Jesse Norman
MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire · Conservative · United Kingdom
“In view of the new Prime Minister’s spending priorities, it now seems highly unlikely that the ruinously expensive current plans will be put to the House before the end of this year. Seven months have already passed with no action.”
“10 North have real spending powers of its own? If the answer is yes, then this will be a new kind of cross-departmental Ministry—perhaps a territorial Ministry, like a regional Government but with no defined scope or mandate. We will need to see the legal instruments delegating Treasury authority and functions to it.”
“I rather fear that, given our longevity and at least the level of banter on the Government side of the Dispatch Box, we will be seen over time as the Morecambe and Wise, or perhaps the two Ronnies, of British politics.”
“The past few weeks have brought news of the deaths of Dolly Parton, Tim Curry and Wendell Berry. I am sure that many colleagues will share my sense of shock and sadness at the loss of those extraordinary figures, but also give great thanks for their lives. Truly, we live in a world of change.”
“10 North will not have spending power of its own, then ultimately the Treasury and the Chancellor will continue to sign off on its public spending and on any taxing matters. Decentralisation is really important, but No. 10 North will not be a means of decentralisation in this scenario; it will be just another layer of Government.”
“But we are not going to cast nasturtiums, in the words of a friend of mine, on any of this nonsense—not even on Baroness Lloyd and the hopeless Building Digital UK, who have entirely failed to address the issue of fibre broadband in neglected parts of my constituency and simply repeated the same language of incompetence and failure to me…”
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“That is something I feel very strongly about. We are trying to build a new specialist technical engineering college in Hereford, precisely to bring those different aspects of the human personality together in the service of better jobs and better possibilities. I also think that it encourages us all, as a House and as a Parliament, to ask the right questions and to support long-term solutions, even when those questions and solutions may not be ones that we are ideologically or politically drawn to. We are in a world where welfare costs are rising higher than anyone could have wanted; civil service effectiveness is perhaps not as great as we would like; productivity in the NHS is not what we would all want, for whatever reasons that may be, over a very long period; and we need a rapid boost to our defence and security.”
“He always said that the secret to success in the toy business was to have a mental age of seven and an eye for detail. He had incredible energy but also amazing resilience and focus on the long term. “Turn up at the finishing line” was one of his maxims. Even in his 80s, he was building and creating a new enterprise to develop flat-pack trucks, if you can imagine such a thing, Madam Deputy Speaker, that could be sold to countries around the world at low cost, supporting businesses and people. I think the whole House would agree with me that we need these values today. At a time of difficulty, stagnation and international conflict, we need these values of creativity, ambition, drive, respect for others and, above all, capability —a focus not just on the head, but on the hand and the heart as well.”
“Thank you very much indeed, Madam Deputy Speaker. I hope that you and the House will excuse me if I start on a very personal note. Almost exactly 24 hours ago, my father, Torquil Norman, died at the age of 91. He was an extraordinary man. He flew Seafires and Sea Furies during his national service in the Fleet Air Arm. He created Polly Pocket, a toy that has brought unbelievable joy to many young people around the House and around the world. He rebuilt the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm in London, not just as an incredible performing arts centre, but as a creative centre for young people from whatever background to be able to find their way into jobs. The reason I mention that now is that my father stood for values that bear a wider consideration in this House and in our own lives—values of positivity and creativity.”
“Do not give us food security. Do not work every hour God sends, whatever the weather—we do not care. The Leader of the House has been very clear that it is her policy not to answer Opposition questions, or even to answer questions about her policy of not answering questions. She ignored my questions yet again last week, but perhaps she can have a go at these questions now. Why have the Government taken such a punitive approach to the countryside? Are they doing so deliberately, or is it just by accident? Finally, will she come to visit some farmers in Herefordshire with me so that she can see the actual effect of these policies for herself? We will throw in some magnificent Shepherds or Rowlestone ice cream, as well, if that will make any difference.”
