Mr Alistair Carmichael
MP for Orkney and Shetland · Liberal Democrat · United Kingdom
“I do not know whether this is something I still need to declare, Mr Speaker, but I visited the Falkland Islands in 2003 as a guest of the Falkland Islands Government. They have never invited me back.”
“I remind the House of my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and also that my wife is a practising veterinary surgeon. What is happening was predictable because it was predicted. The Government were warned by the National Audit Office in June last year that they were unprepared for outbreaks of this sort.”
“The Minister is surely aware that there is no route to net zero that does not go through oil and gas hydrocarbons, and that not exploiting resources on the UK continental shelf leaves us reliant on imports, which also has carbon consequences that must be taken into account.”
“The transition to clean energy could be an opportunity to build a different model that would, to use the First Secretary of State’s own words, end “overly centralised decision making and over-privatisation”.”
“I welcome what the Prime Minister just said about strengthening farming. If he is serious about this, one of the first things he can do is ensure that our farmers do not have to compete with imported food that is produced to lower standards than we expect.”
“Q4. Like others, I have always respected the Prime Minister as somebody who was in politics because he wanted to give service to his country, and he has earned our gratitude for that. In my constituency, those who volunteer as coastguard rescue officers also do so from a wish to give service to their community.”
The complete record
Every one of 4,707 lines we hold for Mr Alistair Carmichael, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 37 of 95.
“I accept everything that the Minister has said about interventions with regard to the Indian criminal justice system. That is why the point about arbitrary detention is so important, because as the spokesperson for the official Opposition, the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock), and the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes) have both said, in the event that that is the view of the Government, they have a duty to intervene. Is that the view of the Government, and if it is, why have they not intervened? If it is not, what points of distinction would they make?”
“What does the Secretary of State want to achieve with his review? He will be aware that as long as we remain a party to the European convention on human rights, the rights that are available to citizens as a consequence cannot be altered. Any changes to the Human Rights Act would just return us to the situation that we had before the Act, when we could only enforce the remedies for these rights by going to Strasbourg. Is that what the Government want to achieve here?”
“The Government were able to award contracts using their high priority lane because this House gave them the power to do so. We did it, effectively, on trust. Will the Minister now repay the trust that this House placed in the Government by publishing the details not just of the contracts that were put through that high priority lane, but of those who introduced the contractors to the Government, the basis on which it was thought appropriate to put them through the high priority lane and the economic outcomes of those decisions?”
“Making allowance for the fact that there is bound to be a late surge, we might anticipate that there will be some half a million by the time of the close of the deadline. He will be aware that only once an application has been granted is the applicant entitled to the right to healthcare, to work and to rent. They could be liable to charges within the NHS. What does he intend to do for these possibly half a million people while we are waiting for the applications to be processed?”
“May I say to the Minister that I did exactly what he has enjoined others to do? Some weeks ago, I wrote to all the EU nationals I could identify in my constituency. We publicised the looming deadline in the press, and I have to tell him that it turned up a disturbing number of glitches in the system, not least one involving the inadequacy of certain mobile smartphones for uploading documents. I would have hoped that by this stage of things, those sorts of bugs would have been ironed out of the system, but my experience is very much that they have not. On the figures that the Minister has given the House today, there remain something in the region of 400,000 unprocessed applications.”
“We need to be more ambitious than that, and for those in this House there must come a point when we decide whether we help the progress towards normal democratic politics in Northern Ireland by continuing to “help out” or whether eventually we will have to say that that is a problem for the Northern Ireland institutions themselves to resolve. For today, on Second Reading, this Bill has my support, but I want it to be clearly understood that in as much as it does sustain a status quo, it can do that only to create stability to ensure further progress. Otherwise, it is always going to be a waste of time.”
“So much in that agreement created institutions that were never intended to be as enduring as they have been. The purpose of power sharing was to provide an environment in which the communities could work together eventually to achieve what we in the rest of the UK would regard as normal politics, where it would not be necessary to have an Executive constituted in the way that they are, where, in effect, everybody is in government and nobody is in opposition. That is why the one tiny point of disagreement I have with the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon is when he says we should be seeking to maintain the status quo. The status quo was never meant to be maintained, and I do not believe that in the long term it is sustainable as a democratic exercise.”
