Graham Stringer
MP for Blackley and Middleton South · Labour · United Kingdom
“I strongly agree with the Government’s policy on devolution and better technical and scientific education, but all that will be for nought if we do not do something about the cost of energy. We cannot grow and compete as an economy when we have higher energy costs than our major industrial competitors.”
“I am fully supportive of Stephen Watson, the chief constable of Greater Manchester. It is the first time I can say that about a chief constable since the 1970s.”
“We cannot call ourselves a civilised society while Shabir Ahmed is walking the streets of this country. I agree with the thrust of the question by the hon.”
“Particle physics and astronomy have had a rough deal since the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council—PPARC—was abolished about 19 years ago.”
“In the ’80s and ’90s in this country, many police officers carried out their duties in a prejudicial and racist way. I am proud of having worked alongside many others to eliminate that racism as much as we could.”
“I remind hon. Members that they may make a speech only with the prior permission of the Member in charge and the Minister. I have received no information that such permission has been given. As is the convention for 30-minute debates, there will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up.”
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“Order. May I ask the hon. Gentleman to bring his speech to a conclusion within the next couple of minutes so that there is equal time for the Labour spokesperson and the Minister? I have divided the time from the start of his speech to the end of the debate approximately into three. I would be grateful if he began to bring his speech to a close.”
“Any change to the route of HS2 is likely to lead to further delays and extra cost. Is not the solution to HS2 to put competent people in charge of delivering it, and not to mess about with it and give an advantage to those who are opposed to it?”
“My hon. Friend is making a powerful case about a very serious subject. Does she agree that since the Greater Manchester Police introduced the iOPS computer system, children in Greater Manchester are at even more risk than before? Children who go missing overnight are not being registered, and the information is not getting through to police officers when they come on duty the next morning. The reassurances of the chief constable that everything is all right are at odds with the evidence. The iOPS system is putting more children at risk, and when Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary goes into Greater Manchester, I hope he will look seriously at these problems.”
“I am grateful to the Minister. He is absolutely right: all the political parties have, at one time or another, made a commitment to a referendum. In their 2010 manifestos, the three major parties gave a commitment to hold a referendum on what became the Lisbon treaty, better known as the European constitution, although unfortunately the majority of MPs did not comply with those manifesto commitments. Does the Minister agree, however, that the parties that support a referendum, either in the House or in their manifestos, should accept the result when they lose?”
“A new argument has come forward. A number of parties have said that if there is a second referendum, they will honour the result only if people vote in a particular way. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that would completely undermine that referendum, and all future referendums?”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. I was surprised to find that the charging sockets are not standardised, either on cars or on charging points. Would it not make sense to regulate to standardise them?”
“They are doing their best, but it is a fact that there will not be many people working in the BBC who are from the poorest parts of the United Kingdom and would give a different view on the matter. I think that is one reason why we see such high salaries. To someone in the organisation from the background that I have described, having a salary of nearly £2 million might not seem as obscene as it does to most of the people I represent. I do not believe that Gary Lineker was a great footballer; I do not believe that he is—whatever it is—20 or 15 times better at his job than Gabby Logan.”
“Friend is my guess that that gives them an almost coherent, homogenous view of the EU and what our relationship with the EU should be. Although this is more difficult to substantiate, I nevertheless think that it also means that, privately, they think they are right and that their view of the world is correct, and that the people who I represent—who are, by and large, not as well educated and do not have the same level of income or educational achievement—are probably wrong. That is never stated publicly, and I have many friends who are BBC executives and reporters and who do their best. I would never question the integrity of individual BBC reporters.”
“On bias and other aspects of the BBC, my worry is that there is a certain decadence within the organisation, by which I mean a decaying of standards in all sorts of areas of reporting, which, if it continues, might mean that if this debate took place in five or 10 years, there would not be as much support for what is in effect the state broadcaster, supported by a flat-rate tax. I agree partially with my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) that there is one obvious reason for that, although there may well be others: the people who run, report and work for the BBC are primarily drawn from London and Oxbridge, and they have a common view of the world that leads to certain conclusions. Where I probably disagree with my hon.”
