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.”
The complete record
Every one of 605 lines we hold for Graham Stringer, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 12 of 13.
“My hon. Friend is making a very strong case about the damage that is being done to local services by cuts in the Government grant. Does she agree that there is no resilience in local government’s tax base, which is strangling local democracy, and that there needs to be a reversal of the changes that were made in the late ’80s and early ’90s to councils’ abilities to raise their own money?”
“My hon. Friend has listed a series of arguments and reasons that might undermine the 2016 decision. Does she agree that a second referendum would have no credibility if the result of the first referendum was not implemented thoroughly and properly?”
“I think the Prime Minister should have said at the beginning, “We are not accepting a ridiculous deal like this.” She needs either to go back to the Commission and get a better deal, or to go back to the people; hopefully, the Labour party would then get a mandate to negotiate a better deal.”
“Sadly, the Government have not come back with a deal after two and a half years, and I will vote against what they have come back with. I agree with the leader of my party that if there is a general election, it may well help to put pressure on the Commission, but one thing we know: if this pretty appalling deal is rejected, the EU is master, or mistress, of the last-minute deal. The EU will suffer more than the UK in absolute terms, although less in percentage terms, if there is no reasonable agreement on 29 March. I do not think tomorrow is the end of the story.”
“It is in Asia, the United States and even South America that most of the growth is occurring, so I do not think we have a great deal to be frightened of on those matters. I have covered a lot of ground, and one could cover more, because the petitions themselves cover a huge amount of ground, from staying to leaving to what the impact will be. The view that I have set out may not be the majority view in my party or in the House of Commons, but it is the majority view in the country, as the 2016 referendum showed. I remind hon. Members of what the Prime Minister at the time, David Cameron, said—that the people are sovereign. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) said in response, “This is not for Members to decide; it is for you, the public, to decide what happens.” It would be quite wrong for us to stop now.”
“Yet people regularly state on the floor of the House of Commons that we will have an economic disaster, based not only on the Bank of England but on other think tanks and institutions that are using the same failed models, which do not allow for the flexibility and substitution that exist in the market in this country. In a more general sense, most of our trade is done under World Trade Organisation rules anyway; most of the world trades under World Trade Organisation rules. I am not saying it is better than what we have—it is not—but it is adequate. The car industry has bleated quite a lot, but the imports of parts are not solely from the EU. Some come from other parts of the world economy. The rest of the world is also where most of the growth is. The EU has been one of the slowest-growing parts of the world economy.”
“Those things are not going to happen, but when anything is changed there will be some short-term disruption. Because we would be making our own laws, in a very short time there would be major benefits. We would also keep most of the £39 billion that the House of Lords EU Financial Affairs Sub-Committee said we had no legal obligation to pay. That would probably give a 2% boost to our GDP. Incidentally, I think I would go to Mystic Meg for predictions about the economy before I would go to the Bank of England, which said that the mere vote to leave the EU would lead to half a million job losses after 23 June. How many jobs were lost? More jobs were created.”
“Member for Sutton and Cheam that it would not. There would be some short-term disruption, but nothing like the disruption suggested in what the BBC propagates, or in the regular cries of woe heard on the Floor of the House of Commons. However, there is bound to be some disruption. We heard from the sub-prefecture of Calais that there would be no halting of goods there—and why would there be? Why would countries try to make it more difficult for their own industries to export? It has always been a put-up job—the idea that somehow, in support of the European Commission, the French would not want to sell us wine, but would want the people producing wine in Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Rhône valley to be poorer. That is an extraordinary proposition. The same would be true of Spain and other European countries.”
“I think that it is partly its non-democratic nature that is responsible for what is happening around the EU—not only economic problems on the southern coast, but the rise of the far right in many countries. It is extraordinary that in my political lifetime there should be a party of the far right in Sweden, and that Sweden—one of the great, long-standing democracies in Europe—should not be able to form a Government. There are other strands to the reasons for the resurgence of the right in Europe, but one is that people can no longer vote for Governments that will do what they want them to, because those factors are determined by the EU. If it came to a no deal—although frankly it would be better for us to have our cake and eat it, and have a deal beneficial to EU citizens and to us—would it be the end of the world? I agree with the hon.”