“Devolution in Scotland and Wales was the product not of a peace process but of an aspiration to make democracy work better and make democratic politics work better for Scotland and Northern Ireland. To suggest now that a comparison can be made is, I am afraid, misleading. It is rooted in a misunderstanding of the process that has brought us to this point. An understanding of the process that brought us to devolution is important, because that reminds us of the consequences should we allow devolution—the democratic institutions in Northern Ireland—to fail. My hon. Friend the Member for North Down spoke about designations and the difficulties now with the model of government set up under the Good Friday agreement. He is absolutely right.”
“Member for Foyle (Colum Eastwood), have reflected on the different ways in which devolution works, and unfavourable comparisons have been made about its operation in Scotland and Wales compared to Northern Ireland. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I was part of the process that saw the set-up of the Scottish Parliament. The Liberal Democrats were an active participant, along with the Labour party, the local authorities, Churches and other parts of civic Scotland, in the constitutional convention that constructed the blueprint for the Scottish Parliament. Those were the roots of devolution in Scotland, and we did that out of a concern that Scottish institutions and Scots law would be better protected and promoted through a devolved Parliament.”
“However, as somebody who has observed and participated in the conduct of Northern Ireland business in this House for some time, I think that it is a process that we might have hoped would bring us further and faster than it has done. It established a framework for the people of Northern Ireland to deal with problems for themselves through politics rather than through violence. Although it sounds modest to say that now, it was a significant achievement. The process started actually under Margaret Thatcher and went through the Governments of John Major and Tony Blair. In the course of the debate, many people, including the right hon. Members for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) and for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) and the hon.”
“The idea that there was any democratic scrutiny or accountability as part of that process is nonsensical. Therefore, at the very least, I welcome the fact that we are managing not to return to that. However, as I look around the Chamber, there are not many hon. Members who were here in 2003, so I remind them of what it was like under direct rule when the Assembly collapsed previously. It would not be in their constituents’ best interests to return to that. As the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), the Chair of the Select Committee, said, this is not emergency legislation. Of course, in the technical, parliamentary sense of the term, it is not, but I suggest that it is still urgent. He also said that the Good Friday agreement was a process, and he was correct in that as well.”
“Friend the Member for North Down just said, the most obvious and sensible thing that could be done at the moment is the negotiation of a temporary veterinary agreement in relation to Northern Ireland. It would, I think, be something not that difficult to construct, but for reasons of dogma as much as anything else, the Government seem incapable of doing that. Mr Deputy Speaker, you and I were both in this House in 2003 when it was necessary to cancel elections to the then Northern Ireland Assembly. That was a difficult and painful time. It led to the suspension of the Assembly and to business and legislation relating to Northern Ireland being conducted directly from this Parliament. It was a disgrace. I remember whole Bills going through in Committee Rooms upstairs in 90 minutes for all stages.”
“Let us not ignore the fact that much of the political instability to which others have referred is a consequence of the Brexit deal that was done by the Prime Minister and of the Northern Ireland protocol. I suggest that the Prime Minister and his party have for the most part, with a few honourable exceptions such as the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith), been careless in the custody of their duties under the Good Friday agreement. I have always felt that they never really understood the genuinely fragile nature of the peace that was created by the Good Friday agreement, and that it becomes acute at a moment like this as a consequence. As my hon.”
“He does so at a difficult and challenging time, and I am sure that he has the good wishes of all parts of the House in taking on the task that he has undertaken. My party, like those represented by everybody else who has spoken today, will support the measures in this Bill. I think it is perhaps worth reflecting parenthetically that, in a debate that has generated a fair amount of disagreement, the one thing in respect of which there has been universal agreement is that we all support the Bill. That just makes me wonder whether the measures in the Bill are the equal of the political situation that it purports to deal with. I think the political context is important here.”
