Pairing

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Monday 23rd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Minister says that we should not believe the press reports that we have seen, so can he settle this matter once and for all? Did the Chief Whip also call other MPs and ask them to break the pair alongside the right hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis)? Because if he did, that is not a mistake, it is a policy.

I say to the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) that this does matter, because if the public cannot trust the Government to organise themselves, how can they trust them to organise a country?

[Mr Lidington]

Every pair other than that with the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire was honoured last Tuesday.

Electoral Commission Investigation: Vote Leave

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Tuesday 17th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chloe Smith]

Yes, it is. In response to a report by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, we will shortly bring forward a consultation on ensuring that there are imprints on digital campaigning material just as much as there would be on paper. I think that is important.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Minister confirms that there is now an ongoing police investigation as a result of this report. Does she not therefore think it is right that all those who could potentially be part of that police investigation recuse themselves from Government until it is concluded? Surely law-makers should not be law-breakers.

[Chloe Smith]

It is not for me to confirm a police investigation—it is for the Electoral Commission. It is not for me to comment on what ought to be in a police investigation—it is for the independent regulator. I think that distinction is quite important.

Oral Answers to Questions

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Wednesday 9th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vara]

I repeat what I said earlier: this is a devolved matter. We have to respect—[Interruption.] The hon. Lady in particular, given that she is a Scottish National party Member, will want to respect the rights of the devolved Assemblies. Criminal law is a devolved issue in Northern Ireland. I say again that there have been no prosecutions at all as regards the rape issue in the 50 years since 1967 when section 5 was introduced, and that the outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions has said that it is highly unlikely that there will be any.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

2. What steps she is taking to support equality and human rights in Northern Ireland; and if she will make a statement.

[The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Karen Bradley)]

This Government have a strong track record of supporting equality and human rights across the whole United Kingdom.

[Stella Creasy]

“Cruel, inhumane and degrading”—not my words, but those of the United Nations on our treatment of women in Northern Ireland. Given the absence of an Assembly, why does the Secretary of State choose to recognise the importance of a free vote in this place on same-sex marriage while refusing to extend the same protection to Northern Irish women’s fundamental right not to be forced to continue an unwanted pregnancy?

[Karen Bradley]

The hon. Lady knows that abortion is a very sensitive issue, and there are strongly held views on both sides of the debate. It is also a devolved matter, as she has said. She refers to the fact that I am on record as saying that a vote on same-sex marriage, among Government Members, is a matter of conscience, and that is also true for abortion. But it would not be right for the UK Government to undermine the devolution settlement by trying to force on the people of Northern Ireland something that we in Westminster think is right; the people of Northern Ireland have to make that decision.

Oral Answers to Questions

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Wednesday 18th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that. I have not yet met Prime Minister Trudeau this week, but this is certainly an issue that we have made sure is being spoken about here at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, and we will raise it within the G7 context.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

In 2009, Michelle Samaraweera was raped and murdered. Since 2012, Aman Vyas has been avoiding extradition for this and eight other charges of sexual violence against women in Walthamstow. There have been 47 hearings to date, with the judge not showing up for seven of them, and seven different judges have been appointed. When the Prime Minister talks to her good friend Prime Minister Modi while he is here in London, will she commit to raising this case with him and asking India to take it seriously, so that we can finally get justice for Michelle?

[The Prime Minister]

I have already met Prime Minister Modi for our bilateral discussions. There are a number of issues of extradition between the two countries—the UK and India. We raise a number of cases with the Indian Government, as I did this morning. It is important that we recognise the independence of the judiciary in both countries.

Syria

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern]

I could not have said it better myself.

I want to offer the Prime Minister another chance to do something about this. I accept that, immediately, this may be a forlorn hope, but I still want to offer her the chance. I would like her to stand at the Dispatch Box and tell me that she will double the number of refugees that we will take by 2020. Then we will know that she is really serious about global Britain. She should stand at the Dispatch Box and tell me that we will double the number of Dubs kids that we will accept, and then I will think that she really means it.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way in what is an incredibly powerful speech. I am so pleased that she raised the issue of the Dubs children, because we know that there are Syrian children in the refugee camps in Greece. This conflict has been going on for seven years, and of course people have fled further than just the nearest camps. Turkey is taking 3 million, and we have not even taken the 3,000 we said we would take when we passed the Dubs amendment. We are talking about a small fraction, but it is a fraction that is life or death for those we do not take. The Prime Minister is shaking her head. I urge her to go to the camps in Greece, see those children and tell us that they are not as worthy as the children in Ghouta, because they all need our help.