“Right. David Plowright was one of the great leaders of commercial television. He was the chief executive of Granada Television for many years, where great documentaries and “World in Action” were produced, as well as groundbreaking drama and excellent regional news, and he went on to become the deputy chair of Channel 4. His criteria for the BBC—one of his main competitors—was that it was there to keep the commercial side of television honest. He wanted to support it, and he wanted it to be as good as it possibly could be. It is interesting that, all around this debate, people have to different degrees supported the BBC. Nobody would create it as it is today if we were starting afresh, but there is enormous support, respect and affection for it.”
“The argument against that often put by BBC executives is that it damages the independence of the BBC. My hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) knocked that argument on the head on a very specific case. The people running the BBC are part of the informal ruling class in London, and they scratch each other’s backs, so there is not complete independence there. Further, Governments have always set the level of the licence fee, so every five years the Government have a say. I do not see why we should not have progressive rather than regressive taxation for what is undoubtedly a public good. The BBC has had a lot of support, but it has to look at how it funds its regional organisations and how it stops being a cosmopolitan elite, with all the narrow views that that implies.”
“There will be real problems in the future if the BBC does not sort these things out. I have spoken slightly longer than I intended. Finally, I will speak about the issue of free licences. It is not really worth a great deal of further thought. It is quite obvious that the Government—not the BBC—should be responsible for a benefit such as free television licences for the over-75s. The licence fee, however, is worth further consideration—not next week, but in the near future. I find it strange that on my side of the House there is enthusiasm and support for—I could name many such issues, but I will not—flat-rate taxes, which are regressive. If there is a public good and a public benefit from television, which I think there is, it should be funded by progressive taxation coming out of income tax.”
“I appeared on a programme with Lord Lilley—with whom I disagree with about almost everything—about the Met Office, with Quentin Letts conducting the interview. Lord Lilley has a scientific background. He has a degree from Cambridge in physics. We agreed that climate change is happening and the planet is warming up a bit, but that the response is probably overblown. I said that the Met Office was very good at short-term forecasting, but hopeless at medium and long-term forecasts. It is now impossible to get a recording of that programme, because it is banned, like the Catholic Church in the 16th century. We are on a banned list, because we agreed that the discussion was unbalanced. On the EU, there is no balance, but on a relatively trivial matter, the scientifically illiterate people at the BBC have decided to ban us.”
“I believe in the scientific method and I practised for 10 years, running an analytical laboratory, so I am not, in the way some people mean it, a climate sceptic. However, some of the science from the likes of the University of East Anglia and in the leaked emails is a bit dodgy—very dodgy in that case. Some of the policies proposed to deal with climate change are expensive and one needs to be sceptical about the cost of those policies. Not only is the cohort running the BBC from Oxbridge, but it is happier speaking about the subjunctive than the second law of thermodynamics. They have clear views on what the perception of science and climate change is. I will give an example, which I think is quite extraordinary.”
“They have counted the number of people who were pro-EU compared with the number who were anti-EU, and the pros win by about three to one. In fact, one of the senior political journalists said, “We have no need to be balanced in this matter,” which I think is at odds with the BBC’s constitution. The difference, during the run-up to the referendum campaign, was striking. The BBC did what it does in general elections: it was perfectly well balanced. That was in contrast with what happened afterwards and what happened before the period of the referendum. I think that that is partly because the people who run the BBC in London are essentially all pro-EU and think that there is something peculiar about people who are not. My background is as a scientist.”
