David Davis
MP for Goole and Pocklington · Conservative · United Kingdom
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I start by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) on putting a Bill in front of the House that has support from literally everybody in the Chamber?”
“The Post Office Horizon scandal highlighted the institutional instinct to find a convenient scapegoat. Innocent people paid the price, while the institution sought to protect itself. If the Thirlwall inquiry asks too narrow a set of questions, systemic NHS failures will go unexamined.”
“Last month’s sentencing of Nicola Sturgeon’s husband exposed the real reasons behind the Scottish Government’s persecution of Alex Salmond. From 2010 to 2022, Peter Murrell abused his position to embezzle almost £500,000 from the SNP to buy luxury items. He used SNP money to buy a £33,000 Volkswagen Golf.”
“The consultants also reported that in the two months since the change infants have been sick but recovered as expected.” The report highlighted deficiencies in staffing levels, leadership and communication, but, in the trial, it was not shown to the jury—they knew nothing of it.”
“One of the nurses let go later described it as “the decimation of the Nursing and Midwifery service”, adding that “eight registered nurses...were replaced with nursery nurses...unqualified staff are replacing qualified staff”.”
“There was little space, cots and incubators were stored in corridors, and mothers struggled to find somewhere to breastfeed their babies. Susan Gilby, the hospital’s chief executive between 2018 and 2022, later described the unit as “dark, dingy and cramped”, providing a “less than ideal” environment to work in.”
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“If the American system insists on trying to exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction in the American interest, perhaps we should mimic Israel and refuse to extradite British citizens for anything other than serious crimes of violence and terrorism. We need to give British citizens, businessmen and entrepreneurs the protection, certainty and justice that they deserve.”
“Businesses developed by brilliant British inventors will look to merge, co-operate, or sell to big US companies. If the current extradition treaty stands, every one of them could face American extraterritorial legal action and a legal system stacked against them. In the interests of both countries, this has to change. We need to find a way to rein in the US’s extraterritorial tendencies and ensure that our arrangements are fair, balanced and based on reciprocity. The simplest way to do that is to change the British law to exactly mirror the American law—the Americans cannot possibly complain about that—and say that the Secretary of State “may” extradite, rather than “must”.”
“UK and European law guarantee a right to a fair trial. An extradition before a UK trial has concluded is incompatible with that right, as it pre-empts the judgment of the court. The Home Secretary should therefore delay the extradition on grounds of basic justice, just as my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) refused the extradition of Gary McKinnon on human rights grounds when she was Home Secretary in 2012. If the Home Secretary certifies the extradition request, it is out of her hands. If she holds off certification, we can let British justice take its course. In the longer term, we need to take a fresh look at our extradition arrangements with the United States, particularly as we embark on a new trading relationship with them. In the next decade, Britain and the US will develop even closer commercial relationships.”
“To put that in perspective, Dr Lynch’s trial so far has cost £40 million and has involved over 11 million documents. The opening arguments alone were 1,067 pages and the closing arguments were 4,494 pages. One can easily see how someone in Dr Lynch’s position would be coerced into giving in and admitting guilt, irrespective of the facts. I would not call that a plea bargain; I would call that blackmail. This is nothing like normal British justice. It effectively turns the presumption of innocence into the presumption of guilt. Mike Lynch could be arrested any day now and sent to the United States to go through this appalling ordeal, but I hope not. I hope that the Home Secretary will use every legal mechanism available to delay this extradition until the judge has made his decision in the civil trial.”
“There are many reasons for that, but no doubt the ferocious use of plea bargains is a major factor. Once charges have been brought, and after Dr Lynch—if he is unfortunate to suffer this—has spent months in appalling conditions, prosecutors will almost certainly try to convince him to admit guilt to a lesser charge. They will promise a shorter sentence, some of which might be served in the UK, and they will remind him of the huge financial cost of a protracted and complex trial. If he refuses, he will face the prospect of a deliberately intimidating lengthy sentence, and the costs of the trial could run into millions. The rules are set up for him to fail. He will be told that he must run his defence from his own prison cell, where he can only have one ream of paper at a time.”
