Sammy Wilson
MP for East Antrim · Democratic Unionist Party · United Kingdom
“I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. The Foreign Secretary has said that his concern is for the behaviour of some settlers on the west bank, and I think we all share that, but does he accept that the fear of losing votes to the Green party and the independent Members on the Bench behind me is also…”
“It is a sad state of affairs when ordinary people feel compelled to take direct action against illegal immigration into our country as a result of successive Governments failing to stop the invasion of our country by illegal immigrants, aided by criminal gangs.”
“The Chancellor has rightly identified trade frictions as a major impediment to economic growth. As a result of the Windsor framework, the internal market in the UK has been severely disrupted by EU-imposed restrictions on trade, which mean customs unions, mountains of paperwork and physical barriers. What steps does the right hon.”
“We would not need these regulations were it not for EU regulations having to apply to a certain part of the United Kingdom because it is regarded as part of the EU, regardless of the democratic vote of the British people to leave the EU. This is not about protecting biodiversity.”
“Because they are now subject to all these additional regulations. If they do not abide by those regulations—we have already seen this—those goods can be seized, destroyed, re-exported or detained by DAERA in Northern Ireland. That is not something which is just a maybe; it happens currently.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alec. The Minister outlined why these regulations were necessary and gave what, to most on the Committee, would be an acceptable argument: they are to protect biodiversity in Northern Ireland and to ensure that diseased plants are not accessing the Northern Ireland market.”
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“Scotland might have free unfettered trade with Northern Ireland, but does the hon. Gentleman not think it would be a far bigger problem that it would not have free unfettered trade with its biggest market, England?”
“When she talks about food standards, does the hon. Lady find it odd that the EU is now proposing to reintroduce the offal that gave us mad cow disease for feed for animals in the EU, and for export to this country? The EU is reducing food standards while the UK Government have animal welfare proposals such as banning the export of live animals. We are the ones upholding food and animal welfare standards, not the EU.”
“Here is the point, Mr Speaker: the Government’s case was approved, presented and argued before the Prime Minister gave the answer to my right hon. Friend in the House of Commons. That answer therefore must have been misleading to the House.”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. On 23 June, my colleague my right hon. Friend the Member for Lagan Valley (Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson) asked the Prime Minister whether article 6 of the Act of Union (Ireland) 1800 had been impliedly repealed when the Northern Ireland protocol was approved by the House of Commons. The Prime Minister answered emphatically no. Last Thursday, the High Court, responding to a case made by the Government’s lawyers, said that the Northern Ireland protocol was not in conflict with the 1800 Act because article 6, which guaranteed equal trade across the United Kingdom, had been impliedly repealed when the withdrawal Act was passed through the House of Commons. Mr Justice Colton agreed that indeed article 6 had been overridden by the passing of the withdrawal Acts here in the House of Commons.”
“Inadvertently misleading to the House. I would like to know whether the Prime Minister can be called to apologise for inadvertently misleading the House. What steps does he intend to take to undo the damage that the change to the Act of Union has caused constitutionally and economically to Northern Ireland?”
“I am sure that people back home will be amazed at the honeyed words of the Secretary of State. He talks about the constitutional integrity of the United Kingdom and the importance of the devolved Administration and devolved institutions, and yet he has interfered, and has just announced that he is prepared to interfere once again, in the institutions in Northern Ireland in a way in which no Secretary of State would dare to do in Scotland or Wales. Does he not accept that, for the Unionist community, this continual interference in the institutions at Stormont at the behest of Sinn Féin is not an annoyance but something that enrages people?”
“Just so that no one is misled by the previous intervention, will the Secretary of State confirm that no one has sought an amnesty for soldiers? All that has been asked for is that soldiers who have already had cases investigated—some up to three times—should not be trailed through the courts again for political reasons by those who are attempting to rewrite the history of the troubles.”