“We are in complete regulatory alignment with it, and it has a trade surplus with us. We have been paying a lot of money into it. The reason why many of the university exchanges work is, to put it bluntly, that our top universities are better than the EU’s. To take a simple criterion such as the number of Nobel awards, one college at Cambridge has won more Nobel prizes than the top universities in the EU. They need our universities. So what motivates the European Commission to be so unaccommodating in the negotiation? I do not think it is to do with trade. The Commission is prepared to punish EU citizens by coming to what is, from their point of view, a bad deal, given their trade surplus, because it does not want any other states to follow our example.”
“We have had many debates about it here and on the Floor of the House, and we should not have another. I have one further point to make about the economic impact of the EU. It is assumed not just that the EU is economically beneficial to us, but that stopping the current trading arrangements, under which we are in the EU internal market, would be wholly negative. We are running a huge trade deficit of between £70 billion and £80 billion a year. I think that if the rules are changed we will get a lot of substitution. Jobs will be created here, because any tariffs—and possibly a drop in the pound—would make it cheaper to manufacture here. Why we consider it so economically advantageous to us to be in an internal market where we have a huge trade deficit, I do not know. It is worth thinking about why the EU had done as it has.”
“If people did not understand a simple proposition such as the one about leaving the European Union, how are they going to understand the pre-negotiation agreement, with its 585—or perhaps it is 685—pages of nonsensical legal script? They are not going to. It is ludicrous to pretend that that is easier to understand than the simple proposition. Also, if we are to ignore the first referendum, what credibility would a second have? What credibility would any future referendum have? Would we have to say, when it was agreed to hold a referendum, “We’ll have a first one, and if it goes the way the establishment would not like, we will make it the best of three”? That is what the proposition for a second referendum is like. We should not proceed with a second referendum.”
“As I said, it was a simple proposition, and people did know what they were voting for—to leave the European Union. Having talked during the period of the referendum to people I represent from some of the poorest estates in the country, it is fairly clear to me that they knew exactly what they were voting for. It is an insult to them to say they did not know. The implication is that the educated, cosmopolitan elite are superior, and that their votes should weigh more than the votes of people in poorer parts of the country without degrees and A-levels. I do not believe that, and I guess that if it is stated explicitly, most people in the Chamber do not believe it, but that is at the base of “didn’t understand it”.”
“It is extraordinary that the CRISPR technology has, in effect, been banned, while new crops created by random genetic mutation—using irradiation, so there is no controlling what happens—are allowed. I use those examples—one economic one, at the huge end of things, and a specific scientific one—to illustrate the point that it is nonsensical to think that the EU always makes decisions that lead to more jobs, more growth and better science. It simply does not. I believe fundamentally that we would get better regulations if we made them ourselves, for our own industry and science, rather than having them designed to fit across the 27 or 28 countries of the EU. Another argument that is made for a second referendum, or for not implementing the 2016 referendum, is that people did not understand what they were voting for.”
“There are many examples of perverse EU decisions that have led, and will lead, to job losses. Last summer, the European Court of Justice, in line with what the EU Commission had said, ruled that the CRISPR-Cas9 technology, which is about inserting parts of genes into crops, was unlawful. That decision has been widely condemned throughout the scientific community as anti-scientific and as having “a chilling effect” on research and the economy. The rest of the world is happy to get on with it, because this technology, where it exists, leads to a drop of about a third in the use of herbicides and a 20% increase in crops. That decision will damage UK and European science, and related jobs in science and agriculture, and it may lead to less food.”