“It is a genuine pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North Down (Stephen Farry) and indeed, before him, the hon. Member for Foyle (Colum Eastwood). It is at moments when the House has to debate matters relating to Northern Ireland and to Northern Ireland alone that the somewhat asymmetric nature of the Union that makes up the United Kingdom is most apparent. I think it assists the House enormously that we are able to hear now a variety—a multiplicity—of views coming from Northern Ireland. I thank those hon. Members, and indeed all hon. Members from Northern Ireland who have made their contribution to this debate today. I also place on record my congratulations and the congratulations of my party to the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson) on assuming the leadership of his party.”
“What recent estimate the commission has made of the potential number of fraudulent votes that will be prevented with plans to mandate voter ID at future elections.”
“We know, as the hon. Gentleman says, that previous work by the commission has shown that voter impersonation is a very rare occurrence in this country. We also know from the other side of the Atlantic that schemes there involving the production of identification at polling stations have suppressed turnout, especially among poorer communities and minority ethnic communities. Will that experience be taken into account by the commission in formulating further advice to the Government in respect of their proposed legislation?”
“The idea that these events were contributed to by arms sold from this country is something that many people, wherever they stand on the debate, find disturbing.”
“To those who have suggested that that is not possible because it is not quite the right time, I gently say that the reason that Palestine does not control her own territory goes back to the circumstances that pertained in 1967 and subsequently. There is now no good reason for that not to be the case. In the context of the recent conflict in Palestine, I hope that the Minister and our Government will look very closely at the deployment of arms that would have come from this country. Like others, I bow to no one in my acceptance of Israel’s right to defend herself, but we all know that self-defence in law, wherever we find it, must always be commensurate, appropriate and proportionate, and what we saw was none of those things.”
“However, the point about the one-state reality, as he describes it, is that it is no solution. The only solution is a two-state solution, and if it is a solution that does not involve two states in a meaningful way, it is no solution. The yardstick by which the Minister and British foreign policy should be guided is always to ask one simple question: will this make the achievement of a two-state solution more or less likely? Looking around Palestine, we see that the settlement-building programme on the west bank makes the achievement of a two-state solution manifestly less likely, and it should be condemned by our Government accordingly. It is also beyond peradventure that Britain should recognise Palestine as a state.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I remind the House of my interim entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and that I serve as a director of the advisory board of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding. The two petitions address probably two of the most substantial issues that we could have hoped to have before us. I thank the Petitions Committee for allowing this debate, but I am afraid that the belief that any meaningful analysis of the issues at hand can be achieved in a three-minute speech represents optimism beyond even that which I possess. Picking up on the point made by the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard), I have visited Palestine twice and have seen what he refers to as the “one-state reality”. I know exactly what he means.”
“The British Red Cross, which I think we would all acknowledge as the expert in the area of provision of accommodation of this sort, made a recommendation in its recent report that the Home Office “should introduce a formal, independent inspection regime for asylum…accommodation with publicly available reports,” in order to better “monitor the quality and effectiveness of support provided and improve transparency and accountability” for decisions. Surely, in the Home Office’s own interests, that would be preferable to a status quo where it is left to mark its own homework or to be called out by the courts.”
“It has been reported that there have been no fewer than 16 private meetings between the Treasury and those two banks in the six months from July to December 2020. What was said at those meetings, and why are we still engaging on a business-as-usual basis?”
“On 1 March this year, the new head of RTHK, a career civil servant, Patrick Li, took charge. He pledged editorial independence, but he said that there cannot be “freedom without restraint”. George Orwell would have been proud of that one. With the World News TV channel taken off air in China, and the blocking of news channels and internet provision for years, we have to look at what more we can do to support the World Service, which is still the blue chip standard in broadcasting around the world. Secondly, I would like to hear more from Government about what we are saying to financial institutions, such as HSBC and Standard Chartered, that have come out in support of the national security law. That we allow them to continue to operate as normal in this country seems to contradict what we say of our intentions towards Hong Kong.”