“They were told that if they pleaded not guilty, they would be denied bail and get 35 years in a high-security US prison, but if they pleaded guilty, they would get only three years, possibly serving some of it in a British jail. In the end, they were sentenced to 37 months in a Texas prison because they gave way to the pressure. That is standard practice in the American system, which has a corrosive over-reliance on plea bargains. Ninety-seven per cent. of cases are settled by a plea bargain in the United States. In the US, mandatory sentencing means that it is the prosecutor who determines the sentence, not the judge, which allows the prosecutor to operate a sort of judicial blackmail. The US imprisons a higher proportion of its citizens than any other country in the world.”
“After the Financial Services Authority and the Serious Fraud Office decided that there was no basis for a prosecution in the UK, the three were extradited to the US because the Justice Department believed their crimes contributed to the collapse of Enron. The NatWest Three have since written vivid accounts of their experience. As soon as they stepped off the plane in the US, before a trial had even begun, they were treated like convicted criminals. Handcuffed and frogmarched to the jail, they were treated with contempt by marshals and subjected to a comprehensive and intrusive full-body search. It highlighted the classic approach that US authorities take.”
“The reality is that it is much more slanted. If Dr Lynch is unfortunate enough to be extradited and denied bail, as most foreign suspects are—they are taken to be an intrinsic flight risk—he will face appalling conditions that are much worse than anything found in the UK. He will likely find himself in a high-security prison in a cramped cell with gang members, drug dealers and murderers. Take the example of the NatWest Three. They were investigated by the UK authorities in 2001 for financial crimes. The alleged offences took place in London, while the three were employed by a London-based company.”
“The British Extradition Act 2003 states: “The Secretary of State must order the person’s discharge.” The equivalent US code, however, states: “The Secretary of State may order the person....to be tried”. That sounds like a minor difference in language, but it has had a very, very big impact. Since 2007, the UK has surrendered 135 UK nationals to the US, 99 of them for non-violent alleged offences. During the same period, the US has surrendered only 11 people to the UK. That is why countries such as France and Israel refuse to allow their citizens to be extradited. It seems inconceivable, then, that the UK has ceded so much of its discretion, particularly given the extraordinary way in which extradited suspects are treated in the US. Many people think the US justice system is broadly similar to ours.”
“An American citizen facing extradition to the UK can challenge it in a US court on the basis that there is no “probable cause”, but a UK citizen facing extradition to the US has no right to a “reasonable grounds” hearing. This is what the Joint Committee on Human Rights called in 2011 a “lack of reciprocity in the Treaty.” It went on to recommend: “The Government should increase the proof required for the extradition of British citizens to the US so as to require sufficient evidence to establish probable cause, as is required for the extradition of a US citizen to the UK.” What is more, the US Secretary of State has far greater discretion to refuse an extradition than our Home Secretary—just look at the rejected extradition request for Anne Sacoolas.”
“The Home Affairs Committee concluded, in a 2012 report on the UK-US extradition treaty, that the US “has the power to reach out around the world and—provided there is a very, very tenuous connection with the US—it generally has the power to prosecute.” In a 2011 report on our extradition arrangements, Lord Justice Scott Baker concluded that we do not need to change the rules to ensure that London-based offences are dealt with here in the UK. He was wrong. He failed to give enough weight to the US ambition to extend its extraterritorial jurisdiction on commercial crimes. He also made no allowance for the incredibly one-sided nature of the prosecution and trial of foreign suspects in the US justice system. This is the core problem of our asymmetric and unbalanced treaty with the US.”
“Dr Lynch is being charged with several counts of wire fraud, an offence originally designed to make a state crime into a federal crime so that prosecutions could be made by federal authorities. Its application quickly expanded, prompting one federal judge to say it has “been invoked to impose criminal penalties upon a staggeringly broad swath of behaviour”. That staggeringly broad swath is now being applied across national borders. In essence, a legal playbook designed to catch and convict mobsters and racketeers has first been repurposed to catch white-collar offenders, and now that repurposing has been extended outside American borders into what should be other countries’ jurisdictions.”