“In sharp contrast, it is the Government’s policy towards rural areas that is most striking. We have seen the family farm tax and the disproportionate effect on hospices and social care services in rural areas arising from the rise in national insurance. Now, in the same week, we have seen new compulsory purchase powers to seize farmland and the abrupt and unexpected end of the sustainable farming incentives scheme. The Government are simultaneously reducing farm incomes, threatening farm holdings and forcing the sale of family farms through their inheritance tax changes. I am sad to say that even the £35 million allocated by the previous Government to clean up the River Wye—one of the natural glories of this country—has been cut to just £1 million. The Labour message is clear: do not be a farmer. Do not feed the country.”
“The Energy Secretary was forced to pare back his ruinously expensive zero-carbon energy plans; the Prime Minister had to announce his plan for change; the Government were forced to accelerate their defence spending plans in order to address the situation in Ukraine; and so it continues. This week, we have heard of the Government’s so-called Operation Chainsaw—or should that be butter knife?—to reshape the civil service. Next week, we will have hasty and almost certainly ill thought through cuts to welfare. Labour was red under the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), became a gentle cerise for voters at the general election and, now that reality is setting in, it is a pleasing shade of purple, with more and more patches of blue. The Prime Minister and the Government are becoming more Conservative by the day.”
“The Government made an unsuccessful attempt to claim credit for the achievements of the newly rebranded National Wealth Fund, which had been set up only weeks before. The system of infrastructure monitoring and planning has been dismantled, and there has been no news for three months on the decision on small modular reactors, which was due on 1 December or thereabouts. Can the Leader of the House update the House on when we can expect that decision? Then President Trump got elected, despite—or perhaps because of—the special SWAT team of Labour activists sent over to campaign for his rival, and then the mugging by reality really began.”
“The Chancellor was even so bold, as Members will recall, as to announce to the CBI that she would not be raising taxes or increasing debt over the course of the Government. As she said: “I’m clear…I’m not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes”. However, the Budget started to unravel almost as soon as it was published. We had the bizarre sight of a Government who were ever more committed to talking about growth while clubbing growth to death across a variety of sectors: through the national insurance rise and the £5 billion burden of the Employment Rights Bill, of course, but also through their loss of credibility in the markets, which has pushed up gilt yields by 25% since September. Great British Energy was announced, and did nothing.”
“I am sure the whole House will want to join me in recognising and thanking the salvage and nature recovery specialists who are even now scrambling to clear up after the disastrous collision in the North sea. They say a conservative is a socialist who has been mugged by reality. If that is so, we are witnessing the extraordinary sight of a Prime Minister who is being visibly mugged by reality in slow motion before our very eyes. The Government’s brand of socialism started well from their point of view, if disastrously for the country: we had the union pay-offs, the rapid settlement of pay disputes in the public sector—for zero apparent efficiency benefits—and a heavily tax-and-spend Budget.”
“Colleagues get a point every time the Leader of the House blames the previous Government, attacks Members of the Opposition, changes the subject or uses the words “gently remind”, “take no lectures” or similar in her response. I would not for one second suggest that colleagues shout “Bingo!” in the Chamber, but there may be other ways in which they can indicate when they have filled their card. That is a light-hearted suggestion, but it has a serious purpose. I know how strongly you, Mr Speaker, feel about the importance of parliamentary accountability, transparency and the proper scrutiny of Government decisions. I ask the Leader of the House again if she will reaffirm her commitment to those values and engage properly with the questions I ask in the future.”
“A recent low point was at business questions on 13 February, when I raised five important issues relating to the Government’s approach to the rule of law, including the potential clash between domestic and international law, the level of risk that the Government sought to take and their attitude towards judicial review. I am sorry to say that the Leader of the House did not bother to respond to any of those questions: instead, we had yet another series of irrelevant political attacks. We need a better way to track and monitor those evasions, so, in the spirit of openness and transparency, I propose a new approach, which we can call “Leader’s bingo”.”
“In fact, on none of those occasions did the Leader of the House bother to give any kind of proper answer at all. Instead, her approach was to change the subject and attack the previous Government, rather than to defend the record of her own Government—which is, after all, the whole point of these exchanges. More troubling still is that she herself has so often called for transparency from Ministers, and that a failure to be accountable is itself a breach of the rules of this House, of the Nolan principles and of the ministerial code of conduct. I wish I could report that anything has changed since December. If anything, however, I am afraid that matters have got worse.”