“Our failure at that time was seen by the Chinese Government as an indication that we perhaps did not mean the things we said in the joint declaration. That is ironic, when one considers that we entered into the joint declaration because of our experience in relation to the Falkland Islands. That was another instance where we had sent the wrong signals to a despotic regime, which then thought it could take advantage of that. We tried to avoid the same thing happening again by entering into the joint declaration, but we do not seem to have learned the lessons. There are a couple of issues I want to touch on briefly. The first relates to the position of the BBC in Hong Kong and China. Its relationship with Radio Television Hong Kong as its local partner is becoming increasingly problematic.”
“We have seen a repeated pattern of people telling us, when we speak about human rights, “Maybe just wind your neck in. There is another deal coming. There is a delegation going. There is going to be a visit or a conference.” In the years since we completed and entered into the joint declaration, we have essentially sent all the wrong signals, and that has brought us to where we are today. I am genuinely delighted that the Government have taken the action they have on BNO passport holders. How much better and stronger might our position be if we had done that at the point of handover in 1997? That was surely the point at which we could have sent a signal that we intended to stand with the people of Hong Kong.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Ghani. I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Gedling (Tom Randall) on securing this debate. One of the things that he was quite right to say in his introduction was that this should not be about the history of our relationship with Hong Kong, and it is certainly not about recreating some sort of imperial past. I think our own recent history with regard to the territory is worth reflecting on. The position in which we find ourselves today has not happened overnight; it is the product of three decades—possibly more—of British foreign policy and our determination to put commercial interests over human rights. I co-chair the all-party parliamentary group on Hong Kong with Baroness Bennett, and I am also a patron of Hong Kong Watch.”
“The Royal College of General Practitioners, the Doctors’ Association UK and the British Medical Association have all expressed concern about the adequacy of communication with patients about the proposals for data sharing. From the answer that the Secretary of State gave to the Opposition Front Bencher—the right hon. Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth)—and to my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), he obviously disagrees with that, but in the interests of making data-based decisions, can he tell the House what his Department is doing to assess the level of patient awareness about what will happen if they do not opt out by 23 June?”
“I welcome the very robust political and diplomatic stance that the Government are taking, but this case is more than that. This is a potential human tragedy as well, with Roman Protasevich now in detention and possibly ultimately facing the death penalty. I know, having campaigned in different parts of the world, that consular and embassy staff are very effective in the way in which they deploy their resources in supporting people campaigning against the use of the death penalty. Can the Foreign Secretary give me some assurance that everything that can be done to keep this case in the public eye will be done, within the confines of their role in country?”
“You know, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I am not the sort of man to stand here and say, “I told you so,” but on 20 June last year I told the Minister that this was exactly what was going to happen. I hope that the work Sir Wyn Williams has done thus far will not be wasted and will not have to be repeated. The Minister also knows that of the £58 million settlement given to sub-postmasters by the Post Office, £46 million went in the payment of legal fees. Those legal fees were only necessary because the Post Office sought to defend a case that it should not have been defending. If the Minister really wants to reset the relationship between the Government, the Post Office and sub-postmasters, he could do no better than to give an undertaking today to give that money back to the postmasters.”
“Accepting everything that the Minister says about the probity of her colleagues, does she not think that it would be in their interests for their names and their reputations to be cleared by a system that is wholly independent of the Prime Minister? Complaints against Ministers could be investigated, those investigations would be instigated by someone independent of Government, and thereafter their conclusions would be published. Surely that would be good for her colleagues.”
“I think I come at the Israel-Palestine question from a rather different point of view from that held by the Home Secretary, but even for somebody who is as staunch a supporter of the Palestinian cause as I am, there can be no place in this debate for what we saw, and we in this country help nobody in Palestine by evincing sentiments that are antisemitic. On that, at least, I hope there will be a measure of consensus across the House.”