[Alison McGovern]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention, and I will mention her activism again in a moment.

I just want to say to the Prime Minister that I am really serious about my request. I really feel that if we are to restore our global reputation, bring true meaning to global Britain and send a message to the world that Britain is back on the world stage, it is, as she will know, deeds, not words, that we require.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

I am going to keep my remarks brief, Mr Speaker, as previous speakers have done justice to a huge range of subjects. I shall try to stick narrowly to the subject of the Government’s role. First, I should like to compliment the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) on securing the debate. I listened with great interest to her speech and will make a couple of comments about some of the things she said, but I will not follow her down that road, if she will forgive me. I want to deal specifically with what took place in the past few days and the reasons for it.

It is important to get the background absolutely straight and to consider what led to the Prime Minister having to take this decision. Sometimes it is easy to skate over some of these things. I was looking at the House of Commons Library paper on this, which is well worth reading. It lays out in considerable detail the number of times that the Syrians have broken all the accords they made on chemical weapons. It goes on to point out, as the Prime Minister did, that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons does not apportion blame, even when it inspects. It was supposed to be going in fairly shortly, but it is now blocked from going in and we have deep suspicions about the reasons for that. There is a major effort to clear up what is in there and to get rid of people who might be able to show that they have been attacked by these weapons.

Russia has vetoed every single resolution in the Security Council. Something else that is quite interesting, and that has not come out so far, is that in December 2017 an attempt was made to get an extension of the OPCW-United Nations joint investigative mechanism’s mandate. That would have enabled the JIM to look at what was going on and would have given it the power to apportion blame. The Russians vetoed the extension of that mandate without a single question, and it was clear that they did so because they did not want that investigation to take place.

It is worth reminding ourselves that, back in 2013—when I was a member of the Government—the Government came to the House to ask for a mandate to attack areas of command and control or of chemical stockpiles. I was sad to see, when the House voted against that motion, that there were some party politics involved. However, I am not going to revisit the past, other than to say that I think that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has given due regard to the lesson from that. We had to take action then, and serious consequences flowed from our not doing so. Back in 2013, Assad was on the back foot. There were some quite reasonable groups—I do not say that lightly—opposing him, including the Free Syrian Army. Yes, some of the more extreme groups were there, including the jihadis, but there was perhaps an opportunity to influence the direction of what might happen in Syria.

The rejection of the motion in 2013 was probably the single most devastating blow to Syria, and it has led to serious consequences. It emboldened President Assad to believe that he could go on doing what he wanted. The Russians then persuaded President Obama not to pursue the matter by guaranteeing that President Assad would produce no more chemical weapons, and that he would never use such weapons even if he had them. Of course, they have failed completely on that. So perhaps they are complicit in the use of chemical weapons; I begin to wonder whether they are, as they have used them so liberally elsewhere, particularly here on our own home soil in Salisbury.

The vote also gave the Russians the green light to pursue their own agenda aggressively in Syria, and to make the war even worse than it might otherwise have been. The right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) mentioned the appalling attacks on hospitals, and he was absolutely right to do so, but the question is how closely Russia has been involved in the deliberate targeting and bombing of hospitals and other civilian areas. We are beginning to see all of that in this.

The final bit about the vote in 2013—I hope the House really considers this—is that it opened the door to the takeover of most of the opposition to Assad by jihadi groups, who were untrammelled and un-resisted. With America stepping back, the reality was that the rest was left to the influence of Russia. We then ended up dealing with the worst of all worlds, with Daesh attacks both in Syria and subsequently in Iraq. That shut down many of the options that might well have been available to us.

I am in favour of the House being consulted, but the House also has to give a little leeway to the Executive when it comes to moments such as last week, when it was quite clear that urgent action needed to be taken. Urgent action is based on deep intelligence and if it is not taken quickly, there could well be further consequences later. Such circumstances are difficult, and it behoves a Government to ensure that the action they take is narrowly targeted and therefore effective in its limited regard.

