David Mundell
MP for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale · Conservative · United Kingdom
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Naushabah Khan), not just for her thoughtful contribution but for securing this debate. It is so important that we take every opportunity we can to shine a light on this conflict.”
“Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds). I am sure that the new Minister, whom I welcome to her post, will do likewise. Nevertheless, as I said, Sudan remains chronically under-reported.”
“I absolutely agree. I—and the Minister, I am sure—would like the Quad that was established to be more effective in relation to the involvement of the United States and neighbouring countries, with those neighbouring countries playing a positive role rather than supporting the protagonists in the conflict. As the right hon.”
“As UN Security Council penholder, the UK has a distinct moral and diplomatic duty to lead these negotiations at the upcoming UN General Assembly and press relentlessly for a humanitarian truce, a permanent ceasefire, robust civilian protection, civic engagement and unhindered aid access.”
“I recognise that the Minister and her colleagues in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office must navigate delicate regional dynamics, but the Government must not shy away from forcefully challenging the covert actions of some of our Gulf allies in Sudan, both publicly and in private diplomacy.”
“We saw the horrific realities of the crisis just two weeks ago with the totally unacceptable attack on a World Food Programme convoy in Kordofan. Civilian personnel were injured and lifesaving aid was destroyed.”
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“As I said in my answer, a commission is to be established. This coalition Government, unlike the previous Government, are determined to deal with the issue.”
“I can assure the hon. Gentleman that I will be taking an interest in the resolution of the West Lothian question. The hon. Gentleman agreed with Lord Derry Irving when he said that the only answer to the West Lothian question was not to ask it.”
“My right hon. Friend is meeting the hon. Gentleman and representatives from the industry next week to discuss how best to stimulate further growth and expansion in this important sector.”
“I am glad that the Government are dealing with the issues that the hon. Gentleman raises with even more urgency. As he knows, the major package of reforms to business taxation in the Budget is designed to make the UK the most competitive tax regime in the G20 and that will substantially help the video games industry.”
“When I had the opportunity to visit the Clydebank jobcentre in the hon. Lady’s constituency, I found that the people there—who are on the front line in helping the unemployed into work—welcomed the Government’s measures to replace the myriad schemes introduced by the previous Government with a single Work programme.”
“The VAT rise is part of a fair and progressive Budget. Difficult decisions are necessary to tackle the record deficit that this Government have inherited, but the richest will pay more than the poorest.”
“The right hon. Lady makes a good point about the tourism industry and she will know that many jobs in that industry are low paid. The decision to raise the income tax personal allowance for under-65s by £1,000 in 2011-12 will benefit 2 million basic rate income tax payers in Scotland, including many working in the tourism industry.”
“The provision of road transport in Scotland is a devolved matter. Transport Scotland is responsible for the management and maintenance of the trunk road network in Scotland, including the A1.”
“I advise my hon. Friend that the Scottish Government have no proposals for any major schemes on the A1 trunk road in Scotland, but I will speak to colleagues in the Department for Transport about the need to liaise on cross-border routes. [Interruption.]”
“Since 1 May, the Advocate-General and his predecessor have received 716 minutes notifying them of devolution issues. In the same period, the Advocate-General has continued monitoring 41 devolution cases, has been represented in court in three, and is currently involved as intervenor in two cases.”
“As far as I am aware, the Scottish Government appear to have abandoned their proposal for a referendum on independence, especially after 80% of voters in Scotland at the recent general election voted for parties that support the Union.”
“Dealing with the deficit and continuing to ensure the economic recovery is the most urgent issue we face. We must tackle the deficit to restore confidence in our economy and support the recovery.”
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his, as usual, spirited question. I am sure he will be in agreement with the Scottish Parliament Finance Committee, which called on the Scottish Government to show far greater leadership by discussing in more open and realistic terms the impact that the cuts will have and the options that are available to deal with those cuts.”