“The moves in the carry-over Bill in relation to the right to protest are misjudged and ill-conceived, and I think that, ultimately, they will be counterproductive. The hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst referred to the question of judicial review. Any Government who believe in the rule of law should have absolutely no difficulty putting the decisions that they have taken before the court. If those decisions are right and legal, they should have no problem in the courts; and if they are not right and legal, they should want to change them in any event. Time is short and there is one point that I wanted to put on the record. I am in total agreement with the Home Secretary’s comments condemning the scenes on our streets and online in relation to antisemitism, specifically in London.”
“We heard as much tonight when the Home Secretary talked about setting centrally driven targets in order to improve policing. Centrally driven targets will not improve policing; it is community policing, rooted in the community that it is there to serve, that will improve policing and produce the outcomes. We have heard this for decades: the rhetoric goes on, yet year after year our streets and communities become less safe for our people, and the rhetoric does not change. I also discern in the Queen’s Speech an emerging pattern from this Government, and it is one that disturbs and concerns me. Yet again, I am afraid, the Conservatives have been pleased to style themselves in opposition as liberals, and perhaps even occasionally as libertarians, but they are increasingly authoritarian in government.”
“When listening to the Home Secretary, however, it struck me that if we ever wanted to generate a bob or two, we could bring out a new parlour game called “Who said it and when?” because there were points in her speech when I felt that I could have been listening to just about any Home Secretary that I have heard speak at the Dispatch Box in the last 20 years. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard Home Secretaries stand there talking about “Cracking down on this” or “Getting tough on that”. It is always the rhetoric of toughness, whereas we know that, in fact, getting things right in criminal justice is often about doing things that are difficult—and difficult to explain in the tabloid press—but that are also right and effective.”
“Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am very grateful to you. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), who made a very thoughtful contribution. He said a lot in four minutes, characterised by the fact that, of course, he knows what he is talking about, because he has not just a political understanding but professional experience of criminal justice. In particular, when he spoke of sentencing and how rehabilitation should be at the heart of our prison system, there was nothing he said with which I could disagree personally or politically.”
“If this inquiry is to achieve everything that we would want of it, then it must be the pre-eminent vehicle by which the voice of those who have lost loved ones in this pandemic will be heard. I am pretty certain that Ministers, officials, health professionals, business interests and others will all have good-quality legal representation in that, many paid out of the public purse. Can the Prime Minister give me some commitment today that bereaved families will also get the necessary support to ensure that they have the same quality of representation, so that their voices will be properly heard?”
“If, in the last year, we had operated under the wind speed and temperature restrictions that are currently under consultation by the Scottish Government, there would only have been two sailings allowed from Orkney to Aberdeen. It is the law of good intentions and unintended consequences in operation. The people who designed the system, which is currently regarded as being blue-chip, with industry-leading standards, were the farmers at the turn of the century, and they are the people who should be involved in the recreation of that system now.”
“I hope that it understands the damage it risks doing to the delicate and complex economic ecosystem that communities such as ours rely on. Once an economic ecosystem such as that is lost, it can never be easily recreated. I do not wish to hold the House, but I want to mention one other matter of supreme importance to the production of food in the Northern Isles: the ability to export it to other parts of Scotland and the United Kingdom. It comes to the point made by the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish). The Scottish Government are currently undertaking a consultation on the transportation of animals within Scotland. For us, with a 12-hour journey from Shetland to Aberdeen, that could have very serious implications. Even the shorter journey from Orkney to Aberdeen would be severely affected.”
“The Co-op does have a long tradition of being at the heart of highland and island communities, and I am sure I am not the only one who spent many happy—or not so happy—childhood evenings licking stamps to be put in the Co-op book for the dividend, but the Co-op Group today is a very different beast. It operates effectively in the same predatory manner as we would expect of any other supermarket, bearing down on suppliers in communities such as mine. It is a trail that many communities the length and breadth of the country have seen over the years, but for a company such as the Co-op Group that has always prided itself—and, dare I say it, marketed itself quite effectively—on being the supermarket that was somehow different, to have this change in its culture is unfortunate to say the very least.”
