Dame Angela Eagle
MP for Wallasey · Labour · United Kingdom
“The Kremlin increasingly relies on proxy organisations to pursue its objectives, seeking to undermine our security while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability. The so-called GRU Volunteer Corps is a clear example of that approach. It is not an independent force or a loose collection of volunteers.”
“This Government have introduced support for the Jewish communities who have been threatened and directly targeted by IRGC proxies. Just a couple of days ago, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced an extra £250 million for policing to ensure that we can support and protect our Jewish communities.”
“I will move on to the Islamic Movement of Companions of the Right. The IMCR has publicly claimed seven attacks at UK locations linked to Jewish and Israeli communities and to Persian-language media, including the antisemitic arson attack on four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green on 23 March.”
“We expect platforms to act responsibly and not to provide space for state threat-linked activity, propaganda or recruitment. We will be keeping a close eye on that, as well as liaising with social media companies to tell them about how this law impacts them.”
“The IRGC Quds Force and the IRGC Intelligence Organisation, together with the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, form the Iranian intelligence apparatus. As a key component of the Iranian state’s security apparatus, the IRGC is answerable directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader.”
“It provides a targeted and proportionate means of disrupting those involved in foreign power threat activity based on the recommendations of Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of state threat legislation. To answer the hon.”
The complete record
Every one of 5,924 lines we hold for Dame Angela Eagle, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 50 of 119.
“My right hon. Friend is recognising the truth that resources are connected to results when it comes to dealing with crime. Does she agree that the cuts that have seen 1,000 officers disappear from the Merseyside force have created a situation where those who are committing crimes see less evidence of the police being able to follow them up, which creates a view on the street that lawlessness can be got away with? That actually encourages criminality while making it much harder for the law-abiding to report it to the police.”
“It looks to me that there is a reasonable case for judicial review, because of the Government’s lack of ability to put before Parliament and the people in Buckinghamshire the appropriate documentation in an appropriate and timely fashion. I look forward to the Minister’s response, but I would like him to say that he will withdraw this SI temporarily, and bring it back when he has all his ducks in order and has done the appropriate amount of work.”
“I hope the Minister will consider withdrawing these regulations, until he can sort himself out and bring to the Committee the appropriate documentation, so that everyone in Parliament can have a proper look at what we are meant to be approving. I certainly hope that if the Minister does not do that, the Opposition Front Bench will consider voting against this proposal. The proposal is half-baked, it does not have the consent that it claims to have and the Minister has not even bothered to provide the appropriate documentation for us to consider. He ought to go back to the drawing board and come back with all the appropriate documentation. I look forward to him explaining that consent does not mean the consent of four of the five local authorities.”
“Despite the fact that we may in principle want authorities to be unitary, surely, if there is local democracy, there must be a local, democratic way of bringing that about, which does not just mean that the largest fish swallows all the smaller fish, whether they want to be swallowed or not. It seems to me that in their bureaucratic efforts to get this done and dusted in time, the Government are riding roughshod over perfectly reasonable local interests. The fact that the Government have not seen it fit to lay before Parliament the appropriate documentation, so that we can check the assurances that they say they will give us, is a disgrace. This Committee should not be meeting without the appropriate documentation in front of it.”
“If these kinds of things are to be done appropriately and in a successful way, it is not appropriate for the Minister to do it in a top-down, fast way, empowering the largest and most powerful local authority in the area, so that it can dominate the rest of the authorities that have been swallowed up by it. That will lead to getting off on the wrong foot, resentments, which will not disappear quickly, and the alienation of local people, who believe that their district council is being swallowed up in a way that leaves them with little chance to influence the new unitary authority that is being created. In my area, we have experience of being forced to become unitary: our metropolitan council—the Merseyside one—was simply abolished, with no consent either, it must be said. That leads to a struggle.”