“As a member of the Labour party for many years who opposed the monetarism of the early 1980s, I am astonished that members of the Labour party are so wedded to the EU, which has at the core of its policies the stability and growth pact. The stability and growth pact is, in fact, monetarism; it is Thatcherism internationalised. It is not just abstract thought. It is one of the reasons why youth across the whole of southern Europe have lost the democratic right to determine what happens in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, and why there is a whole generation of young people on the dole. The situation has been created by the macroeconomic policies at the centre of EU policy. The policy does not just affect those people; by deflating the EU economy, it affects our ability to export there.”
“Members in this Chamber regularly stand for election on manifestos that contain tax commitments. Tax commitments are a way of confiscating people’s income and capital resources, and they make people poorer. We all vote for them, and we all stand on manifestos that make people poorer, usually for social and public benefit. I think it is a nonsensical statement. It appears to have credibility—who could disagree with it?—but its objective and purpose are to undermine the democratic decision that was taken by more than 17.4 million people, as the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam said. The other implication is that being in the EU always makes us richer and never makes us poorer, and that its decisions always benefit the people of the United Kingdom and the EU. That is demonstrably not true.”
“Since then, we have had a vote to trigger article 50, which passed by a huge majority. In many cases, although not in all, remainers have looked for ways to undermine the decision, even though it was unconditional and unambiguous. A number of statements have been made, which at first sound quite sensible. I hear regularly in the Chamber, and I have heard it said here, that people did not vote to make themselves poorer. I know they did not—it is true—but they did not vote to make themselves richer. They voted to leave the European Union. The statement that people did not vote to make themselves poorer has two implications. One is that people never vote to make themselves poorer—that it would be absurd even to think that. But a moment’s thought shows that that is absolutely not true. Right hon. and hon.”
“It leaves control over the end of that negotiation, and over whether Northern Ireland has different laws from the rest of the United Kingdom, subject to a different legislature. That is an outrage. It is an embarrassment to the Prime Minister and a disgrace to the country that anybody, of whichever political party, would bring back a deal like that. The debate on the petitions ranges all over the place, but it is worth going back to the referendum. The wording of the referendum was unambiguous and unconditional. There was no condition on the ballot paper. It was absolutely clear that if people voted one way they were voting to remain in the EU, and if they voted in the other box they were voting to leave. The Prime Minister has not managed to deliver the result.”
“I agree with much of what the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully) said, except his final conclusion that somehow this deal is a way forward. There are a number of reasons why it is not. First, it is not a deal; it is an agreement to have negotiations for a final deal. On Sunday, Neil Warnock, the manager of Cardiff City—I am not used to quoting him on his political stance or on football matters—spoke for probably the majority of the United Kingdom when he said that the Government should get on and implement what the people had decided in the referendum. After two and half years, that should happen, but the Government have not done so. They have come back with an agreement to negotiate that the Prime Minister should be embarrassed about.”
“My hon. Friend is right to say that there is no majority in the House of Commons for a general election at present—partly because a two-thirds majority is needed under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011—but does he really believe that if the Prime Minister loses tomorrow by more than 100 votes and potentially 200 votes, this Government will have any credibility left at all if the central plank of their existence has failed by so many votes in the House of Commons? Is not the only honourable thing to do to have a general election and see what the public think?”
“We agree on tomorrow’s vote, but disagree on the objectives. I assume we agree that we all should follow the law. Does my hon. Friend not accept the view of the House of Lords Committee about where our legal obligations start and finish? We do not have a legal obligation to pay £39 billion, and the basis of trade deals is to follow the rules and the law.”
“I agree completely with the Minister’s point about the motivation for a second referendum, but some of the people who want to subvert the 2016 referendum result have another string to their bow: attrition. By extending article 50, they want to extend the whole process until the House or the public should get weary of it. Will the Minister give us an assurance that under no circumstances will the Government introduce a statutory instrument that changes the date for leaving the European Union that was set in the European Union (Withdrawal) Act?”