Had the Government been proposing a wider operation, such as the one conducted against Daesh in Iraq or in northern Syria, they would certainly have had to come to the House to explain the nature of that. Last week was an exception; an Executive do need the ability to take such action and then come to the House to explain it and, as the Prime Minister rightly said today, take the consequences of the House’s view about that action, including whether it was justified both legally and in moral terms.

The really important point here, which we do not talk about enough, is the reality that Russia sits like a great beast behind all of what is happening. Without Russia’s involvement in Syria, much of what is going on would not be happening today. Russia’s direct and selfish involvement, which is only about its procurement of a decent-weather port in the Mediterranean and its ability to position its aircraft in Syria and to involve itself in the region, has led it to get involved in some of the worst activities that it is possible to imagine, and with complete indifference to the world order.

If we look back over what Russia has done, we see not just its invasions of Ukraine, Crimea, Georgia and so on, but its involvement in chemical warfare. In 2013, the Russians guaranteed that Syria would not use chemical weapons again. What kind of a guarantee is that, coming from a nation that poisoned the President of Ukraine, killed Mr Litvinenko by radiation, and went on to use a nerve agent to attack Mr Skripal and his daughter on British soil? That is the kind of guarantee given by a criminal to another criminal, and yet we should somehow allow it to be the protector it has not been. It suits Russia’s purposes to have Syria able to do as it pleases; that does not matter to Russia at all.

I say to the hon. Member for Wirral South that her speech was full of fine principle, which I of course absolutely sign up to and back her on, but even that fine principle prompts some serious questions. The most serious relates to what she said about keeping open the corridors of aid and about ensuring that the air is protected from attacks, because she immediately encounters the question: what do we do about the Russians? It is the Russians who have failed to allow—

[Stella Creasy]

rose—

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I am not going give way. The hon. Lady is my constituency neighbour, but—

[Stella Creasy]

I was just going to ask a question.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I am going to answer it myself, if the hon. Lady does not mind. I always find that they are the best answers.

I simply say to the hon. Member for Wirral South—this is exactly the point—that we come back to realpolitik. The Russians are sitting right at the heart of the problem and, while they are still able to control it, the Prime Minister is left with having to make this kind of decision: to say that we will not tolerate the use of such weapons, even if the Russians are behind it. That is the important point.

We have to pursue an aggressive position towards Russia. As the right hon. Member for Leeds Central said, Russia is not just producing disinformation but is lying outright about what has been going on. We need to pursue the money, and we need to put it to our European colleagues that they have to think carefully about the use of energy from Russia. It is the energy Russia sells to Europe and others that sustains this tiny economy to build its weapons and to produce its chemical warfare. If we can cut the money to Russia, we begin to cut its ability to interfere in nations such as Syria, Ukraine, Crimea, Georgia and others. The world will be a better place if Russia is restricted on that basis, and I urge my right hon. Friends to do so.

I fully accept the reasons why my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister took her decision, and she was right to do so. She was right in that sense to take the decision without coming to Parliament, and she is right to come to consult Parliament today. I hope we back her fully.

Syria

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend. He is absolutely right that, when we think about this issue, we should hold in our minds the horrific suffering of children and others in Douma as a result of the use of these chemical weapons.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Prime Minister has just said that we should hold in our minds the images of the suffering of those children—the human cost of the consequences of Assad and his Russian backers using chemical weapons against the people and it becoming normalised—but we know that this is not the first time. With that in mind, may I beg the Prime Minister to rethink her approach to those Syrians who have fled to Europe, because they are the same people fleeing this horror? They are the people who needed a safe haven. Forty per cent. of those in the Greek camps are Syrian, a third of whom are children, and there is only one Home Office official to deal with the issue for the entirety of Greece. Do those people not deserve more direct support from us, too?

[The Prime Minister]

The Home Office has been looking at this issue very carefully. We have changed the arrangements to ensure that a wider group of children will fall within the remit of our proposals for bringing refugee children into the United Kingdom. There are a number of ways in which we are ensuring that we accommodate, and offer shelter and security to, refugees from Syria, including refugee children. But as I said earlier, we must also recognise the many millions of people from Syria who have been displaced both within and from their country. It is right that we look to ensure that we can provide as much support as possible for them, and that is best done by supporting them in region.

