Sir Bernard Jenkin
MP for Harwich and North Essex · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Despite long and historic disagreements between successive UK Governments and Israel, it has remained a steadfast ally in counter-terrorist efforts to keep our people safe in this country. We are now embarked, it seems, on a full diplomatic dispute with Israel and tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats.”
“I would very much have liked to have discussed the medical devices questions arising from the Bill. The Minister made an incredibly short speech about that important matter. It is quite clear that these provisions are part of the covert dynamic alignment with the EU and the covert rejoin agenda being pursued by the Government.”
“I am as keen as anybody to get on with discussing the Health Bill, but this topic is too serious an opportunity to miss, given that the hon. Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) has raised such important issues. I really commend his speech and his initiative. Everybody should read it.”
“The Minister shakes her head, but she is yet to give a good reason as to why this measure is in the Bill. When we had an Adjournment debate in July with the then Minister for patient safety, the hon.”
“The chief executive of the CQC is wantonly conflicted in terms of looking after the safe space, so he cannot be the one left in charge of that function. The real point here is that we are missing the opportunity to save so much money. Governments keep having public inquiries.”
“I asked the Minister, in a letter I sent her after the debate in July, to give us the information on how much the transfer of all this would cost. Nothing has arrived. I never had a reply to the letter. Of course, the Government have changed the Minister and the new Minister for patient safety, the right hon.”
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“I do not expect the Government to comment on this point, but I have every confidence that NATO’s SHAPE—Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe —in Belgium will be war-gaming escalation scenarios and will not be ruling out a vigorous response, as even the shadow Defence Secretary adverted to, involving co-ordinated retaliation to make sure that that escalation would be met with sufficient deterrence. The second key lesson is that it is evident, if it was not obvious already, that the world is watching this conflict. The global implications of the outcome in Ukraine are profound. President Putin must not be seen to have gained from his illegal aggression, because of all the consequences for every other autocratic regime that is eyeing the neighbouring territory of another sovereign state.”
“I am delighted by the scale of the United States’ response to the crisis now, and I wish it had come earlier. Still, we must be ready to respond to Russian escalation, the possible use of chemical weapons and even the possibility of a tactical nuclear strike in Ukraine. That risk would rise significantly if Russia declared that captured Ukraine territory was now sovereign Russian territory, because that would trigger a whole set of defence doctrines in Russian military doctrine that would legitimise in Russian minds the use of tactical nuclear weapons.”
“The Russian forces, which are much larger and more extensively equipped than ours, have proved catastrophically incapable of delivering their intended effects. They are riven with corruption and have poorly maintained and poorly designed equipment. They are poorly led and incapable of conducting air superiority operations over a neighbouring country with meagre air defence of its own. They cannot defend their ships or run their logistics effectively. In addition, we are finding that Russia has not dared to attack NATO countries even when they are actively supporting the resistance with arms to Ukraine. The first important lesson to take from the conflict is that we started out feeling much too timid about provoking Russian escalation. Perhaps the timing has been perfect, but I think we could have moved quicker and faster.”
“Then we had the invasion of Georgia, the cyber-attacks, the Litvinenko murder, the violation of the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty—incidentally, that was unilateral rearmament by the Russians, rather than disarmament—the invasion of Crimea, the Salisbury poisonings, hybrid warfare, the weaponisation of gas, and the destabilisation of the Balkans. We ignored all those signals—the clearest possible signals—but the failure of the UK, the United States, the German Government and the French Government is a failure of our national strategies, not a failure of NATO. Moreover, we can now say that NATO conventional forces are rather less inferior to Russian armed forces than we might have feared.”
“Some still say that NATO has failed because of Ukraine, but NATO never declared that it would defend Ukraine. NATO is hardly to be accused of failing to deter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when it never specifically said that it would seek to deter that. There have been political failures by the Governments of NATO members in recent years, individually and collectively, but as the former Defence Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), said earlier, it was all laid out at the Munich security conference in 2007 by President Putin.”
“Western Europe and the free world has to that extent become a victim of the success of NATO—success being peace in Europe and beyond Europe for decade after decade. That success was based on two fundamental foundations: nuclear deterrence and NATO. That is not just because it provided collective security in Europe, but because it was binding—and still is binding—the US and Canadian security guarantees into the European security guarantees. It is the joining of transatlantic security that has made NATO so effective. Incidentally, one of the tragedies of the European Union is that it has gone down the path of trying to create a separate autonomous defence alliance outside NATO, which has corroded that automatic assumption that the United States and Europe will always act together.”