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his warm welcome. He will already know that the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport has set out his clear objective of turning Britain into a digital economy. The hon. Gentleman specified with clarity the needs of rural areas, for which the Secretary of State and I will continue to fight within Government.”
“I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his elevation to the chairmanship of the Scottish Affairs Committee, on which I was pleased to serve with him. I am sure that he will bring his own distinct style to the Committee’s proceedings. As the hon. Gentleman will know, this Government’s position on the aircraft carriers is, despite attempts to suggest otherwise, no different from that of the previous Government. There is to be a strategic defence review. The nuclear deterrent is excluded from that review, and it would be wrong to prejudge the review in any other way, other than to say that sea-borne defence is obviously very important to this country.”
“All Members of this House share the sense of shock and disbelief at the tragic events that unfolded in Cumbria on 2 June. The hon. Gentleman must have felt this more than most given his close personal associations with Whitehaven, and I personally offer my condolences to him and to the families that have been so cruelly affected. In Prime Minister’s questions on 3 June, the Prime Minister confirmed that the Association of Chief Police Officers would be supporting a peer review, to be conducted by national police experts, on firearms licensing, the police firearms response and firearms tactics. Firearms legislation is a reserved matter. As the Home Secretary told the House in her statement on 3 June, we will await the police report before we embark on and lead a debate about the gun laws across Great Britain.”
“We are all proud of the efforts of officers from the Dumfries and Galloway police force and others in Scotland after the events in Cumbria. I will meet the hon. Gentleman’s delegation.”
“I shall most certainly take into account the issues that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has raised. He will, however, be aware that the Calman commission has recommended that the regulation of air guns be transferred to the responsibility of the Scottish Parliament, and the Government are committed to doing that in the Bill that we will bring forward in the autumn.”
“My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has made it a priority to speak to a number of key individuals in the business sector in Scotland to get an update on the main issues affecting them.”
“The hon. Gentleman was a strong supporter of Lord Myners and will know therefore that the latter said: “The Government cannot create jobs. The Government can create an environment that is conducive to the creation of jobs”. —[ Official Report, House of Lords, 8 June 2010; Vol. 719, c. 625.] That is the priority of this coalition Government.”
“The Government have already announced their plans for a radical reform of the welfare-to-work system and the implementation of the programme, which among other things will tackle the issue of economic inactivity.”
“Like the Secretary of State, I do not want to pre-empt next week’s Budget, but I am sure that the Chancellor will have heard the hon. Gentleman’s representations.”
“The Minister will know that 665,000 working-age people in Scotland are economically inactive. In the past three months, that figure has risen by 21,000. In the past year, Labour has wiped £4.8 billion off the value of the Scottish economy. Since 1997, Scotland’s share of the national debt has more than doubled, and almost 150,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost. Those are facts; there is little that the Minister and the Secretary of State can do about them now, but will she take this last opportunity at the Dispatch Box to apologise to the people of Scotland?”
“Like most people, but unlike Labour Members, I am interested in talking about the present—2010. Labour’s last manifesto said: “2010: Full employment in every region and nation”. The number of people who have been on the dole in Scotland for more than one year has in fact gone up by 122 per cent. in the past 12 months, yet the Minister and the Secretary of State still want to introduce a tax on jobs that will kill recovery. If she thinks that that is a good idea, is it not she and the Secretary of State who have been misled, not leading Scottish business figures?”
“In 2000 the then Secretary of State for Scotland boasted that “For the first time in generations, the end of youth unemployment is a real possibility”. After 10 years of Labour Government youth unemployment has not ended; it has actually shot up by 60 per cent. Last week the Secretary of State said that the onus was on bankers to deal with unemployment. Then he claimed that Scotland’s economy had been boosted by the recent snowfall. Has it not occurred to him that youth unemployment in Scotland is high not because there are too many bankers or not enough snow, but because the Government’s economic policies are not working?”