“My right hon. Friend is exactly right. I was the shadow Home Secretary at the time and I opposed this treaty, but eventually our party gave in on the grounds that it was about paedophilia and terrorism and violent crime. That was the sole basis upon which we accepted what we thought at the time was a treaty that made it too easy for the US to extradite. And of course what we are seeing now is that that is not what is happening: the United States is going after white-collar businessmen and seeking to be the judge, jury and executioner for global commercial deals. Since 2003, some 80% of the extraditions were for non-violent crimes. This seems like very strange behaviour when we consider that this is a country that did not convict any American chief executives in the 2008 crisis, which clearly had some frauds behind it.”
“There is no doubt that this is a difficult area, but the Home Office always used to see its job as the protection both of life and of our way of life. Unfortunately, in the almost impossible task of preventing every act of violence and of terrorism, the Home Office has sometimes slipped somewhat into thought police mode. Will the Minister remind all the agencies that we all subscribe to the French saying, “I may detest what you believe, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”?”
“I rise to support the proposal of my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), to go back to the Lords for a compromise on the matter. Of all the changes incorporated in the withdrawal Act in the past month or two, this is the weakest; it opens a swathe of problems for both Government and judiciary. Lord Mackay got very close to getting it right, and we should talk to him again.”
“I look forward not to the Minister solving the issue today—I know that that is not within his reach—but to it being solved in the Budget.”
“The Minister has my sympathy. I have a sense of déjà vu from the omnishambles Budget, when the last attempt was made to attack pasties and caravans. At the time, I spoke to a predecessor in his post. I said, “You will lose taxes as a result of the impact on jobs, trade and so on.” He said, “Well, we don’t do calculations that way in the Treasury,” to which my response was, “You ought to.” This policy is masquerading as a green policy. It is destroying jobs in my constituency in Haltemprice already. It is hurting the poorest in our society in terms of their natural holidays travelling around the country. As we have heard, it is replacing staycations with trips to Cyprus and so on, which will use more in one trip than these vehicles use in one year.”
“I thank the Minister for being so generous in giving way. On that exact point, perhaps the best thing to compare, if he wants to look at more than one-off costs, is the first six years, which can be reasonably compared. A light commercial vehicle doing 8,000 miles a year will have to meet £3,325; for a motorhome doing 3,000 miles a year, it is £4,460. It is a ridiculous comparison.”
“The Secretary of State started topical questions by describing the improper release of 28 million records of students and schoolchildren. That serious breach of privacy and data protection was made even more serious by the fact that the data appears to have been used to get even more young children hooked on gambling. One problem in this policy area is that the companies involved view the fines as just the cost of doing business. Through the Secretary of State, may I say to the Information Commissioner that I hope the fine in this case is many multiples of the profit made? I hope the Secretary of State will have his Department sue the company concerned for breach of practice.”
“It grew by 2.25%, year on year, every year in the 60 years from 1948 to 2008. Since 2008, it has been at 0.5%.”
“That is our first challenge, and the fundamental weakness in all the Opposition arguments so far today. The reason why Labour lost hundreds of thousands of votes in the north of England is that nobody believed it was able to pay for its promises. The public were right, as always, and the Labour party was wrong. So what will dictate whether we are able to meet our own aims for our society? The key issue that determines the affluence of citizens, the delivery of public services and even the level of opportunity in society is one boring technical term: productivity. From shortly after the war in 1948, when they started measuring it, until 2008, productivity in this country—whether it was total productivity or labour productivity—grew by 2.25% a year. It bounced around a bit, but never by very much.”
“In the past 30 years, that globalisation has raised half the world out of poverty, but that trend is not secure. We as a nation need to be ready to act, both politically to ensure that free trade remains central to the world’s economic operating systems, and commercially to seize the advantages in that for ourselves. Brexit is the catalyst in that process; it is not the outcome. Brexit by itself is not enough. To exploit the opportunities given to us by Brexit, we need to overhaul British society and the British economy. That is the challenge in front of us. High-quality public services, education, healthcare, social support and the rule of law are vital parts of a decent society, but the Government can provide them only if they have the resources to pay for them.”