“The answer is that it is one of the policies that encourages Scots to vote to remain in the United Kingdom, which was the outcome of the referendum held on Scottish independence. I will concentrate my remarks on a background debate that has been going on, which is whether this 85-day crisis that we are now in is evidence that somehow NATO has failed. I wish to contest that idea. It became axiomatic for decade after decade that war between major powers was unthinkable. It became our ingrained expectation. I was born 21 years after the end of the second world war, and it is now 77 years after the end of the second world war. Generations in this House and in our country have no folk or family memory of one of the defining moments, if not the defining moment, of our national history.”
“Will the Chief Secretary to the Treasury confirm the nature of that £83 billion figure? Is it a cash demand on the Government, or is a substantial part of it rolled over so that we do not need to pay and it is merely attached to index-linked bonds?”
“Would the hon. Lady like to explain to the House how much harder it would be for business and what it would do to living standards in Scotland if Scotland followed the SNP’s suggestion and left the United Kingdom, with a border across the middle of Great Britain?”
“Again, I am happy to be proved wrong—let us see the Bill—but we could have done with some pre-legislative scrutiny of such a Bill.”
“It is appropriate that I am following the quite passionate speech by the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome) about the conversion therapy Bill. I broadly welcome the Queen’s Speech and the Government’s legislative programme. I was always in favour of some kind of legislation about conversion therapy, but the more I have looked at the issue, the less and less happy I am that there should be such a Bill, not because I am in favour of conversion therapy, but because I cannot see that legislation is either necessary or desirable. I am ready to be proved wrong, but I can think of no coercive behaviour that it would ban that is not already illegal. This Bill will be used to stoke exactly the kind of bitter disputes about transsexuality that we need to resolve before we legislate next in this field.”
“I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, but we should recognise that these issues of conversion therapy and transsexuality are very important to certain sections of society. They need to be addressed, but we need to be sure that we address them in the right way.”
“There is no excuse for another such episode. My right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary is right to sound cautious, but we can see what is coming, and I am confident that this Government will act as they must.”
“The Government should provide pensioners and poorer families with the confidence they can afford to stay warm. We should double the warm home discount and treble the winter fuel payment. This package would cost not £3 billion, but £13.5 billion from July in this current tax year, but that is still less than the recent tax increases we have seen, and it is about 0.6% of GDP and affordable. Now or later, we should also consider relief for middle-income households. The lower 40% of households will feel severe stress from energy and food costs alone. We could start reindexing tax thresholds, or more, and that would have the advantage of incentivising work and productivity. I have watched Governments—and Oppositions, I think we saw it today—blindsided by their own commitment to outdated thinking and policies of the past.”
“Like after the unforeseen covid crisis, the Treasury must adapt to this unexpected war in Europe and accept that this new global energy and economic crisis also requires a very substantial policy response. I have to say that is far greater than the £3 billion package that the Labour party has offered us, though I do not subscribe to the rest of its fiscal profligacy. I suggest that the £20 uplift in universal credit should immediately be restored. The abolition of VAT on domestic fuel would abolish a regressive tax that hurts the poorest households the most. We can do that now we are outside the EU. The Government should abolish the green levies on energy bills and fund them from the Exchequer, as recommended by Professor Dieter Helm.”
“Meanwhile, we must all recognise the cost of living crisis—yes, crisis. Even before today’s shock rise in CPI to 9%, the Commons Library had given me striking projections for the effect of this crisis on households. The full-year cost of just energy and food prices will rise by well over £1,000 a year for the lowest 20% of households by income and by £1,500 a year for pensioner households. A summer package to rescue the most vulnerable households is needed to avoid real financial distress and personal anguish and to support the economic demand of the most vulnerable households, or we will be creating possibly a worse recession than is already expected. I welcome the suggestion in The Times today that the Government are considering a package. The spring statement represented peacetime thinking.”
“This crisis requires a vast reorganisation of Europe’s energy supply and trading arrangements, and this massive adjustment will take years and is unprecedented. Only major food and energy producers in the world, such as Canada and the US, will avoid the worst kind of recession. At least the United Kingdom can produce some of our own gas and oil and can continue to expand renewables, but why are we pumping our surplus gas out to Europe this warm spring to fill EU storage capacity, when we should be filling our own? The Government shut it down, and we need to reopen our gas storage capacity as quickly as possible. I fervently hope that we can achieve net zero by 2050 without excessive cost. The Government are right to see gas as the essential transition fuel, but why import gas when we can produce our own more cheaply?”