“Members will recall that I first raised this issue at business questions on 5 December, when I highlighted a series of occasions on which the Leader had been unwilling to answer or even address some obvious examples of Government economic incompetence. As I pointed out: “Many different responses were open to her. She could have said, ‘I agree with you.’” —[ Official Report , 5 December 2024; Vol. 758, c. 458.] She could have said, “The shadow Leader is wrong for the following reasons,” or even, “I don’t know.” If she did not want to respond at that time, she could have said, as so many other Ministers do, “I will look into it,” “I will reply to you,” or, “I will ask a colleague to investigate and respond”. We just heard the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster say those things.”
“It is our function on the Opposition Benches to press public concerns and raise questions about the Government—indeed, as His Majesty’s loyal Opposition, it is not only our function, but our constitutional duty to do so. It is the Government’s job to respond to those questions and concerns and, in so doing, to make the case publicly for the policy choices and decisions they have made and to say whether they have an underlying strategy. Unfortunately, as you will have noticed, Mr Speaker, the Government are not doing that in our sessions. In fact, the Leader of the House rarely, if ever, responds to the important public questions and concerns that I raise. Instead, I am sorry to say that we get the same endlessly reheated mishmash of standard party political lines, personal jibes and irrelevant comment. Hon.”
“Mr Speaker, may I first associate myself very strongly with your kind remarks about Peter Hipkins and his service to this House? We join all colleagues in celebration of International Women’s Day this Saturday. I am sure the whole House will also share my deep concern at the latest news in relation to Ukraine and will wish to send all of our best wishes to the Prime Minister and other European leaders in doing everything they can to support that country. It is now three months or so since I became shadow Leader of the House, and I am sad to say that these joyous Thursday morning sessions seem to have fallen into a little bit of a rut. [ Interruption. ] “No, no!”, I hear you cry, “Business questions are still as fresh, lively and engaging as they ever were, if not more so,” but sadly I fear that is not true.”
“What is worse is that, in his statement, the Prime Minister tried to aggregate the intelligence services budget into the defence budget. That is grossly misleading, because those budgets are, and have long been, kept separate. What is worse still is that the Prime Minister’s claim that the combination of the two budgets would be 2.6% of GDP seems to imply a cut, not a rise, in the budget for the intelligence services, which currently stands at over 0.15% of GDP. This cannot be correct. Even if the Leader of the House cannot address my question now, I would be grateful if she could write to me with the details in order to answer it for the record and for the benefit of this House.”
“Unfortunately, the real numbers in the defence statement were in fact half what he claimed, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies quickly made clear, and I am sorry to say that the statement was insulting in other ways to this House. It appears to have been leaked to the media, who ran the headline before the Prime Minister had even stood up. Perish the thought that the statement was deliberately redacted so that MPs would be kept in the dark and could not hold the Government to account. The Prime Minister has emphasised all the planning that was involved in this decision. Even so, he was repeatedly unable to answer the simple “yes or no” question of whether funding for the Chagos Islands deal was included in the total.”
“I reported in December that genuine signs of reality were starting to break through in the Government’s so-called plan for change. In it, the Prime Minister said: “In 2010, the incoming government inherited public finances in desperate need of repair.” He said that the UK needed “a profound cultural shift away from a declinist mentality, which has become so comfortable with failure”. Finally, and most notably, he said that “we cannot tax our way to prosperity or spend our way to better public services.” The Prime Minister was right on all three counts, and he is right now to increase defence spending. It is not untrue to say that he is visibly becoming more conservative before our eyes.”
“After all, it was obvious in the autumn that there could be tariffs on trade and, as Ministers have since acknowledged, an inevitable rise in defence spending. It is almost as though Labour never imagined, or perhaps never wanted to believe, that President Trump would be re-elected. As a result, the Government may be forced to have a mini-Budget next month and then a spending review, which has been so delayed that they will have gone a full year from their election without having any settled spending plans. Meanwhile, they prefer to import oil and gas from abroad, rather than use less expensive domestic energy supplies. Forget securonomics; this is a recipe for insecurity, as well as increasing carbon emissions. However, it is important to give credit where credit is due.”