“It will require them to show the same respect to devolution in Northern Ireland as they would show in Scotland and Wales. I guarantee that no Secretary of State for either Scotland or Wales would dare interfere in the devolved settlements in those two countries in the way in which this Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and this Government have done with devolution in Northern Ireland.”
“As a result, we now have the protocol being able to be pushed through without any real say by the people who are most affected by it, although, as Members have pointed out today, it is beginning to affect some of their constituents too, because they cannot even trade in Northern Ireland. It is another example of where, in order to attain certain objectives, the Government have cherry-picked parts of the safeguards built into the constitutional structure of Northern Ireland. What angers many people in Northern Ireland is that that seems to be done on issues that most affect the Unionist community. I am sure some of my colleagues will have something to say on some of those other issues. We will be supporting the Bill tonight, but if the Government want to sustain devolution and see it prosper, it will require more than just this Bill.”
“I am sure we will get some lectures about the petition of concern when the SDLP speakers get up to speak, but all I can say about the changes is that, incidentally, no one party now would have 30 Members to exclusively put forward a petition of concern, and the petition of concern was one of the safety mechanisms in the agreement, for use when there were divisive issues and one bloc tried to impose those issues on others. Incidentally—this is significant, again, as an example of the Government’s interference—there is nothing more divisive in Northern Ireland than the Northern Ireland protocol, yet the safety measures in the Belfast agreement for issues such as the protocol have been totally removed. They were totally removed when the protocol and the withdrawal agreement were brought here to the House of Commons.”
“Incidentally, that was not drafted by Sinn Féin or the DUP. We were not the largest parties when the Good Friday agreement was negotiated. It was drafted in that form by the Social Democratic and Labour party and the Ulster Unionist party, who thought that they would be the ones who would be able to exercise the petition of concern. It is very significant that, now that Unionists no longer have a majority in the Assembly, those who clamoured for the petition of concern because they said it was necessary to protect minorities are the ones who wish to see it watered down. There were not abuses of the petition of concern. Indeed, it was not even used all that often. When it was used, all parties used it, and the time that it was used and abused the most was by the SDLP when it came to welfare reform.”
“If they are simply there as lame ducks, there is no point in having them, yet if they are able to do everything that they would normally be able to do with Assembly scrutiny, I think that there would be grave concerns about that. I hope that some of those issues will be teased out in Committee. I do not know whether it is easy to codify that or put it in the terms of the Bill, but certainly it is not an issue that can be ignored. On the changes to the petition of concern, I note again what the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon said. He said that the changes are necessary to stop the abuses of the petition of concern by the large parties. First, let me make something clear. The Belfast agreement did not put any limitations on the petition of concern. It can be used for whatever purpose.”
“There would be that 24-week period with Ministers in place, but I take the point made by the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh), about what powers those Ministers should have. That is a very fine balance. Do we have 24 weeks in which Ministers have full power without accountability? Do we have 24 weeks in which Ministers have no power other than to administer issues and therefore are not able to deal with serious issues that come up? I do not have an easy answer to that, but she posed an important question. There may be occasions when that elongated period is necessary. If we are going to have it, we have to be very clear what Ministers can do during that time.”
“I know that this is not part of the Bill, but the Secretary of State mentioned it and he mentioned his intention in the House today. I give warning to him that if he wants to find a way of undermining devolution and of making it difficult for parties to work together, let him continue down this road of giving in to people because they threaten. Or, maybe it is because the Government fear that Sinn Féin has more of a threat than any other party in the Executive and therefore it has to be pandered to. This does not augur well for devolution. Let me turn to the terms of the Bill itself and the period of up to 24 weeks for reflection and attempts to try and overcome the difficulties that there are. Sometimes there are issues that parties do not see eye to eye on, which they cannot agree on and which are important to them.”