“I do not think that the Secretary of State should give lectures on people who are seen through. He will acknowledge that a stable and supportive family environment plays a major part in equipping young people with the personal skills needed for employment. Yet Cardinal O’Brien has warned that the Secretary of State’s Government are undertaking a “systematic and unrelenting attack on family values.” Last night the Secretary of State was due to say, “When the Cardinal speaks, people listen.” The cardinal has spoken. Is the Secretary of State listening?”
“More than eight weeks ago, the finance committee of the Scottish Parliament made a perfectly reasonable request for a Treasury Minister to come to Holyrood and explain the implications of the pre-Budget report for Scotland. No reply has yet been received. The Chancellor may well have been distracted by fighting back the forces of hell, while the Secretary of State may have been distracted by appealing to the forces of heaven. Is there any hope that the two of them might now come down to a more earthly plane, show respect to the Scottish Parliament, and grant that request?”
“I am sure that the Minister’s summit will be welcome, but in Ayrshire alone a further 3,419 people have been forced on to the dole in the past 12 months. Can the Minister tell all those people, as well as the hundreds of thousands of other jobseekers in Scotland, where exactly they will find the signs that Scotland is coming out of recession that the Secretary of State claimed were there on Monday? He claims that those signs exist, but is it not the case that the evidence in Ayrshire and elsewhere in Scotland simply does not back him up?”
“The Minister and the Secretary of State are good at talking the language of the 1980s, but sadly not so good at dealing with the issues of the present. On the very day that the Secretary of State claimed that there were signs that Scotland was emerging from the recession, the latest purchasing managers index showed that manufacturing was still contracting and that the flow of new orders in Scotland was considerably weaker than elsewhere in the UK. The Minister and the Secretary of State refer to the future jobs fund, which has brought some benefits, but is it not the case that the fund is increasingly focused on public sector employment, rather than on our hard-pressed private sector? So other than warm words—”
“May I be the first to congratulate the Secretary of State on being named best Scot at Westminster? I am sure the Prime Minister is delighted. Month after month, Scottish unemployment rises; month after month, the Scotland Office issues a statement distancing the Government from responsibility, invoking global factors; and month after month, that looks less credible. If the Government’s economic policies have been right for Scotland, can the Secretary of State explain to us why the US, France and Germany have all returned to growth, but over the same period Scottish gross domestic product has continued to fall? Given that unemployment lags behind growth, are we to assume that Scotland will suffer further from Labour’s legacy of rising unemployment for many months to come?”
“The Secretary of State’s monologues about history are almost as predictable as those press releases on unemployment from the Scotland Office. We want to talk about the present. There are 270,000 people in Scotland on incapacity benefit under this Government. That cannot be justified—when will he take steps to get these people re-tested? All those found to be either ready to work or ready to prepare for work should be given support by specialist organisations; instead, they are ignored by his Government. When will he put that right?”
“Whatever differences we may have with the Labour Government about how to take forward the Calman recommendations, may I invite the Secretary of State to agree with me that they are as nothing compared with the divide between us and the Scottish National party? We are Unionists; they are separatists. We are in the mainstream of the constitutional debate; they are on the extreme. However, does the Secretary of State also agree that there are no grounds for complacency? The Calman commission contrasts markedly with the so-called “national conversation”, whose main participants appear to be insomniac cyber-nats. Is it not the case that the work of the commission, not Mr. Salmond’s publicly funded, self-indulgent chit-chat, will endure and form the basis for taking—”
“Will the Secretary of State acknowledge that the guiding principle in deliberations on the Calman process has been, and must continue to be, securing Scotland’s position within the United Kingdom? Is he as heartened as I am by recent polling in Scotland that demonstrates that there is very little support for separatism and an independence referendum? Does he accept Sir Kenneth Calman’s view that the establishment of better working relationships between the British Government and the Scottish Government and between the Parliaments here and at Holyrood must be in place to underpin every other recommendation in his report? Given that most of the measures to improve relationships do not require any legislation, can he tell us what he will do to re-establish the good will between Westminster and Holyrood, which appears to have ebbed away?”