“But that is always the case when this country faces a point of inflection and a change of historic position. Our nation now faces a reset moment on a par with 1945, when the Attlee Government came in, and with 1979, when the Thatcher Government came in. Both of them had enormous national problems to solve, and we are in the same position. Thatcher’s revolution, controversial as it was, was above all a revolution of expectations, in which the United Kingdom once more realised it was able to stand on its own two feet. In truth, we are facing something similar today. However, in the next decade, Brexit will not be the biggest challenge to the UK Government and our nation. Fast globalisation of trade and massive technological change will create bigger challenges and bigger opportunities even than Brexit.”
“The first thing to say is that I will not focus solely on education today. As you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, I always focus on my favourite line in the Queen’s Speech, which is the last one: “Other measures will be laid before you.” It gives us the option of talking about whatever we like. I should also, en passant, like to say a personal thank you to the Secretary of State for his announcement of the extra funding for special needs. He may know that I have a special interest in this, a personal interest, and this funding will go to a very important sector. This Queen’s Speech was the longest ever Queen’s Speech I have known in terms of duration. At the beginning of the debate on the Queen’s Speech before Christmas, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) said that these had been “troubled times” for Parliament.”
“No productivity means no progress. How do we deal with that? The answers include education, skills, training, research and investment, and of course, as the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) rightly said, infrastructure. If we are to reset our economy and our society, we must be unflinching in our analysis and in the critique of our own past as well as those of the other parties.”
“Had productivity continued at the level it had been for the previous 60 years, had we not had the financial collapse, which happened largely under the watch of the Labour Government and the earlier Clinton Administration in the US, then wages, income and the economy would have been about 22% bigger than they are today. The tax take would have been higher, the deficit would have been easier to pay off, austerity would have been more manageable and shorter. All those things stemmed not just from the crash, but from the damage to our ability to recover from the crash as productivity was allowed to collapse. This dramatic and apparently permanent reduction in productivity has had spectacular consequences across the whole of society and the entire economy, and that is what we have to solve. The productivity problem is a universal problem.”
“I will come directly to the hon. Gentleman’s question later in my speech. He is exactly right in one respect: that is a contributory factor for productivity. But he should not look just at the past 10 years if he wants to comment about our infrastructure. The most used phrase by George Osborne when he was Chancellor was to say, while pointing at Gordon Brown, that he never mended the roof when the sun was shining. That is exactly what happened through those Labour years: profligate spending—poor spending, inadequate spending —that nevertheless did not provide the services that we needed. Now, what has been the effect of that change in productivity? What is the size of the impact?”
“It has encouraged all sorts of perverse consequences and behaviours in our universities, so we must deal with it. I would argue to the Secretary of State for Education—I know that this is wider and much bigger than just the Department for Education—that he and his colleagues should be radical and brave.”
“I have some sympathy with one area of Opposition Members’ comments, which is the university underpinning of the research and the response to the Augar report. I know Philip Augar very well, and I spoke to him about his review before the report. If anything, it pulled its punches. The truth is that the university tuition fees and loans scheme invented and implemented by the Blair Government and carried on by us has failed. It has done a bad job. It has delivered poor-quality education, high levels of expectations and low levels of outcome. It has landed young people—some are now middle-aged—with liabilities for almost their entire lives, putting a cap on their aspirations. It has not delivered what it was intended to deliver, which was people paying for their component, not the public advantage component. It does not work that way.”
“That means taking a good idea from the laboratory and making a great product, which leads to a great company, which leads to more and more jobs, more wealth creation, more tax and the rest of it. We would do well to build on some of the great institutions that we currently have. The University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, which is essentially an aviation-based operation, is doing fantastic, world-class, world-beating work. We should do similar things with the Warwick Manufacturing Group. There is a great deal of work to do to encourage those operations and build on them. Maybe we should even look to build a Massachusetts Institute of Technology of the north, because that is the sort of thing that we should be considering if we are to fix our economy.”
“In the short term, we need to double the amount of research spend not just by the Government, but by the private sector. In the longer run, we need to treble that joint expenditure, and I stress that it should be joint expenditure. We should also address the things that we have not been so good at. It is easy to put money into genetics, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars or IT—the things we are historically world leaders in—but we should also try to ensure that that money goes where it will make a big difference by improving the things that we have not been so good at. Historically, we have not been so good at what is called translational research.”