“My own party actually complained more about not getting the money for certain things than some of the other parties did, because that is just the job, and if we do not have enough money, we cannot give everyone everything they ask for. But no one ever accused us of being biased. We worked our way through difficult issues including, during that period, the most difficult issue of the devolution of policing and justice. For any Member of this House to suggest that the natives cannot work their way through these things, so we have to take things over occasionally—all it does is ensure that those who wish to be intransigent will continue to be intransigent because they know that they have the safety valve of running to the Secretary of State’s door, and he will sort it all out for them rather than them sorting it out for themselves.”
“I have to say, the kind of condescending, patronising attitude that we get from the Chair of the Select Committee does not go down very well in Northern Ireland—this kind of condescending attitude: “If the natives can’t get it together, then let’s do it here”. He was talking like some 19th-century colonial ruler. Of course, there are difficult situations and difficult decisions to be made in Northern Ireland. I served as a Minister in the Northern Ireland Executive for five years; I served as Finance Minister. None of the parties ever accused the DUP at that stage of being one-sided in the way in which it dealt with the finances across Departments.”
“The Bill is meant to be all about sustaining devolution—to try to make devolution stronger, to try to stop it being hijacked by any one party, to try to stop the disruption that we had in the past—and yet, at the same time as the Bill is going through, we have the Secretary of State once again giving the green light to a party that does not want to see stability in Northern Ireland, that does not really care whether there is stability in Northern Ireland, and that gives priority to its niche demands over the main concerns of people in Northern Ireland, whether they are Unionist or nationalist, which are to get money spent and time devoted to dealing with the essential, day-to-day issues. I listened to the Chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), who endorsed this approach.”
“A British Secretary of State, the British House of Commons—“Please do these things for us because we can’t persuade people in Northern Ireland to do them.” I think the Secretary of State should think very carefully about the way he undermines devolution.”
“Either the Secretary of State wants parties in Northern Ireland to work together or he does not. Either he wants to try to take the poison out of the system in Northern Ireland or he does not. I can tell this House one thing: if this one-sided pandering to Sinn Féin—setting aside the devolved powers—continues, all he is doing is allowing Sinn Féin to come back time and again. this is the irony: this is a party that refuses to take its seats in this House and wants to see Northern Ireland divorced from the rest of the United Kingdom, but when it cannot get its own way, where is the first place that it goes scurrying to?”
“I must say that while my party has signed up to the cultural aspects, many people—including, I suspect, Sinn Féin voters in Northern Ireland—really are questioning why, at a time when we are coming out of covid, with hospital waiting lists at about 350,000, with lots of children in schools having missed out on their education and in need of catch-up and with unemployment having doubled as a result of the covid restrictions, the main concern, and the threat to devolution again, is, “If you do not do the cultural aspects of New Decade, New Approach and allocate resources, Assembly time and political capital to it, we will not allow devolution to be set up again.” Pathetically, the Secretary of State caved in to those threats again with the commitment he made to Sinn Féin that if it is not done in the Assembly by the end of September, he will take the devolution powers and do it in Westminster.”
“Yet, in the same breath, he described how, once again, he intends if necessary to cast devolution aside and take on the responsibilities of the devolved Administration in Northern Ireland to satisfy the threats of one party and one party alone: Sinn Féin. Of course, the impasse and fears we had in Northern Ireland were because Sinn Féin was threatening not to appoint a Deputy First Minister if it did not get the cultural aspects of New Decade, New Approach delivered on the timetable it demanded.”
“This is an attempt by the parties in Northern Ireland, led by us in the negotiations, to ensure that we could not have three years without a Government in Northern Ireland. Incidentally, because the Government here in Westminster were afraid to take on Sinn Féin, they sat on their hands and refused to do anything to try to get a situation going in which devolution was restored in Northern Ireland. Secondly, there is a certain irony. We had the Secretary of State standing here today, and we heard his honeyed words that the Bill is all about the Government’s commitment to the constitutional integrity of the United Kingdom and that parties should not be making threats to bring down devolution.”