“The Government have talked about growth, but their decisions have managed to reduce the Bank of England’s forecast from 2% to 0.75% growth for this year. It is little wonder when one considers the £25 billion increase in national insurance contributions and the imposition of an Employment Rights Bill with an up-front cost estimated at £5 billion, among much else. Most bizarre of all has been the lack of foresight in financial planning. The Chancellor talked grandly in her Mais lecture last year about “securonomics”—whatever that is—and the importance of economic security, but as many commentators have noticed, her fiscal rules and other decisions have left her very little room for manoeuvre.”
“Mr Speaker, I am not quite sure what mental obfuscation is filling my head this morning, but I thank you again. It is my happy task to open by saying that today sees the retirement of Dawn, a stalwart of the Tea Room. I am sure that I speak for the whole House in wishing her a very happy retirement. On a very different note, this week also marks the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We wish the Prime Minister every success in his meetings at the White House today. The Government have come in for some fairly punishing criticism from me at the Dispatch Box in recent months, and rightly so. They came to power loudly advertising their virtue and careful planning, but instead, as the House will know, we have seen a series of entirely avoidable resignations, blunders and mishaps.”
“Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 4 July, and to be printed (Bill 186).”
“In other words, many of the key clean-up measures and mitigations are well understood. What we need now is action. We need an end to delay. We need political leadership from Ministers on both sides of the border, a shared determination to address this vital national issue with the seriousness it deserves, and the funding—the £35 million cut from the plan for the Wye—to make it happen. The River Wye is a true national treasure. It requires not just short-term measures but a sustained, collective effort led by the UK and Welsh Governments to ensure that this magnificent river is fully restored to health as swiftly as that can be achieved. Question put and agreed to. Ordered, That Jesse Norman and Ellie Chowns present the Bill. Jesse Norman accordingly presented the Bill.”
“It would for the first time require the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in law to publish and implement a plan for cleaning and improving the water quality of the River Wye. That is a measure that every MP of every constituency inside or outside the Wye catchment should be enthusiastic to support. Solutions must include better land management, improved water treatment, effective incentives for sustainable farming and stronger oversight and enforcement. The Wye catchment 2025 management plan is designed to cover not just water quality but biodiversity loss and flood and drought vulnerability. The nutrient management board provides an important framework of public accountability in relation to measures affecting nutrients and water quality.”
“Water companies have paid many tens of millions of pounds in fines since 2022 alone. That money should go back into saving our rivers. What is to be done? Protecting and restoring the Wye requires a long-term, collaborative approach, as I have highlighted. The UK and Welsh Governments, the agencies, farmers, businesses, local authorities, environmental groups and local people all have a role to play in developing a strategy that balances economic sustainability with environmental responsibility. While I am very glad that my colleague the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Ellie Chowns) is sponsoring the Bill, it is a great pity that other Wye catchment MPs have chosen not to. Indeed, I do not notice a single Wye catchment MP in the Chamber; a great sadness. The Bill is clear and simple in its intent.”
“The then Government also announced that they had appointed a new river champion, whose job it was to lead the detailed planning work in collaboration with key stakeholders on both sides of the border. The plan for the Wye was by no means perfect, but for the first time it provided a framework, badly needed money to support projects and research, and a named person to help drive things forward on the ground. It was therefore deeply disappointing when the plan was dropped by the new Government after the general election, alongside the idea of the river champion. It is still more disappointing that the Treasury is also now rowing back on the previous Government’s commitment to ringfence money from fines on water companies and use them for a river restoration fund. That is a massive step backwards.”
“At the national level, I am sorry to say that progress in addressing these issues has been painfully slow. For years, the creation of a high-level catchment-wide plan, essential to managing this cross-border issue, was impeded by political differences between the Welsh and UK Governments. Meanwhile, the regulatory agencies struggled to enforce existing environmental protections effectively. Finally, after three ministerial visits, including one by the then Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to Hereford in June 2023, we managed to secure publication of the River Wye action plan last year. That at least covered the English part of the river, and £35 million was reallocated from within existing DEFRA budgets to fund mitigations and the development of an integrated long-term recovery strategy.”