“I do not know whether it was down to our lobbying, but there was not a second series. I want to talk about two other matters. One is bias on the EU. My hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South made a speech that I half completely agreed with and half completely disagreed with. There is quite a lot of evidence, in terms of the numbers of people interviewed about the European Union, that there are more pro-EU people. In the run-up to the referendum, virtually every business person who was interviewed on the “Today” programme was asked how Brexit was going to damage their business. In fact, it became a standard form of question or statement that “in spite of Brexit”, this benefit or that increase in jobs had happened. A number of independent research groups have shown the bias in the run-up to the European elections.”
“They opened a pub and created a most peculiar party of transvestites. I have nothing against transvestites, but that kind of situation had never happened in that particular public house, which had been closed for a couple of years. They got a pretend landlord in to talk about how he was very happy for his tenants to take drugs. It was clearly a put-up job. And some of the people who said outrageous things were taken on holiday by the company doing this. It was a shocking and terrible thing, and I do not believe that if people from that kind of background had been part of the BBC, that programme would ever have been made. Fortunately, there was not a second series. The head of BBC Three was good enough to see me and Councillor Karney, who represented the ward.”
“The mistakes themselves are mistakes, but they do indicate a larger problem with the BBC. The BBC procured and presented on BBC Three, when it was a channel, a series of programmes called “People Like Us”. That was based in the ward that I used to represent as a councillor and that is still in the constituency I represent. Frankly, it was poverty porn. It gave the most distorted view of one of the poorest wards in the country. Depending on how we count these things—it is not a competition that any ward or constituency wants to win—Harpurhey is the poorest or the third poorest ward in the country. Cameras went along and the people making the programme pretended—it was a pretence—that they were following how people in Harpurhey lived. They were not; they were distorting it. They paid girls to fight each other.”
“But—it is a big but—£20 million is still quite a lot of money, and one of the aspects of the BBC that I appreciate is the quality of regional radio, which is massively underfunded. In regional radio, £20 million would go a long way. Compared with when I started out in politics, which was a long time ago, what is put out by BBC Radio Manchester now—its political coverage and the rest of its coverage—on less resources is not as comprehensive. The quality of the people doing it is excellent, but there simply are not as many of them and there is not as much. That is because of underfunding. I want to give three or four examples, if I may, of where I think this cohort of south-eastern, Oxbridge-educated people get it wrong. I will say, and the point has already been made, that any organisation with human beings in it is going to make mistakes.”
“He has dropped his salary, but I do not think that he was ever worth more than £600,000 or that the private sector was going to pay that amount of money for him. I have no idea what Andrew Neil gets paid at the moment, but it is a great pity that another great interviewer is leaving the BBC. I do not know whether that is down to commercial pressure or just because he is a bit cheeky and teases the BBC management, but it is a great pity. He gives politicians all round the clock a pretty tough and torrid time when he interviews them, and that is a great thing for democracy. But I think that, from that narrow base, we do get a distorted view. Incidentally, I take the point made by the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle that £20 million would not pay the licence fees for the over-75s. I accept that; it is just simple arithmetic.”
“That is a reasonable point as far as it goes. The BBC has not only paid very high salaries in a discriminatory way over the last five years; when it was found to be discriminating, it increased those salaries. It is the case that there are places within the BBC that have to compete commercially, but the fact that it has increased the number of people presenting sports programmes surely shows that there is not a shortage. It could get very high-quality people at a lower rate. Let us say that Gary Lineker goes to BT or Sky; I think that the people at the BBC who are earning a lot less are as good. I understand the argument advanced by the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman), but I do not think that it stands up in that case or many others. I think that John Humphrys is one of the best interviewers there has been on the BBC.”
“I have great respect for the right hon. Lady, but she is fundamentally wrong on this issue, although she is right to criticise the way in which the Department for Transport uses travel times. In the assessment of all transport infrastructure, the Department fails to take into account the economic investment that always follows investment in transport. The case is the opposite of what she is saying: it underestimates the benefits from HS2.”