“Conservatives accept that the Scottish Parliament needs to be more financially accountable, that the devolution settlement needs to be tidied up and that Westminster and Holyrood need to start working constructively together for the good of Scotland and Britain, but we will ensure those things through our own White Paper, not this Government’s proposals launched in the dying days of this Parliament. Will the Secretary of State welcome that commitment and undertake to continue in the spirit of Calman, on the basis of consensus and momentum, regardless of who is in government, and resist the temptation to play party politics with such an important issue as Scotland’s constitution?”
“I thank the Secretary of State for his statement, for the advance notice of it and for the extent to which both he and his predecessor have engaged with fellow Unionist politicians in Scotland during the Calman process. I also put on record my thanks to the commissioners for their work. The Conservatives fully supported the setting up of the commission and have played a full part in its work. I look forward to reading the White Paper, but does the Secretary of State concede that the timing of it so near an election inevitably means that the issue will have to be revisited by the next Government? Does he acknowledge that his Government’s White Paper should not bind any incoming Conservative Government?”
“Is it not the case that the First Minister of Scotland’s publicly funded, self-indulgent chit-chat will not survive? It is the work of the commission that will endure and form the basis for taking forward the devolved settlement in Scotland for the benefit of the people of Scotland and Britain.”
“Perhaps the Secretary of State can tell us what role he actually played in the deliberations on the Megrahi case within the Government. He surely had an obligation to ensure that both Scotland’s interests and the devolution settlement were fully understood. Currently, our only source of information is Channel 4, whose website says, rather bluntly: “There has been a lively discussion behind the scenes in government about whether to attack the SNP… I hear that the Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy in particular has been chomping at the bit to go for the SNP administration but has been reined in by the PM and others.””
“I do not regard that as an answer. Given the Secretary of State’s self-proclaimed role as filter between the UK Government and the Scottish Government, can he tell the House why the UK Government refused to give the Scottish Justice Secretary, Mr. MacAskill, the facts and representations that he says he requested when making his decision to release Mr. al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds? Conservative Members do not believe that that decision could have been made on any reasonable basis. Perhaps the Secretary of State regrets ensuring that Mr. MacAskill did not have every piece of information that he needed. [Interruption.]”
“I thank the right hon. Gentleman and congratulate him on his campaign, which has my full support and that of my colleagues in Scotland. Does he agree that if Diageo is the blue-chip, high-quality global company that it holds itself to be, the 90-day consultation will be a genuine one in which a counter-proposal will be listened to and properly and legitimately evaluated, rather than being a sham exercise simply endorsing decisions that have already been made?”
“In the meantime, how does he envisage the welcome steering group that has been established taking forward the commission’s recommendations for reshaping the mechanism by which Scotland receives 60 per cent. of its public spending, and over which the Scottish Parliament has control?”
“I am sure that over the past 30 years, Scottish questions will have been the highlight of your parliamentary calendar, Mr. Speaker. May I use this occasion not just to thank you and Mary for the personal kindness that you have always shown me, but to recognise the outstanding contribution that you have made to public life in Glasgow, in Scotland and throughout the United Kingdom? Does the Secretary of State agree that, unlike the First Minister of Scotland, the Calman commission based its analysis of public expenditure in Scotland on research and fact, rather than on soundbites? Does the Secretary of State welcome the commission’s suggestion of an updated needs assessment for the overall level of spending in each part of the United Kingdom?”
“I thank the Secretary of State for that response. Does he agree that the past year has seen the three Unionist parties working together for the people of Scotland on the future of devolution, putting Scotland’s interests first? That is in stark contrast to the national conversation, which is the pursuit of a separatist agenda at public expense. Does the Secretary of State agree that the First Minister is out of touch with what the people of Scotland want—a devolution settlement that works, not separation? In the best interests of the Scottish people, will the Secretary of State try one more time to persuade the First Minister to put aside petty party politics, join the mainstream of the constitutional debate and leave behind the backwater that is his national conversation?”