“I had called for the proceeds of fines on water companies to be ringfenced and devoted to a new national rivers recovery fund. In November 2022, the Government accepted that ringfencing. In relation to the Wye, it is important to be aware that much good work has been done on the ground. The cross-border nutrient management board has carefully assessed and assembled a range of potentially useful measures. Thanks to detailed assessment work with Welsh Water, it now looks as though local sewage and waste water discharges will be brought within national standards—though only by the early 2030s, which is still far too slow. The community response on both sides of the border has been magnificent, with hundreds of volunteer citizen scientists actively taking weekly water readings under the aegis of the Friends of the Wye and other organisations.”
“In June 2021, working with other catchment MPs at the time, I invited the national agencies and the local councils on both sides of the border to a special meeting devoted to the issue. In October 2021, I co-ordinated a letter from Wye catchment MPs to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury calling for a specific spending package devoted to the Wye in the 2021 three-year spending review. The result, notwithstanding lockdowns and other pandemic delays, was the Hereford Shell Store meeting of July 2022 and the setting up of the Wye phosphates working group, whose terms of reference were then adopted—very much with my support—by a phosphates commission established by the four local authorities. All those things helped to bring people and groups together. In the course of that work, I am pleased to say we also had one major win of substance.”
“As well as agricultural run-off, sewage and waste water discharges and changes in land management have contributed to the problem. Those pressures have been compounded by rises in water temperature and changes to seasonal water flow. Many of those specific problems and their interactions are still not fully understood, so there is a real need for proper research. Building on the work of Councillor Elissa Swinglehurst and the Wye and Usk Foundation among many others, I first highlighted this issue in September 2020. From the start I pressed the agencies—the Environment Agency, Natural England and Natural Resources Wales—for a collective response and called on them to produce a cross-border, all-catchment long-term action plan.”
“It is a special area of conservation with two sites of special scientific interest. The river is thus a vital part not only of the local economy in Herefordshire but of our landscape, our culture and our heritage as a nation. Admired since Roman times, the river is one of the birthplaces of British tourism, the origin of the movement known as the picturesque and the inspiration for some of the finest poetry in the English language, yet in recent years it has faced huge environmental pressures, particularly from high phosphate levels, which have harmed water quality and aquatic life. The rapid growth of certain farming sectors, including poultry, has brought economic benefits but also placed additional strain on the river.”
“I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the Secretary of State to publish and implement a plan for cleaning and improving the water quality of the River Wye; and for connected purposes. As shadow Leader of the House, I am rarely allowed to speak on behalf of my constituents from the Back Benches, so this ten-minute rule motion is a priceless opportunity for me to highlight a vital issue of both local and national significance—the plight of the River Wye. The Wye is one of the most beautiful and ecologically significant rivers in the UK. Rising from the slopes of Plynlimon in mid-Wales, it winds its way via Hay-on-Wye and Hereford on to Ross-on-Wye before heading down to Symonds Yat, Monmouth, Tintern and the Severn estuary. The Wye valley, too, is renowned for its beauty.”
“I do not expect the Leader of the House to tell us how the Government plan to resolve those obvious problems today, but the House would be grateful for a debate in Government time on what on earth the Government’s approach will be to resolving them.”
“Elsewhere, he has pledged to restore checks on Executive—that is, Government—action. This comes at a time when the Prime Minister has specifically pledged to end vexatious litigation while building a huge amount of new housing and infrastructure. You see the problem, Mr Speaker. It was the problem that the noble Lord Glasman was pointing out when he praised the rule of law, but not of lawyers. This edict will have a chilling effect on what I think we can already agree is pretty sluggish decision making by Ministers. Will the Government now take less legal risk, as the Attorney General requires? Will their lawyers now require Ministers to act only when they can defeat a legal challenge, or will they curb the judicial reviews and other legal cases that will otherwise inevitably disrupt their building plans?”