“My right hon. Friend makes a brilliant case. If anything, he underestimates the result. When the Transport Committee went to France to look at the impact of the TGV, it found that the go-ahead cities that used the high-speed lines got huge extra investment that had not been calculated in the original assessment. Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds are all go-ahead cities, so I expect more jobs than my right hon. Friend says.”
“Order. I do not wish to interrupt the right hon. Gentleman, who is making some interesting points, but the question is “That this House has considered Combat Air Strategy progress and next steps.” I hope the right hon. Gentleman will focus his remarks on the objective of the debate.”
“7. What discussions he has had with the European Commission on the applicability of Article 24 of the WTO General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in relation to the UK leaving the EU.”
“On an all-party visit to the World Trade Organisation, it was made clear that if there was the prospect of a negotiated free trade agreement in the future, tariff-free trade could continue. Does the Minister agree that if the EU does not agree to that negotiated free trade in the future, which would allow tariff-free trade on leaving, that will be because it wants to punish the UK, not come to the best agreement in the interests of its people?”
“Friend the Member for Sheffield Central says, to reuse things rather than recycling them—glass bottles rather than plastic being an obvious example.”
“I am stimulated to get to my feet by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), who is associated with the University of Sheffield, as I was some time ago, through the Sheffield students’ union. One of the things I learned at the university was that if we cannot measure it, or we do not measure it, we are unlikely to make progress with it. Does my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) agree that some of the Government’s statistics are extremely dodgy in this area, particularly on recycling? When waste is exported, we assume that it is recycled, but that is unaudited. The best way to deal with these things is, first, to deal with them domestically and, secondly, as my hon.”
“Some time ago, I had lunch with Eddie Stobart—I may have got this figure slightly wrong, because it was a long time ago that we had lunch—but I think he said that at any one time on the motorways he had 40 lorries carrying nothing but water. It is an extraordinary waste of energy making the bottles and, as the hon. Gentleman says, we have high-quality water in virtually every corner of this country. I have tried at different times to persuade the House authorities to use tap water, not bottled water. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we could make a small contribution by not having bottled water at our Committee meetings?”
“Within the Government, there are many different estimates of the impact on jobs and the cost to the Treasury. Why do we not have an impact assessment for this statutory instrument? That would be good regulatory and legislative practice.”
“Order. I intend to call the SNP spokesperson at 2.30 pm. Five Back Benchers are indicating that they wish to speak, so the arithmetic is straightforward: there is no need for a time limit.”
“Before I call the Minister, I will say two things. First, my notes said that the Minister was Kit Malthouse, but you are no less welcome for being unexpected, Minister. Secondly, can I ask you to leave a short space of time at the end of your speech for the Chair of the Committee to wind up?”
“When Nicholas Ridley deregulated bus services nearly a third of a century ago, he promised that bus services would increase and be used by more passengers. Actually, bus deregulation has been a catastrophe and a disaster for the travelling public. Is not the answer to this question absolutely obvious—that the Government should encourage and allow all local authorities in England to re-regulate their services?”
“Professor Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, drew attention in her most recent report to the fact that there has been no change in health inequalities, both regionally and by class, since the Black report was published in 1980. To go back to the right hon. Lady’s first point, that implicates all political parties over nearly 40 years for not having dealt with those inequalities. What does she think can be done about it?”
“No distinction can be drawn between victims of such crimes, but there is something particularly monstrous and brutal about people who dedicated themselves to public service being killed in this fashion. I spoke to Keith Bradley yesterday and he told me he was being supported by liaison officers and wanted me to pass on his thanks to the Foreign Secretary. I finish by asking the Foreign Secretary—I know what his answer will be, but it is worth saying anyway—to redouble his efforts to ensure that people in this country and elsewhere are as safe as they can be from the diaspora of ISIS in Syria and elsewhere.”