“We all used to believe in what the Germans called, “Wandel durch Handel”—the mistaken faith that nations that trade together would never go to war with each other. President Putin has smashed that confidence. Business and Governments are reducing their exposure to dependency on all autocratic regimes. That is throwing globalisation into reverse, creating massive price increases and shortages. Poorer nations are acting to keep their food affordable for their own people. For example, India has just banned wheat exports, following Indonesia, which banned palm oil exports. We have an acute, growing and potentially far greater energy supply crisis in Europe. Europe cannot continue to rely on supply from Russia.”
“I had not intended to make a great speech about this subject. I note the point that the hon. Gentleman has made and I wish to move on. I welcome the forthcoming legislation to protect the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. I say to the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), who spoke a few moments ago, that perhaps we agree a great deal about the future of the Northern Ireland protocol. The question is whether we can make it happen unless we have some legislation coming down the track as well, because the EU has not changed its mandate. I want to concentrate today on much more immediate challenges. Covid supply chain disruption persists in many parts of the world, notably China, and now we have Russia’s dreadful war against Ukraine, which frankly has shattered the geopolitical order that we have become used to for decades.”
“Friend to engage with the reasonable elements of the Labour party to support her negotiating position so that we can reach a negotiated settlement?”
“May I just point out to my right hon. Friend that I only reluctantly voted for the protocol and the withdrawal agreement on the basis that we were not allowed to conclude a permanent trading agreement with the EU until we left and that it would be superseded or overtaken in due course? May I also just point out that apart from the disagreement about whether we should have legislation, there seems to be very broad agreement across the House, as there was when I proposed a motion to this House on 15 July last year, which the Labour party actually supported with very warm words, saying there were legitimate concerns among the Unionist community that had to be addressed? It is a shame that the Labour party will not will the means as well as the ends, but can I invite my right hon.”
“I support what my right hon. Friend is saying about the need for more renewables and for nuclear. We all support the objective of net zero by 2050, but we are now in a gas supply crisis. The Government insist that we are in a European market; Europe is heavily dependent on Russia. We need to produce as much gas as we can. It is a simple question: is shale an option for the Government in the immediate term, or not? That is what we need to know; otherwise, the wells will be concreted over, which the Government said they do not want.”
“Has my right hon. Friend seen the recent reports that the Russian navy is now massing off Odesa in a typical Russian tactical manoeuvre to open a new front? Is this not in fact a new opportunity to demonstrate to the world the unacceptability of Putin’s disgusting war and to invite open and international condemnation of his actions?”
“NATO must rebuild the strength and deterrence upon which our security depends. The price of peace is eternal vigilance, a lesson we must never again forget. We will rebuild peace only through strength. Let us never again forget that we can have peace only through strength.”
“There must be a clear distinction between the measured way we act and our iron will and resolve to win in the end. What we must not do is accept a political defeat while the military battle is turning against Putin’s army. In fact, the danger today comes from those who want to negotiate on Putin’s terms by inviting political defeat at the time when Putin’s war is going so badly for him. There will be more destruction, more death, more indescribable horrors, more tragedy and more blood. That is the pity of war, as Wilfred Owen described it. We should pledge to rebuild Ukraine and pledge that this invasion will not stand, or the whole free world will pay the price for such a defeat for decades to come. We must rebuild our strength. We enjoyed a 30-year peace dividend, but the peace is over and the dividend is cancelled.”
“We know that one day Ukraine will again be free, but to give our resolve meaning we must do more to support the fighting morale of the Ukrainian forces, as their morale is their vital component. They have, so far, surpassed the expectations so many had of them, they have humiliated Putin’s army and they have destroyed the fake aura of his invincibility. We must arm them in every way we can short of war, as my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) said. We must provide more ammunition, more ant-tank weapons, more anti-aircraft weapons, more humanitarian and military training and more humanitarian aid, and we should find a way to get them the MiGs. We must not be intimidated from doing what is right to help another nation defend itself, but we must avoid overreacting to Putin’s escalations and provocations.”
“The lies, the corruption, the self-deceit, the lack of consent and the inability to inspire—Putin’s invasion is built on the same rotten values. Democracy and our elected politicians are riven with imperfections, but our fundamental values shine across the seas and continents to illuminate the darkness. They inspire those who are fighting the invaders now, and they must inspire us also. Ukrainians will never surrender, as President Zelensky told this Parliament last week, and we should not consider surrendering anything on their behalf, not their freedoms and not their territory. We never accepted the Soviet occupation of the countries of eastern Europe as a permanent settlement, and today those nations are free.”