“In his words: “It is a crying shame that…we face legislation that drives a coach and horses through our world-leading modern slavery framework, which protects women from exploitation.” —[ Official Report , 8 March 2023; Vol. 729, c. 295.] That is quite a U-turn. You see the deeper problem, Mr Speaker. Which is it to be: will the Government abide by international law in this instance and protect women from exploitation, as the Prime Minister said, or will they reverse his newly adopted position in support of the ban? The second problem relates to domestic law. Last November, the Attorney General strengthened his official guidance to Government lawyers on possible legal risk. He specifically cautioned against offering legal support for policies that have only a tenable case.”
“People can agree or disagree about the policy, but the contradictions cannot be fudged. They cannot be blamed on others, and they require explanation. The first contradiction is in relation to international law. On 3 February, the Attorney General told the Council of Europe that the Government would “never withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, or refuse to comply with judgments of the court”. In doing so, he was simply restating settled UK policy for many decades, a fact that he somehow neglected to mention. The difficulty arises, however, because the Government’s new legislation on small boats appears to retain a measure banning migrants from claiming protections under the modern slavery laws. That is a ban that the Prime Minister went out of his way to denounce when it was first introduced in 2023.”
“It is easy to see what has happened here: Labour never expected President Trump to win. It sent a team over to campaign for his opponent. The Government passed an anti-growth Budget, and they did not build enough leeway into their financial planning. Indeed, the Chancellor promised no new taxes or spending. Now we are having to live with the consequences. It was also hard to miss the continuing controversy that the Attorney General is creating, and harder still not to notice the extremely critical words of his Labour colleague, Lord Glasman. I do not propose to repeat those words here, but they point to two issues that demand this House’s full and proper attention. In both cases, the concern is not over the legal positions taken by the Attorney General as such, but the contradictions that they offer to the rest of Government policy.”
“Like some of our leading podcasters, we love a storm cloud or two in business questions. Sure enough, the poor Government have been desperately hoping that recent events in America would drive the storm clouds away from the UK economy. Even though the news from Washington DC has been startling, to say the least, it has not been enough to dispel yet another week of adverse economic headlines. Both the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Bank of England have reportedly downgraded their growth forecasts, the latter cutting its by half, to a measly 0.75% for the year. So much for the Chancellor’s much-vaunted dash for growth. Meanwhile, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has reported that “zero fiscal headroom remains” to deal with any shocks, in the same week that President Trump has announced 25% tariffs on steel.”
“She should therefore have an undiluted interest in ensuring that such an important and controversial Bill is properly handled. After all, she, more than any other, is supposed to be the custodian of proper parliamentary scrutiny of legislation. Will she therefore now act to address these obvious failures, or will she stick to her position that everything is fine and there is nothing to see here?”
“The membership is disproportionately weighted towards supporters of the Bill. The schedule has been highly congested, with back-to-back sittings that do not allow MPs to prepare. Some of the sessions have been held in private. Attempts have been made to prevent key institutions, such as the Royal College of Psychiatrists, from appearing in front of the Committee at all. The effect of all these measures is to impede and inhibit external and internal scrutiny, and we now hear that the impact assessment will now not be published before Report stage. All these things are shocking attempts to undermine and short-circuit the proper scrutiny of the legislation. The Leader of the House has said in terms that the Government are not supporting the legislation.”
“The Government’s own chief medical officer specifically warned the Bill Committee that the NHS should not be rushed into becoming what would amount to a death service and said that most doctors would not wish to take part in the final stages of an assisted dying process, and emphasised the medical vagueness of the idea of qualifying people as terminally ill. We have heard about the serious potential for misdiagnosis through the horrendous case of Peter Sefton-Williams, who was incorrectly diagnosed with motor neurone disease and given as little as six months to live. Those were not my words; they are testimony on the Bill by leading experts from a range of fields. All this has been made much worse by the rushed and secretive way in which the Bill Committee has been handled.”
“But the Leader of the House’s defensiveness was itself revealing. It showed the extent to which the Government are quietly and wrongly standing behind this private Member’s Bill. If we fast-forward two months, what do we find? A Supreme Court justice has told the Bill Committee that it is not clear what the judge’s role is supposed to be in this legislation. They called the judicial protection “largely illusory” and echoed many other legal experts in highlighting the lack of capacity in the High Court.”