“However, the beef and lamb farmers and those food producers who add some value to our local products will tell us that the Co-op, like all supermarkets, will take their products, but only on its terms. Therefore, even if a product does end up on the shelf, the supermarket will determine the price, the quantity, the regularity of supply, the delivery and often even the labelling. The hard commercial reality is that these local suppliers cannot survive on the margins that the supermarkets give them, so the existence of that network of local shops is critical to the future viability of agriculture in Orkney and Shetland.”
“That network of rural shops, however, is absolutely critical to food production in the Northern Isles, and the farmers I spoke about, who now produce finished cattle for slaughter and sale in the local retail sector, will struggle if that network of local shops is not there. One of the local shops that will be most directly affected told me last week that it reckons that it takes goods from no fewer than 80 different local suppliers, which are all small and medium-sized enterprises that will never sell in the same quantity to a big outlet such as the Co-op Group. We know, and the Co-op will tell us, that it takes from local producers to put local lines into its shops. That is true.”
“It is an exemplar of how agriculture can feed into a rural or island economy such as ours. Crucial to that operation, however, is the existence and operation of a thriving network of local shops. My concern today is that many of those local shops are currently under threat. We have had supermarkets in Shetland for decades, like everybody else—we have a big Tesco and a fairly big Co-op in Lerwick and a smaller but still sizeable Co-op in Brae—but recently the Co-op Group lodged applications for planning permission for two further Co-ops, which would be bigger operations, in communities in Scalloway and Sandwick, which are currently served by a variety of small, thriving local independent shops. Those shops are quite clear that if the applications are granted, the future for them looks to be pretty bleak.”
“The designation of Orkney beef and Shetland lamb as protected geographic indicators is an indication of that and, indeed, of the quality of the produce for which we have been responsible over the years. In recent decades, we have seen a growth in producers who have been able to add value in a blossoming food and drink sector, which, in turn, has fed into a growing visitor economy, so it remains as important to the northern isles today as it always has been. In Orkney, we have a long history of producing finished cattle for Orkney beef. In Shetland, traditionally we produced cattle for the store market, but in recent years, by a bit of creativity and a lot of effort, local farmers in Shetland have also been able to produce finished cattle, which have been slaughtered for local consumption in our good, well operated local abattoir.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ghani. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) on securing this important and timely debate. I do not think it is, strictly speaking, a declarable interest, but the House may be aware that I come from farming family. My family still farm on the south-east corner of Islay. My wife is a partner in a veterinary practice in Orkney, serving a diverse range of farming interests: beef and lamb production, and, sadly, a decreasing number of dairy farmers. I declare that interest with some pride; it contributes directly and indirectly to the Carmichael family mortgage payment every month. Food production has always been at the heart of the local economies in Orkney and Shetland.”
“What recent assessment the Electoral Commission has made of the potential effect of Government plans to mandate voter ID in future elections on levels of democratic participation in the UK.”
“I thank the hon. Member for that answer. Notwithstanding the commission’s findings, though, it is estimated that it would cost something in the region of £20 million to introduce a measure such as this and there is always the risk of depressing voter turnout. Would he impress on the commission that, if that money is there to be spent, it would be better spent encouraging voter turnout, rather than on measures such as this, which I contend would inevitably depress it?”
“It is quite astonishing that the Secretary of State’s statement had absolutely nothing to say about the Government’s plans for vaccine ID cards—something that has apparently been trialled. Only last week, the Equality and Human Rights Commission told us that vaccine ID cards, and possibly even the mandatory vaccination scheme that he is trumpeting today, could be unlawful, yet this House has had no opportunity to express a view on them at all. When are the Government going to come clean and share their plans for vaccine ID cards with this House?”
“The Scotch whisky industry is of economic importance to a large number of the most economically fragile communities in the highlands and islands, so I genuinely wish the Secretary of State very well in her endeavours to get the removal of tariffs made permanent. Is the situation that the Prime Minister has created in Northern Ireland helping or hindering the engagement with the Biden Administration?”
“I told Shirley that story some two decades later and it says a lot about her that she instinctively just loved the joke at her own expense. She will be enormously missed by people in all parties, but especially among the family of Liberal Democrats.”