“First, let me make it clear from the outset that the Democratic Unionist party will be supporting the Bill’s Second Reading. That is not because, as the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) seemed to suggest, the Bill is somehow or other a Unionist game and an exclusively Unionist demand. There are provisions in the Bill that seek to ensure that the Assembly cannot be torn down by those who want to see instability in Northern Ireland. Indeed, for three years they ensured that there was instability and no Assembly. We wanted those changes to ensure that that could not happen again, not for the benefit of the DUP or the Unionist community, but for the benefit of the whole of the community. I want to make that clear at the outset. This is not a Unionist game. This is not a Unionist Bill. This is not a Unionist demand.”
“Will the hon. Member agree then that, since we already spend about £200 million on the Irish language, whether it is in relation to education, broadcasting, street names and a whole lot of other things in Northern Ireland, he would not give priority to further cultural issues when a huge amount of money is needed to deal with the waiting lists he described?”
“The hon. Gentleman talks about the commercial impact of the protocol. As his party has Members in the Northern Ireland Assembly, has he no concerns that, as a result of the protocol, many of the things that are devolved to the Northern Ireland Assembly and many of the laws and regulations that were made in the Northern Ireland Assembly will and can no longer be made there, but will be made in Brussels?”
“I have a list the length of my arm of other issues contained in the New Decade, New Approach document that are not being delivered on. Why does the Minister feel that these cultural issues are a greater priority than dealing with the reforms in the health service and dealing with the waiting list of 350,000 in the health service? Why is he not stepping in to deal with that as a priority, rather than these cultural issues?”
“Will the Secretary of State then explain to the House whether visitors to care homes or to hospitals will also require proof of vaccination? Will delivery drivers require it? Will others who provide other services to those care homes and hospitals require the same? Is he not now walking down the road of requiring mandatory vaccination for almost everyone?”
“Between now and “terminus day” many people will find their employment terminated, their business terminated, their livelihoods terminated, and for those reasons, I will not be voting for these restrictions.”
“Those who work in the care sector are going to be forced to have a vaccination. He did not answer the question, but I assume that people visiting anybody in a hospital or care home are going to have to prove they have had a vaccination. Are peripheral workers going to have to have the vaccination? We can see already that the Government are thinking that people have accepted these restrictions and there will be other things in the future that are going to be forced on them. Let me come to my second point. The Minister said he was going to follow the data, so let me tell him about some data: unemployment in my constituency has gone up by more than 100% as a result of restrictions. Businesses are going under.”
“The first is that if we follow the logic of what we have heard from the Minister and the Prime Minister in the past two days, we will never get away from the restrictions we are living with at present, because the Minister has admitted that we will have to live with coronavirus, and we know that it will mutate, so we will get different versions of it. If we get different versions, we will be told, “This version is different from the last version. It is more dangerous. It is more contagious. It leads to more deaths. It leads to higher infection rates.” And so on and so on. We will be told that there is therefore a justification for keeping the restrictions in place. Indeed, we heard from the Minister today not only about the current restrictions; we know that we are going to have further restrictions in the future.”
“You can’t do the things you want to do in normal life, because there’s a real danger you’ll die.” Of course, the statistics show that of those who contract coronavirus a very small proportion, less than 0.3%, actually die. Even the World Health Organisation has said that many of those deaths may not even be attributable to coronavirus anyway. If someone has been tested for coronavirus 28 days before they die in a car accident they still qualify as a coronavirus death. So the statistics themselves have even been used in a way to try to reinforce the message of fear. I wish to make two points today.”
“Like the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) I will not support the Government this evening, but it will not be with a heavy heart; it will be because I have a real conviction that what is being done and the approach that the Government have taken on this issue is wrong. We have heard again today, as we heard yesterday from the Prime Minister, that the very basis of pushing and promoting the policy is to instil fear into the hearts of people across the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister yesterday said that we have to delay because the new variant could kill people in ways that we cannot foresee, or do not understand. It is the same old message: “If you do not obey the restrictions, you are in danger—either of dying yourself or of your relatives dying. You can’t put your nose out the door.”