“Mr Speaker, I am sure you will join me and other right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House in passing on our condolences to the former Member for Manchester, Withington, Keith Bradley, now a Member of the other place, whose sister, Dr Sally Bradley, was killed in Sri Lanka. Her husband, Bill Harrop, was also killed. Dr Sally Bradley qualified as a doctor at Manchester University, worked as a GP in Salford and served as director of public health and director of medicine in the Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, which covers a large part of Greater Manchester. Her husband, Bill Harrop, was a firefighter, but not just a firefighter, and had worked in Manchester and received a commendation after the 1976 IRA bomb, which went off in the centre of Manchester.”
“Does my hon. Friend agree that the cuts that have been made so far have been exacerbated by the lack of a real tax base in local government and too much central Government interference?”
“I agree with the thrust of my hon. Friend’s argument. Does she agree that the argument being put in the Chamber today that we should give people a second vote because they have changed their mind would lead to a “neverendum”—people could change their mind every year, though all the polling evidence, as presented by John Curtice, is that they have not changed their mind—and that about 98% of the people promoting a second referendum are remainers?”
“I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s analysis that the Prime Minister’s negotiating position and skills have been pathetic. If the Opposition table a motion of no confidence, will the hon. Gentleman vote for it, because it is the logic of his position?”
“We have about half an hour before I call the Scottish National party spokesperson, leaving about five and a half to six minutes for each speaker. I do not want to impose a time limit.”
“Before I call the Minister, may I ask him to leave a minute or 90 seconds at the end of his remarks for the proposer of the debate to wind up?”
“This expenditure is only necessary because of the sheer incompetence of the Secretary of State for Transport. I have sat and listened to him in this Chamber and listened to him in the Transport Committee, and after every fiasco his defence is that it has not cost the Exchequer any money. The fact is that this has cost the Exchequer £33 million. Has he not run out of runway and should he not resign?”
“Order. I remind hon. Members that interventions should be short and to the point, and that Members should speak when they have the Floor, not from a sedentary position.”
“Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but I would be grateful if he started to bring his remarks to a conclusion so the Minister has about the same time as he has had.”
“The Minister will remember from the joint Select Committee report on air pollution, “Improving air quality”, that the Committees were dissatisfied with our knowledge about air pollution because direct measurements were not being made. What action is the Minister taking to ensure more accurate knowledge and measurements of existing pollution, rather than relying on models?”
“The hon. Gentleman is being extraordinarily generous in taking interventions. Does he agree that if local impact assessments are done, they are ignored, and not just by Santander? Banks want to force people into online banking, and the real threat of that is that they will move towards allowing algorithms, not human beings, to take decisions. It is not just the high street that goes, but the personal interaction and the ability to appeal to a human being if things go wrong.”
“My hon. Friend is doing an excellent job of presenting our Committee’s report and explaining how the Government tried to fiddle the figures to obscure the fact that London is getting about 80% of the funding. Does she agree that this will not be rectified and made fair until the methodology for deciding on investment schemes is changed? It massively over-weights time saved, which always pushes investment towards densely populated cities such as London, rather than Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds or the other regional cities.”
“Friend agree that the Government have not only failed to respond positively to our recommendations but failed to play a straight bat, in not presenting information to the Committee that would have enabled us to carry through properly our job of scrutinising the Department?”
“My hon. Friend is being very generous in giving way as she draws to her conclusion. She has already mentioned the fact that it took four months from the decision to cancel the electrification to a written statement to the House on the last day before the summer recess. The previous Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Derbyshire Dales (Sir Patrick McLoughlin), assured the Committee that there would be no change in the investment plans when the Office for National Statistics had changed the designation of Network Rail’s public status so that it became part of the public expenditure. However, that has driven many of the cuts in the future investment programme. Does my hon.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend, as a London-based MP, for her support for a sane, sensible and fair regional policy. Does she agree that not only is the unfairness a factor, but that repeated investment in London to solve transport problems is counterproductive? Investment in transport has an economic effect: it creates more jobs, more people and more pressure on housing. Investing in that way is therefore effectively investing in future congestion.”