“What matters above everything now is the resolve and determination of our NATO allies that, however long it takes, freedom and democracy will prevail. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister is fond of saying that Putin’s invasion must fail, but we can show more confidence than that: it will fail and Putin will fail. Dictators and despots who mount illegal foreign wars all fail in the end. Hitler, Mussolini, Galtieri and Saddam Hussein, they all failed. However many die in this struggle, whatever the cost in the mangled bodies of innocent civilians and however many cities are flattened to compensate for Putin’s real powerlessness, he will fail. The wars of dictators always fail and will always fail. The whole evil edifice of the old Soviet Union, even that failed in the end.”
“This will be a shorter speech, but I am afraid that we have to prepare for a long war. There will be escalation. We are seeing the build-up of the Russian navy ready to attack Odesa, there is a threat to Moldova, and in the western Balkans the Russians have been restoking that old conflict ready to make it explode once again and opening another front. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe and North America hoped that sanctions would bring this to an early conclusion, but I am afraid that they will not. Sanctions will take a long time. The Russians have a long history of bearing hardship, and it will take a long time before they blame Mr Putin for those hardships. We will have to bear the sacrifices that the sanctions will cause for our own people, but we can and must win this conflict.”
“I appreciate that there might be difficulties with this, but would the Minister consider whether our offer should be open to injured Russian military personnel as well? If they are captured on the battlefield and they are injured, we should show them the humanity that we are obliged to under the Geneva conventions.”
“The penis is a male organ, so these rapes are committed by men presenting themselves as women.”
“In particular, the rights of women to women-only safe spaces are threatened—safe spaces such as public toilets, women’s hospital wards and women’s prisons. Nearly all violence against women is committed by men, but there is a new and growing category of violence against women committed by people who call themselves women but are biologically male. We should always respond positively to people with genuine gender dysphoria, and I deliver this speech with kindness in my heart, but the Sexual Offences Act 2003 defines rape as when a person “intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of another person…with his penis” without consent. The Crown Prosecution Service reports that between 2012 and 2018 more than 436 cases of rape were recorded as being committed by women.”
“I thank the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) for that inspiring close to her speech. I do not wish to disabuse her in any way, but I think she will find that quite a lot of men do quite a lot of pretending too. We may cover it up better, but the hon. Lady gave the right advice: everyone is better if they are just themselves, and we are better if we feel empowered to be ourselves. This should be a debate in which we celebrate the re-empowerment of women. I say “re-empowerment” because there is now some evidence suggesting that in prehistoric societies women were not disempowered or subjected to male patriarchy. However, recent progress is being thrown into reverse, and not just by terrible wars and by that terrible list that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) reads out every year.”
“Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) was asked to define a woman on the media, and she was unable, or unwilling, to give a clear answer.”
“It is essential that we understand why we are witnessing this historically unprecedented number of young girls who are finding puberty so difficult to navigate. The Government’s proposed conversion therapy Bill must be reviewed in the light of this, and we must wait until the full report comes out before we present the Bill for Second Reading. It is a scientific fact that our biological sex is immutable. Professor Lord Winston said on the BBC’s “Question Time”: “I will say this categorically—that you cannot change your sex. Your sex actually is there in every single cell in the body.” The responsibility for clarity starts with us as legislators. We have to be clear about what words mean in our legislation—but, astonishingly, some of us are reluctant to be clear. A woman is an adult female human. Only this week, the hon.”
“Bastions of feminism—and I hear one on the other side of the House—who highlight this risk, and others such as Germaine Greer, Professor Kathleen Stock and Professor Jo Phoenix, and journalists such as Suzanne Moore, are bullied online and even hounded out of their jobs because they talk about this. But we, as legislators, must be clear and courageous about what a man is and what a woman is. Today’s interim report from the independent review of gender identity services for children and young people by Dr Hilary Cass notes the rapid increase in the number of adolescent girls presenting with gender distress. It states: “At present we have the least information for the largest group of patients—birth registered females first presenting in early teen years”.”
“I have not furnished myself with a quote, but I am very happy to write to the hon. Lady. I can promise her that she did not answer the question when she was asked it.”
“If I have misled the House by misrepresenting the hon. Lady, I absolutely apologise for doing so. I will check the facts, and I will set the record straight if it is necessary for me to do so.”
“There have been others representing the Opposition Front Bench, Mr Deputy Speaker, who have said things like “I am not going to go down that rabbit hole.” Indeed, the Leader of the Opposition said on “Marr” that the phrase “only women have a cervix” “is something that shouldn’t be said. It is not right.” This is a strange way to stand up for women’s rights. The Government must reply to this debate with clear definitions of “man” and “woman”, as enshrined in the Equality Act 2010. They must commit to preventing biological men, whatever identity they claim and with whatever sincerity they claim that identity, from gaining access to women-only safe spaces. If they do not, the Government are failing to protect women.”