UK/EU Future Economic Partnership

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Monday 5th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. She has hit the nail on the head.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

My constituency neighbour, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), may tell the Prime Minister that cherries are there to be picked and cake is there to be eaten, but however sweet it seems fudge is no way to run the country. So can she tell us straight? There are £400 million of public contracts that have full or partial EU funding and are due to expire in the next four months. Does she intend to renew or replace them, many of which are with education and skills facilities, or does she need to find a bus to write it on first?

[The Prime Minister]

Obviously, while we are still members of the European Union, we are looking at maintaining our relationships within the EU and maintaining our obligations and rights as a member of the EU. One issue that will be looked at in relation to the withdrawal agreement is what happens to contracts that are in place at the point at which we leave and what arrangements will pertain to those contracts.

Carillion

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Monday 15th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lidington]

We are seeking to analyse the spread of Carillion contracts so that we know which Members of Parliament are particularly affected. Some contracts, of course, are specific to a particular location while others provide a service across a much greater swathe of the country. What I can say is that so far today the reports from different Government Departments and agencies, whether one looks at schools, hospitals or other public sector providers, are that workers seem to be responding and services are being delivered as usual. I hope very much that that situation continues.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

The accounts show that in the last four years, on the PFI contracts alone, Carillion was part of deals that have made nearly £1 billion in profit directly from the public purse.

It is now clear that the notion, which all Governments have dealt with, that PFI is a good way to transfer risk to the private sector is a myth. Will the Government finally bring in a windfall tax to claw back the money so desperately needed for our public services from these companies? Or is it simply that they broke it but we will always end up fixing it?

[Mr Lidington]

The hon. Lady risks ignoring the £60 billion of capital investment that it has been possible to use to modernise and improve public services, and that would not have been available had this Government and their predecessors not used the PFI and PF2 approaches. The events of the past 24 hours have demonstrated that for private contractors this is not an easy ticket to riches; there are very real risks associated with taking on a contract. In this case it is—and rightly so—Carillion’s shareholders and creditors who are suffering very substantial losses as a consequence of the financial difficulties into which the company has fallen.

Brexit Negotiations

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

As my right hon. Friend knows, in addition to the £700 million already allocated by the Treasury to the current year for the changes that will be needed for the contingency arrangements to be put in place, £3 billion was put forward in the autumn Budget. That will be allocated to Departments, obviously, according to their need and requirement. On the specific issue of customs arrangements, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is moving forward on them, and will have in place what is necessary in order for us to have a customs system when we leave the European Union.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

Frequently with this Prime Minister, we have found that when she says nothing has changed, everything has changed. In particular, this statement talks about residents of Northern Ireland being able to cross the border freely and there being no hard border. If she thinks that it is in the best interests of Northern Irish residents to continue to benefit from freedom of movement, why is she denying equal rights to my constituents?

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Lady says that something significant has changed. I suggest that she looks back in history a little, because she will find that the common travel area has been in place since 1923.

European Council

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Monday 23rd October 2017 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I, and the Government, have been very clear that the whole question of the financial settlement cannot be finally settled until we know what the future partnership will be. It is not that we are going to sign up to a deal and then negotiate what that future partnership will be, so once the formal negotiations on the future of the trade relationship, and of course the security relationship, have started, there will continue to be negotiations on issues which were initially identified as being in phase 1.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

Since the Brexit vote there has been a 96% drop in EU nurses registering to work here. With an NHS vacancy rate of 86,000 and rising, just how much bigger does this crisis have to get before the Government stop using these medics as bargaining chips and do something to make sure that there are nurses and doctors in our A&Es this winter?

[The Prime Minister]

First of all, I reiterate the point that I made in my statement and have made on a number of occasions—we value the contribution that EU citizens have made here in the United Kingdom and we want them to stay. The hon. Lady talks about numbers of nurses. There are more nurses in the NHS today than there were in 2010, and we have taken off the limit on the number of nurses who can be in training. There are 52,000 nurses in training, and there were two applicants for every nurse training place here in the United Kingdom.