“A review simply is not good enough. More than three quarters of trains at Oxford Road do not comply with the timetable. We have had delays, cancellations, reviews. We need an immediate implementation of the Northern Hub investment programme —extra platforms at Salford, and extensions of platforms at Oxford Road, moving to new platforms 15 and 16. Will the Minister do that, and reject the ridiculous idea that this problem can be solved by digitising the signalling system, when there is such mixed rolling stock on these rails?”
“It is only vested interest, when we think we can grab an election without debating, that stops it happening. I did not intend to speak, but the debate is a good one, and it is a shame more people are not here. Sky is to be congratulated, as are the people who signed the petition, on stimulating the discussion.”
“That is the power of debate, and however complicated it is to deal with parties that have significant support with no representation, and those such as the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru whose primary objective is to get out of this place, and who do not want their leader to be Prime Minister but who clearly have a significant democratic impact in the whole United Kingdom, we should do what we can to facilitate those positions. I could go on speaking about this issue, which is an important one, on which we should be giving support. Having heard what the hon. Member for Wellingborough said, I wish him well with his Bill. It may need some tweaks. However, the whole of the House of Commons and House of Lords should get together, because when we are away from elections we all believe in debate.”
“It certainly affected me when I saw how important it was. Hon. Members will remember the rise of the British National party. It did not rise to a significant extent, but it looked as if it was making progress when it was led by the bottom-feeder Nick Griffin. On the evening when he went on “Question Time” I was in someone’s front room talking about pavements and street lighting. At the end of the meeting they said to me, “Are you going to go and buy a bottle of wine?” I thought, “What do these people know about my drinking habits? That’s a bit strange,” but every single one of those people, living in terraced houses in north Manchester, was going back to watch Nick Griffin and Jack Straw, and the other party people on “Question Time”. Griffin was destroyed and the BNP fell apart.”
“I do not think that the 2010 election was affected by the television debates, but I believe that the 2017 election was massively affected by the debates, quite simply because the Prime Minister did not have the courage to debate. She would not put the case for the Conservative party, which went from having a large lead in the opinion polls to not being able to form a majority Government. If anyone doubts the power of the debate, I think the television companies were right to empty-seat the Prime Minister and go ahead without her. It was a bit strange, and it looked a bit strange, but it exposed the fact that the leader of one of our major parties was unprepared to get up and defend its position. I have another example of the positive side of television debate and discussion, although not in a formal leaders’ debate.”
“It is not just that there are a lot of different outlets for information nowadays. We have coined the phrase “fake news” for a lot of the information that has been used in elections and referendums, because of the internet. One of the great things about a debate is the ability to challenge lies. In the old cliché, if you keep on telling lies I will keep on telling the truth. That is the purpose of debate. People have complained about the referendum—about whether certain facts were facts—but it is the purpose of debate to expose such things. What better place than on television, with a huge audience, to get those issues out?”
“It would be the difficult job of a regulatory body to balance up the major parties and who would be invited. It is said, rather glibly, that only the leaders of the parties that are likely to provide the Prime Minister should be there. If we looked at the experience in Canada, the people who were going to be Prime Minister before the election eight or nine years ago were not elected. One of the major parties got 2%. There have been major changes in European Union countries. Parties that were permanently in the ascendency, such as the Social Democrats in Sweden, are now minor parties. Sometimes these changes happen very quickly. There has never been a more intense time for debate. It is going to be a difficult job for any regulatory body that is set up, but I think it is vital.”
“However much Cleggmania we had in that election—and I got worried looking at the figures because it seemed that the Lib Dems were going to get a huge number of votes in my constituency, but I went out every day and I suppose I must have knocked on a Lib Dem door, but nobody admitted to it through the whole campaign—those debates were important, as the people and leaders challenged each other, but I do not think they changed very much. That has been the case in many elections. I remember the opinion polls ticking over on the bottom of the Sky television screen in the 1997 election, barely shifting half a point during the whole election. We live in a time where the world is changing and politics are more fluid than they have ever been. We need a response to that.”