“Largely as a result of this Government’s reckless tax and spend approach, the Scottish block grant has, indeed, grown to twice the size of 10 years ago. Despite some implausibly optimistic forecasts in the Budget, it is clear that the Treasury is now on course to run out of money, yet all the First Minister has done is attempt to persuade the Government that no cut at all can be made to the block grant. Has the Secretary of State informed the Treasury that, following this development, the Chancellor now looks like only the second most deluded politician in Scotland?”
“The Secretary of State can resort to all the old mantras that he wants, but they will do him no good because the public know where the buck stops for this crisis. Does he really disagree with the view of the Centre for Public Policy for Regions that the years of the Scottish Executive coffers being full to overflowing thanks to block grant increases are over? Will he confirm that, as a direct result of Labour’s financial mismanagement of the UK, up to £4 billion in real terms will have to be cut from the Scottish budget over the next four years? Is it not about time that he and his Prime Minister finally took responsibility for Labour’s catastrophic economic failures and, in particular, the damage that they have done to Scotland’s public finances?”
“Finally, will the Secretary of State confirm that he will work as closely as possible with the First Minister and the Scottish Government on all aspects of the aftermath of this incident that fall within the devolved responsibilities?”
“Is the Secretary of State aware of an issue that has been raised in the media about the decision of BP to remove beacons from individual lifejackets following a previous incident? Will he ensure that that is fully investigated so that it can be fully demonstrated whether this decision played any part in the time scale in locating those on board after the crash? Will the Secretary of State take this opportunity to discuss with colleagues in the Department for Transport the Conservative proposal to review the MCA staff’s terms and conditions in relation to other emergency services? This sort of incident demonstrates the legitimacy of their claim to be part of our emergency services.”
“Will he give his personal undertaking to work with colleagues across the UK Government to do everything possible to expedite a preliminary report from the air accidents investigation branch and the Civil Aviation Authority into what caused the catastrophic failure that resulted in such a loss of life? Does the Secretary of State agree with me about the importance of not substituting speculation for a technical inquiry and of distinguishing the cause of individual incidents? Does he agree that in the light of three major incidents—two in Scotland and one in Canada—within a relatively short period, a wider review of practices in relation to the use of helicopters in oil and gas exploration may be necessary fully to restore the confidence of those who have to use them?”
“The failure to locate any survivors must have been very traumatic for all those involved. This incident reinforces to all of us just how dangerous and uncompromising a working environment the North sea is. When we make use of the oil or gas that it produces, or indeed the revenues that it generates, we must always be grateful to the dedicated people who work there. I am sure that the Secretary of State will agree that the health and safety of those workers must always be our priority. May I therefore ask him what he expects the timetable to be for investigating the aircraft wreckage and establishing the cause of the crash?”
“I apologise to the House for not being present for the start of the Secretary of State’s statement, and thank him for an advance copy. I also thank him for coming to the House to make the statement, although sadly in relation to such a tragic loss of life. I, and Members on both sides of the House, echo his sentiments and thoughts for the families and friends of all those who have lost their lives, and for all those who continue to work on the North sea. The whole nation will share the Secretary of State’s gratitude to the personnel of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, the RNLI, the Royal Air Force and the commercial and marine organisations that have given their help to the search and rescue effort. The crew of the Caledonian Victory support ship performed a particularly heroic duty in being first on the scene.”
“The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons call upon the Secretary of State for Transport to, firstly, reconsider the recent cuts to the number of services serving Lockerbie and, secondly, to instigate the introduction of a ‘balanced’ timetable designed to meet the needs of Lockerbie station users, and specifically to allow commuters to travel from Lockerbie to and from Glasgow and Edinburgh at times suitable for the start and end of the normal working day and to allow return from Edinburgh and Glasgow late in the evening so that people in the South of Scotland can take advantage of evening entertainment in these cities. And the Petitioners remain, etc. [P000343]”