“Productivity had been at that level for 60 years. It is not difficult to keep things the same as they were before; the really hard thing is to smash productivity down from 2.3% to 0.5%, which is what the hon. Gentleman’s Government did. If we are to reset the economy, let us look at what we got wrong, as well as at what Labour got wrong. Take research. The past 30 years, under Governments of all persuasions, have seen the UK decline from one the most research-intensive economies to one of the least. In the past decade, China has overtaken us, and South Korea now spends three times as much as we do. The Queen’s Speech committed to establishing the UK as a world leader in science with greater investment—so far so good. In my view, we need to do even more than that in quantitative terms.”
“That was not the only thing that went wrong. I recommend that the hon. Gentleman reads the Augar report carefully, because a lot of things went wrong, including the lack of restrictions on what universities could do. However, if he wants to approach the Secretary of State or have his Front-Bench team approach the Secretary of State to offer a joint approach, I am sure that the Secretary State will be very polite and talk it over with them over a cup of tea.”
“If we do all of that, we will have a very good chance of making the Prime Minister’s promise of a golden future a reality for all our citizens.”
“If we allowed every planning authority in the country to nominate one garden village or garden town of between 1,500 and 5,000 houses, which is big enough to be viable for a school and shops, and so on, we would not solve, but we would seriously mitigate, our housing problem. We would make it attractive for people to live in places other than the south-east. Again, that would majorly improve productivity by attracting talent back out to the provinces. The problem of productivity is a tough one to tackle but tackle it we must. Research, investment, education, infrastructure, magnet cities and garden villages all have a contribution to make in simultaneously improving the lives of our citizens and helping us to solve this fundamental problem. If we do not solve it, we will not be able to afford to solve any of the others.”
“Year after year, the combination of a slow planning process, nimbyism and speculative land hoarding has limited the availability of housing. This has simultaneously led to higher house prices, smaller homes—our homes are now half the size they were in the 1920s, and they are the smallest in Europe—massively lower rates of home ownership, and severe rent poverty. It is hard to solve that in London and the crowded south-east, but it can be solved in the provinces, making them more attractive in the process. The Government are actively thinking about garden villages and garden towns, and we should step up that programme.”
“If that is not enough, perhaps we should cancel High Speed 2 to pay for it. A strategy of modestly sized infrastructure projects—road, rail, air and broadband—will help but, again, it will not be enough by itself. We need to make it more attractive to stay in the regions. We need to turn more of our regional towns and cities into magnet towns and cities, places that attract talent, money and enterprise, and it can be done. If we look around the world, there are dozens of examples. From Bilbao to Pittsburgh, and from Denver to Tel Aviv, cities have transformed their futures. We must ensure that our towns and cities can do the same. Finally, house building has simply not kept up with the huge increase in population over the past 20 years.”
“I hope the Scots Nats forgive me for including Scotland as a region in that context. We have to do something about that. Where productivity is low, jobs are scarce and, of course, wages are low, which is a fundamental problem that this Parliament needs to attack. It argues for targeted policies like free ports and, to come directly to the point made by the hon. Member for Weaver Vale, for a great focus on—forgive me for the phrase—unglamorous, smaller infrastructure projects designed to sort out problems that are on the deck now. We must de-bottleneck the whole economy, because that is much more likely to be effective than grand vanity projects, and everyone knows what I am talking about. We can do that because we will have very low interest rates for the foreseeable future.”
“When we come to the question of domestic investment, which has been up and down in recent years, we must ask ourselves what should guide our policies. We have the most productive industries in Europe by far, and the least productive. We have nine of the 25 fastest growing companies in Europe, but we have a long tail of poor performance. One notable aspect of the productivity conundrum that stands out is that it is not uniform. The key point in this debate is that it is the same regionally, because the golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge has by far the highest productivity in Europe—the average wage in that area is 90% higher than the European average—yet some regions of our economy are down with the lowest performers in the European Union, such as southern Italy and the old East Germany.”
“That would be great for them, great for social mobility, and great for the economy as a whole. We ought to think hard about looking closely at all the things China has done. Something like 1,300 schools are now using artificial intelligence, which is driving its teaching systems and ensuring that every child is diagnosed to find what they are good at and what they are not good at. There is much to be done there. Productivity, however, will have to be fixed with a universal approach, and that includes, of course, investment. On an international scale, we do investment well. With all the furore and negativity about Brexit, people forget that we are still the third-highest recipient of foreign direct investment in the world—way above any European country—and we have been for years and we will continue to be. We must not damage that.”