“Does the hon. Gentleman find rather odd not only the absence of Opposition Members, but the fact that the Government are comfortable about getting the restrictions through only because they have the support of the Labour party, and yet most Labour Members who have spoken today have condemned the Government for their actions?”
“If the Financial Conduct Authority has proven that it is not up to the job, new regulators have to be put in place. Those who take on the responsibilities of the Financial Conduct Authority have to be held responsible as well. We cannot simply say that it is about the institution or the people who are in charge; we have to avoid this happening again so that people in my constituency who have suffered do not continue to suffer from these kinds of actions.”
“It failed to take any action even when it was found that a regulated firm was engaging solely in unregulated lending. Surely that must have raised concerns that the firm was using its regulated status to engage in activities that were unregulated. Its staff were clearly not trained in taking complaints and passing them on. Indeed, as Dame Elizabeth pointed out, they were actually assuring the public that the claims being made by LCF were correct and that their savings were safe. Even when fraud was passed on up the line to supervisors, again it was ignored. All these regulatory failures require the Government to ensure that there is compensation for individuals. I agree with the Minister that we cannot cover every spiv and every chancer who tries to take money from people. If we are going to avoid that, we must have proper regulations.”
“I welcome the Bill. Those of my constituents who have been affected by the collapse of LCF will welcome the fact that, as a result of the excellent report by Dame Elizabeth, which really lifted the lid on how the Financial Conduct Authority failed in its obligations, the Government have been forced into the position we are in today with this Bill. I welcome that. As other speakers have said, this is not the first time that the Financial Conduct Authority has failed in its regulatory duty and failed people who are innocents in all of this. Firms assure them that they are regulated and that protection is available, but the savings they invest are then snatched from them. Let us look at the failure of the FCA in this particular case. It failed to meet its statutory obligations.”
“Does he understand the frustration that businesses and individuals have at the way in which, acting on his advice, they take precautions, spend money and take actions that they think are right, yet find that, when he changes his message, they are placed at a disadvantage?”
“The Secretary of State seems to be the master of mixed messages. Today, he tells us that the vaccination programme is going well, cases are down and hospital admissions have fallen, yet at the weekend, he was telling us that he is still open to removing the date for freedom day—21 June—and keeping restrictions in place. A few weeks ago, he was telling people that they could go to Portugal, yet, despite Portugal having lower infection rates than we do and only 1.5% of people being tested positive on return from Portugal, he has now put it on the amber list, costing the airline industry millions of pounds and putting holidaymakers to great expense.”
“There is no doubt that this was an act of air piracy designed to abduct a critic of the tyrannical Belarusian regime, and there is no doubt that the regime has been emboldened by the Russian regime’s law-breaking exercises around the world. It is important that the Secretary of State take every action, with every possible body, whether it is the EU, the G7, financial institutions or private investors—anyone who can hurt this regime—to send a message to it, and to any who would seek to copy it, that this behaviour will not be tolerated and there will be financial, personal and political consequences.”
“Does not the situation get even worse once these tax avoidance schemes have been identified and shown to be illegal? It is very often the people who were conned into operating with umbrella companies who are penalised, while the umbrella companies walk away with no investigation and there is no means of holding them to account.”
“I thank the Minister for giving way. I tried to catch his eye earlier on; I do not think that he is deliberately avoiding me, but I did not get the chance to talk to him. New schedule 1 refers to VAT on distance selling. It covers 55 pages and was introduced tonight without much chance of consideration. It will affect businesses with a threshold of sales of £8,818, which will require them to register and to do special accounting. What assessment has been made of the likely impact of that on small businesses in Northern Ireland that sell goods into the EU?”
“Can the Prime Minister assure us that the inquiry will include examining and listening to the views of those experts and the issues that they raised?”
