose out, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Can we have an urgent debate on resolving the problems caused by this short-sighted and damaging decision?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

When I was a schoolboy, I had to learn to construe the letters of Erasmus from Latin into English, which I was never very good at, and I am afraid that rather than seeing him as a great figure of renaissance and learning, I found that he mainly complained about his lumbago and the poor dinners he was getting. None the less, the Erasmus programme is being replaced with a better programme, one that encapsulates what we are looking at. We are leaving the European Union and we thought that participation in the Erasmus programme would not be in the interests of the United Kingdom, but we are going to be looking globally, because that is what we are doing: we are taking our eyes from the narrow European focus and lifting them up to the horizon of the globe.