“I was not actually talking about the hon. Lady at that particular point, but she has put on record what she feels, and maybe when she replies to the debate she will give us a definition of what she thinks a woman is. The Government must also challenge the Scottish Parliament’s proposed Gender Recognition Reform Bill, because it intends to endow all UK citizens with new controversial rights that have not been approved by this Parliament. That was never the intention of the devolution settlement. Anyone from any part of the UK would be able to acquire a gender recognition certificate in Scotland with no medical diagnosis. They could then change the sex on their birth certificate and so gain the right to use women-only safe spaces. That is completely unacceptable.”
“I thank the hon. and learned Lady for that intervention, and I note what she says. The SNP Minister Shona Robison said when she was introducing the Bill: “There is no evidence that predatory and abusive men have ever had to pretend to be anything else to carry out abusive and predatory behaviour.”—[ Scottish Parliament Official Report , 3 March 2022; c. 65.] That comment really misses the point. The point is that the Bill does create new opportunities for predatory men and I am afraid that my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) has to accept that there are plenty of instances where biological men have taken advantage of this new freedom being granted them, to the detriment of the safety of women.”
“I do not follow what the hon. Lady is saying. I am in favour of protecting the trans community in this country. What I am not in favour of is allowing biological men into women’s spaces where they can threaten women as a matter of right, however risk-assessed they might be. I do not know how you risk-assess somebody going into a public toilet or into other women-only safe spaces. The fact is that women are taking flight from the political parties that are supporting this kind of agenda. At least the Conservative party can be a safe haven for them if we stand up and speak for women.”
“The hon. and learned Lady is making a terrific speech. Would she agree that men have to stand up for women’s rights, too? There are too many men who stand back from this debate and say, “Oh well, this is a women’s issue. I’m not going to get involved.” I think that is a shame, and that is why I spoke in today’s debate.”
“I mean, obviously, that’s then you’ve got the biological definition, legal definition.” I suggested that that answer was unclear. I think I am correct in my representation of that answer.”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have given notice to the hon. Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) that I would raise this point of order. She challenged me to clarify exactly what she had said, and to correct the record if I was wrong in suggesting that she had not answered a question clearly. The question she was asked by Emma Barnett on “Woman’s Hour” was very simple. She was asked: “And Labour’s definition of a woman?” and she answered: “Well, I have to say that there are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is. I mean, you look at the definition within the Equality Act, and I think it just says someone who is adult and female, I think, but then doesn’t see how you define either of those things.”
“Everything that he warned about that Act has come true, including the way that it has divided Scotland from the rest of the United Kingdom politically and emotionally, the way that it has been exploited by nationalists and narrow nationalism, and the way that it has led to a political and legal dispute between the Parliaments and Governments of the United Kingdom and Scotland. I also have to put on record one word that Richard kept raising with great passion: “consanguinity”. He kept talking about the consanguinity of a united people—that is, we are all a people of a common blood. Personally, I think our consanguinity goes wider than the United Kingdom, but he believed this with such force and it pains me greatly that so many of his predictions came true. He was a wonderful parliamentarian and I will never forget him.”
“I am greatly moved by the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) and the memory of our friend the former Member for Aldridge-Brownhills, whom, as a new Member, one was rather scared of, because his emotion could be so overpowering and his passion could be so devastating. I learned at first hand how that could be harnessed to the public good when I, as a young spokesman on constitutional affairs, was conducting the opposition to the Scotland Act 1998, which laid down the foundations of the devolution settlement that we are now trying to make work.”
“I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement and very much welcome the overall emphasis on replacing fossil fuels with renewables in the longer term. However, does his Department understand the urgency of the present short-term situation for not just prices, but security of supply? The Government have announced support for households, but what about businesses? Businesses tend to buy on six-month contracts and his hope that the situation will rectify itself within a few months is, I am afraid, hopelessly naive. We are facing a crisis in energy bigger than the oil price shock of the 1970s and it is likely to have as big an impact, or a bigger impact, on our economy than that had on our economy then. Is his Department seriously engaged with this situation with the necessary urgency?”
“I echo the words of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and of the Opposition in condemning the Ukraine invasion and in their criticism of Russia. It goes far wider than that, however, and it certainly cannot be business as usual, as the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) just said. The free world is now in an existential struggle with despotic regimes such as Russia and China. What does global trade look like in the new era? I invite my right hon. Friend to—”
“If the BBC World Service comes to my right hon. Friend to ask for additional funding to increase the broadcasting in Russia and among Russia’s supporters and allies, will she entertain and agree to such requests?”