“When the BBC was the monopoly broadcaster in the 1950s, it might have been sensible to just have the debate on the BBC, but now we have a range of social media and different television broadcasters, including access to television stations from around the world, as well as traditional print media. We need to ensure that there is regulation on television, which is where most people look for discussion during a general election. The viewing figures for the debates in 2010 were immense.”
“The difficult problem in setting up any quango is not going to the pool of people who have made themselves available to serve—often public spiritedly; I do not want to be too mean—as it is a closed group. Reluctantly, I think we have to have a body that will consider the complicated issues involved, but I hope it is not the list that was given by the able motivator of the motion, the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay. It is important that we have televised debates or discussions set up, in whatever form, because sometimes we do not state the blindingly obvious: that debate is at the core of democracy and our society. We need to have that debate in as many forums as we can.”
“Therefore, I think we need a regulatory body. My heart sank when the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) went through the list of the great and the good who would have to serve on a quango to regulate television debates—judges and other people. Sadly, we have developed a population of quangocrats who serve on many quangos, scratch each other’s backs and move from one quango to another. That means that sometimes we do not get the breadth and the quality in those organisations that we should. I make a partisan point here, from the position I have taken on the Brexit debate. It is extraordinary that the total membership of the Electoral Commission are remainers.”
“Reluctantly, I agree with them. As we do not have a written constitution, it has the merit of being flexible; when the world changes, the processes within this place and electorally change. If people were acting with democratic spirit and good will, and as television and the media have developed, one would have expected politicians and political parties to have responded to that by enabling people to benefit from having the debate broadcast on television in their front rooms. That has not happened for the reasons stated explicitly by the hon. Member for Wellingborough. When Leaders of the Opposition are massively ahead in the opinion polls, they do not want a debate. Why would they risk hitting a banana skin? When Prime Ministers are in No. 10 and ahead in the opinion polls, they want to avoid exactly the same banana skin.”
“Like my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Drew), I originally turned up to listen to the debate and possibly to make an intervention, but I will follow the excellent speech by the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone). I start with two disappointments. One is that there are not more right hon. and hon. Members present. This is an important issue; I can guarantee that every Member of Parliament has a view about how debates on television and in the media should be conducted during a general election. It is a disappointment that more people have not turned up. It is disrespectful to the 130,000 people who petitioned for the debate and it does not do justice to the importance of the issue. My second disappointment is that the three hon. Members who spoke before me all came to the conclusion that we need a quango to regulate debates.”
“National elections, certainly for the parties that fight seats across the United Kingdom, are fought on the basis of manifestos. Would the hon. Gentleman like to compare the number of people who read our manifestos with the number of people who watched the television debates? He is absolutely right that these are not presidential debates, but the leaders put forward their manifestos.”
“Does the Minister not accept that we already discriminate in legislation—possibly in favour, possibly against, depending on one’s point of view—against electronic media? We demand that they provide a platform for party political broadcasts and that they balance the different views during a general election campaign, but we do not apply that to any other form of media. There is already that separation and it would not, therefore, be changing the legislative framework very much to say that a platform for debates should be provided.”
“Order. I remind hon. Members that interventions should be short and to the point. They are tending to become a little lengthy, and I intend to call the Minister in a minute.”
“The Minister is talking about taking immediate action. It is some time now since the Dieter Helm review came out with a number of recommendations to sort out the chaos of the subsidies going into the alternative energy business, which would take the cost pressure off the most vulnerable households. The Minister does not look as though he has read it. Its approach would take the pressure off the most vulnerable households, so why do the Government not respond and implement those recommendations?”
“Will the Minister explain to the House why, as smart meters are rolled out in the north of England, we are not getting the most up-to-date and best smart meters, which people in Watford are getting? Why is the north being discriminated against?”
“Although we are a little ahead of schedule, before I call the Minister, I ask him to leave a minute or two at the end for the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) to sum up.”