“It is not surprising that the Bill was and is being opposed by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the Secretary of State for Justice, with the former saying: “I do not think that palliative care, end-of-life care in this country is in a condition yet where we are giving people the freedom to choose, without being coerced by the lack of support available.” I am sorry to say that the Leader of the House responded to my remarks in a very patronising way, suggesting that it was somehow inappropriate and “political” for me to raise these matters at all. Of course, that was nonsense. I was not taking and do not take a position on the underlying issue. The whole purpose of business questions is to highlight and debate the passage of legislation through this House.”
“No impact assessment or legal issues analysis had been published. The promoter of the Bill had circulated a document purporting to answer questions, but which actually left a host of important questions entirely untouched. Those questions included the Bill’s impact on the medical profession and the relationship between medical staff and patients, and the impact on the provision and regulation of the different drugs and drug cocktails required. The questions included the involvement of the judiciary in the process and the balance of probabilities test for coercion that the Bill proposed.”
“This week we have seen a Government who talk about growth but have proved themselves unwilling to support transformational investment at the AstraZeneca plant in Liverpool. At the same time, they appear keen to expand the sums being paid in relation to the Chagos islands to a number some 250 times larger than that being considered for AstraZeneca. I can see the degree of shame and embarrassment about that on the Government Benches, and their concern that important cities in this country are being deprived of local investment as a result. In business questions on 28 November, I raised the issue of the assisted dying Bill and highlighted a host of procedural defects in the way it was being rushed through the House by the Government. The Bill was published barely two weeks before the vote on Second Reading, as the House will recall.”
“Does the Leader of the House share my view that we should have a debate on the standards to be applied in these complex cases where there is a potential conflict between the demands of the ministerial code and the statements made by the Government in defence of the Law Officer concerned?”
“There is no reason whatever in law or ministerial practice why the Attorney General should not be transparent on this issue, as he has been already in relation to the legacy Act. There is a strong public interest in him doing so. His legacy comment proves that he concedes the point about the importance of clarity in this area. In the independent adviser on ministerial standards’ recent letter regarding the former anti-corruption Minister, the hon. Member for Hampstead and Highgate (Tulip Siddiq), he highlighted that the ministerial code says: “Ministers…must ensure that no conflict…could reasonably be perceived to arise, between their public duties and their private interests”. That conflict clearly exists now in relation to the Attorney General.”
“As the Solicitor General has just said, the standard that they are aspiring to is to be beyond reproach. The problem is that none of that addresses whether the Attorney General in fact recused himself. This does not fall either within the Law Officers’ convention or the cab rank principle. He either did recuse himself or he did not. The problem is made worse when one reflects that this Attorney General is the first in the history of the office to have come into Government directly from private practice—that point was completely ignored in the urgent question—and that that practice was not in one of the less political areas of law such as corporate law or chancery but squarely in the highly contentious and political area of human rights, with some of it in Northern Ireland.”
“Those are just three examples of the Government’s absolute lack of seriousness in economics, but, as we have just heard in the urgent question, there is a serious issue in the area of law that they cannot avoid. Let me remind the House what has happened. The Attorney General has been repeatedly asked whether he has or has had a conflict of interest in relation to legal matters that could affect his former client, Gerry Adams. In response, a spokesman for the Prime Minister has highlighted systems to prevent potential conflicts from arising. The Attorney General has cited the convention that Law Officers do not discuss their advice to Ministers and has disclaimed any connection between his work for Mr Adams and the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023.”
“In case we forget, Mr Speaker, you and I and everyone else in the Chamber—indeed, every taxpayer—is paying for that. Then we had no less a figure than the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies weighing in. He noted that the Government have done nothing but talk about growth ever since the last general election. He then noted: “At the same time, we have seen the imposition of additional employment regulation, further regulation of rental housing, a hike in stamp duty, a big increase in tax on employers, an inflation-busting rise in the minimum wage, a refusal to contemplate any serious liberalisation of trade or free movement…and, perhaps, a clampdown on immigration.” He asked: “What is this government’s ‘theory of growth’?” He then answered his own question: “Nobody knows”.”