“Of course, I take it as a given that we have done better than Labour would have and, of course, we have mostly kept up with our international competitors. However, to use a phrase that came up more times than any other in my school reports, my reaction is, “Can do better.” That was the theme or motto of my school reports, and I think we can do better here. In the friendliest possible way, we are not doing what some of our competitors, including the Chinese, the Uruguayans, believe it or not, and the Belgians, are doing, which is seizing an opportunity. Technology is such that we ought to be re-engineering the classroom. We ought to be able to re-engineer it so that the best can do better and the least good can be pulled up to the best possible outcome.”
“My point here is that we are not about tinkering with one or two rules. We should be rethinking the whole system. The hon. Lady will forgive me if I do not go down the route that she has laid for me, because we should think about rethinking the whole system. The Secretary of State was eloquent about the achievements at school level, and he was right. While I am on my feet, I pay tribute to the Minister for School Standards, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb), who did a fabulous job of developing phonics-based education— [ Interruption. ] Oh, he is there on the Front Bench. He did a fabulous job on phonics—one of the great successes of all the Education Departments of the past 30 years.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for that undertaking, but will he give me one other undertaking, which is that the United Kingdom will take its place in the World Trade Organisation immediately we leave the European Union, which will be, after all, on 1 February?”
“The proper response to those is through criminal actions; we need not an inquiry by this House, but proper investigation and proper criminal prosecution, independently by the authorities. All the soldiers I know —senior special forces soldiers, senior generals and operational officers in the field today—would welcome that, because no soldier wants to be fighting from the low moral ground. A British soldier wants to be fighting from the high moral ground, and in that at least we are in the same place.”
“It seems to me that the hon. Gentleman makes three separate points. One is about having a war powers Act. I was a co-signatory, with Mr Tony Benn, 20 years ago, in a call for a war powers Act. That is one issue about the role of the House in approving conventional wars over and above article 5 responses—defensive actions. Secondly, there is a question about the oversight of special forces operations. I have doubts on that, because of the cramping effect on our ability to respond flexibly to serious, non-full-war operations. It is important to differentiate the third point, which is about the allegations—they are just that at the moment—that have been put by reporters and repeated by the hon. Gentleman.”
“Given the events of the last few years, I am not sure whether it is congratulations or commiserations I should offer you, Mr Speaker, but I certainly express my pleasure at your appointment. When we return from the election and this House sits after the election campaign, it will be midwinter in northern Syria and 60 British children will be living in tents there. May I again ask the Foreign Secretary to revise, as a matter of urgency, our policy on their return?”
“When the Minister talked about the ISC, he referred to the Justice and Security Act 2013—the latest Act that crystallised the practical approach to the running of the ISC in the years since it was created by the Intelligence Services Act 1994. That Act created an arrangement for the Committee that balanced national security with the right to scrutiny and redaction and the right of the Prime Minister to approve the report before it is released. It rested on balance and on both sides—the House and the Government—treating the other side fairly. That is what is missing here. By not releasing the report, all the Minister does is create a vacuum for the paranoid fantasies we have heard from the Opposition to fill.”
“I commend the Minister for the progressive approach the Government have taken to genomics, but for a large number of genetic diseases the symptoms do not manifest themselves until after developmental damage has been done. Will the Government consider whether we should extend genomic testing to all neonates—all newborns—at some point in the future?”
“I am sure the whole House welcomes the generous approach of the Government to child refugees in Europe. Will the Government apply the same generosity to child refugees who are British citizens in Syria?”
“In his damning report, the ombudsman concluded that “corrupt relationships existed between members of the Security Forces in South Down and the UVF Unit, to whom police attributed the murders at Loughinisland. The failure by police to investigate the veracity of intelligence that those responsible had been ‘warned’ by a police officer of their imminent arrest is inexcusable.” It is clear that the investigation was a case of both incompetence and collusion, and those responsible for this heinous crime have never been arrested, charged or prosecuted.”