“Recently, Hazaras lobbied me and other hon. Members, saying that they are now in deep fear of an ISIS attack. This comes after they have suffered massacres at the hands of the Taliban, and they have a history of being the subject of genocidal attacks by other ethnic groups in Afghanistan. Given the amount of money we have put into Afghanistan, can the Minister not do more?”
“It calls into question whether Parliament means it when it says, “This is for the people to decide, even by a majority of one.” I can give quotes from Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem spokespeople who said that. That was the decision of the House of Commons and it was passed by a large majority.”
“There would be the time taken on the complicated issues of what questions the referendum would ask and what it would be about, and then there would be the time to have a thorough debate. If one of the problems with the first referendum was that the debate was not thorough and detailed enough, one would want at least as long to debate a more complicated question. Those are practical problems, but there is a deep problem of principle with the belief—this applies to Plaid Cymru, the SNP and others—that referendums are the solution to a problem. If this referendum result is not honoured, what will happen with the honouring of any future referendum results?”
“It seems to me that because of those complicated issues, the timetable for getting a second referendum through both Houses would be long. It is not obvious what the decision would be, and interpreting it would be difficult. I am sure the Scottish National party spokesperson, the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard), will correct me if I am wrong, but the debate on the Scottish referendum took more than two years. He will not have been happy with the result, but a thoroughgoing debate was had in Scotland on its future. We had just over a year to debate the 2016 referendum, which came after the 2015 general election when a significant majority of people voted to have a referendum, and still people claimed that there was not sufficient time to hold a referendum.”
“If there were agreement in both Houses that there should be a second referendum—I do not think there is—how long would it take to pass the necessary law? It is not obvious what the question, or questions, would be. Would it be about the 575-page document we have been presented with, which I suspect even lawyers would find difficult to decipher? Would we have another in/out vote? Or would we vote on all three things? I have heard hon. Friends argue on television and radio that there should be a three-point question. They never seem to have the answer to the question posed by the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully): what happens if the electorate vote a third, a third and a third, or if there are other contradictions in the result?”
“A couple of them said something like, “We should make our own laws, shouldn’t we?” That is a pretty simple question and a pretty fundamental way of defining democracy and sovereignty, which are at the core of this issue. I therefore dismiss that suggestion by people who argue for a second referendum. The establishment took one in the guts on this. They did not expect to lose the referendum, so they denigrated people who voted to leave as a way of not dealing with the fundamental arguments. Those arguments were about democracy and sovereignty—the right of an electorate to dismiss the people who raise taxes and make laws. The EU, since its inception, has been a challenge to that process. I do not really want to repeat the arguments that have been made, but some are worth addressing in detail. There are practical problems.”
“They make a number of supporting statements, such as, “The electorate didn’t understand.” I think the electorate did understand what was a very simple proposition. Worse than that to my mind is the statement that the electorate were motivated by anger, disillusionment and alienation because they live in poorer regions of the country. That all boils down to the same point: that people in Hartlepool, Wales, the north of England, the south-west of England, the midlands—all the areas that voted to leave—dealt not with the question before them but with their own internal situation. My experience was quite the reverse. I talked to people while I was out and about on the day of the referendum, and they had a very simple and direct definition of democracy and sovereignty.”
“I am disappointed by the number of people who have turned up to the debate. I came to listen to it because I spoke in the debate on the counter-proposition—that there should be a second referendum—two weeks ago. This is one of the most important constitutional issues of our time, so I expected more right hon. and hon. Members to be present. However, I am grateful for the opportunity briefly to contribute. I will not repeat the arguments of the previous debate but, I hope, make one or two new points. I am sure you remember, Mr Hollobone, as a learned person, that in 1953, after the uprising in East Berlin, Bertolt Brecht said ironically that the regime should dismiss the people and appoint a new one. It seems to me that those people who now argue for a second referendum are saying that in 2016 the electorate got it wrong.”