“I welcome the Prime Minister’s announcement of an inquiry. It is important because of the number of people who died, and also because of the millions of people who will live with the consequences of the policies adopted by Ministers on the advice of their chief medical officers. Many people lost their lives because hospitals and surgeries were closed, people’s businesses were wrecked because of stop-go lockdowns, and children’s education has been disrupted, affecting their life chances. At the same time, there were many credible experts who questioned the modelling on which those policies were based, the impact that this had on the poor, and the appropriateness and the consistency of the actions.”
“Does the right hon. Gentleman recall that it was his party that authorised the changing of Drax B power station to wood pellets, which are now harvested from virgin forests in America and brought across to the United Kingdom, and now require a subsidy of £1 billion a year? Is that the kind of green energy that he talks about?”
“That is why I want to see, and why I believe it is important that we see, the detail of the Queen’s Speech.”
“I hope that it is rocket fuel and not a damp squib. My fear relates to issues about the Union. If the Government do not deal properly with the levelling-up programme and the divisive impact of the Northern Ireland protocol, as well as the impact that that has on Scottish nationalism, then he will not achieve that objective. If we continue to pursue these high-level climate change CO 2 -reducing targets, are we going to find more and more that people’s personal choices are affected, that fuel poverty increases as energy bills go up, and that we chase away energy-intensive industries and lose jobs? If we are going to move in that direction, I believe we do not have a Government who are free market, free choice and pro-Union, but a Government who act against all those fundamental principles of the Conservative party.”
“What impact will that have on people’s ability to go on their annual holiday? Does it mean we insist that people have more expensive ways of heating their houses? It is estimated to cost £20,000 to invest in heat pumps and so on to make a house energy-efficient. Are consumers going to pay that? The Committee on Climate Change says we will have to eat less dairy products and meat. Are we even going to tell people what their diet should be? If we are going to set these targets, then the Government have got to be honest. They cannot simply set a target and not spell out how it will impact on people’s choices and freedom, and what we would regard, in a free society, as the ways in which people can make those choices. The Prime Minister said that he wants to put rocket fuel into the economy after the pandemic.”
“Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) said in her speech today, “We can reduce CO 2 emissions and still have economic growth; we have done that.” The truth of the matter is, of course, that we have reduced CO 2 emissions by divesting ourselves of many of our heavy and energy-intensive industries, such as steel, aluminium and many others. It is not that the CO 2 emissions have ceased; we have simply moved them to another country. If we are going to set targets to reduce CO 2 emissions, the Government must spell out how they are going to do that. Does more renewable energy mean that we add to the £12 billion a year that electricity consumers pay in their electricity bills for renewable energy subsidies? Does it mean greater restrictions on people’s ability to fly because we make flying—one of the big producers of CO 2 —more expensive?”
“I could give lots of other different examples. The first thing the Government must address is the protocol. If we are going to have an equal chance in the levelling-up agenda, Northern Ireland must not be economically and democratically disadvantaged by the imposition of Brussels rule, which we are left with as a result of the protocol. The second thing that I want to discuss is the commitment that the Government have made to setting “binding environmental targets”. I know that, ahead of COP26 in Glasgow, the Government are engaging in international virtue signalling, but there is no point in setting such targets unless they spell out what the impact will be on the people. I noted that the right hon.”
“Secondly, the Government said they want to ease regulations, but that will have an even greater impact because, of course, since Northern Ireland is under the protocol—a monstrous decision to remove all democratic control of laws in Northern Ireland and place it in the hands of Brussels—any UK-wide relaxation of regulations cannot therefore apply to Northern Ireland; and the same goes for any advantages of deregulation, which I believe is right in many instances. To give one example, I welcome the Government’s commitment to improved animal welfare, and I hope they will stop the export of live animals to the continent because of the suffering that that causes. However, those rules could not apply to Northern Ireland, because we will still be subject to EU regulations on the export of live animals.”