“Lady’s constituency—have rejected the final plans for a unitary authority. It sounds to me, listening to the right hon. Lady’s comments a moment ago, that they have reasonable worries, which ought to be properly answered. However, given that the Minister’s powers will expire at the end of March, what we have here appears to be a bureaucratically driven exercise, which is trying to force a change through, despite there being plenty of evidence of local worries and a complete lack of local consent to some of these changes. Does it matter that the people who object happen to come from the smaller district councils, rather than the leviathan county council, which will be empowered, it seems to me, by these plans? It ought to matter to those of us who are interested in local democracy being meaningful.”
“It is a pleasure to serve on this Committee under your chairmanship, Mr Austin. I am glad that I am able to follow the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham, who has filled in a bit of the local colour that I assumed might exist when I read the documents that the Committee has been provided with. She has raised some extremely important questions, which I hope the Minister has extremely good answers to. While looking at the documents, I noticed that, funnily enough, effectively all of the smaller local authorities in the Buckinghamshire area that are going to be swallowed up are against what the Minister is suggesting. Four local authorities—South Bucks District Council, Wycombe District Council, Aylesbury Vale District Council and Chiltern District Council, which covers the right hon.”
“Does my right hon. Friend share my puzzlement, after listening to the Prime Minister for close to an hour and with many people having asked the question, that we are still no nearer to knowing any detail on what the phrase “alternative arrangements” means, except that the Prime Minister said they were arrangements that were alternative?”
“I thank the Secretary of State. I wonder whether he could enlighten the House about the phrase in the amendment tabled by the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Sir Graham Brady). What are the “alternative arrangements” that they are going to barrel off to the EU to renegotiate in the next couple of weeks?”
“Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. As someone who has been here for 27 years, my service is obviously larger than that of the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois). Can the— [ Interruption. ]”
“While we are living in an era of some creativity with respect to the House’s Standing Orders, can you confirm that we have not been so creative so far that amendments can survive the main motion being withdrawn?”
“The Prime Minister could reach out by relaxing her own self-imposed red lines, including thinking about other solutions such as staying in the customs union, which would deal with the backstop situation, but she seems intent on trying to get her dead deal through the House by playing chicken with her own Brexiteers and what she calls her confidence and supply partners. Will she, first, tell us that she really does want to reach out? Secondly, will she tell the House this: if we do amend the motion next Tuesday, will she respect that decision and put it into effect?”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Do you agree that the way in which the rules of this House have evolved, and the way in which the current Government have taken to ignoring Opposition motions and not even deigning to vote on them—coupled with the difficult circumstances in which we in the House of Commons now find ourselves in the aftermath of yesterday’s crushing defeat of the Brexit deal—demonstrate that our Standing Orders are probably in need of some evolution, even though I understand that you cannot change them? Will you perhaps think about bringing the Procedure Committee into play at some stage, so that we can take back some control from a dysfunctional Government and make certain that the will of this House can be properly put into effect?”
“I thank the Prime Minister for her generosity in giving way. With all due respect to her she has come to the House today, after suffering a very, very large defeat indeed, with the same lines and she is making the same assertions as she was making before the vote—it is as if the vote never happened. Her Downing Street spokesperson said that any discussions would have to start and proceed from the red lines that she herself established. Does she not realise, in all honesty, that the time has come for her to show some flexibility on those red lines and get us into a genuine discussion rather than just repeating the lines that we have heard for the past five months ad nauseam?”
“The deep splits in the Conservative party consume all of its energies, and Brexit is like a black hole that devours all light, out of which literally nothing can emerge. This is a Government who have failed badly even on their own terms. They have failed catastrophically on Brexit. They have failed to unite a country that their obsession with the EU divided in the first place. They have failed to deliver on the Prime Minister’s personal promise to deal with “burning injustices”, instead providing us with a parade of incompetent Ministers, unparalleled in any Administration since the second world war.”
“I rise to support this motion of no confidence because at this critical time in our history I believe we have a Government who are incapable of governing, let alone doing so in the national interest. Never have I witnessed in all my 27 years in Parliament a Government as inadequate and incompetent as this one. I have never witnessed a Prime Minister so inept that she has squandered all personal authority and goodwill, yet like a broken record she continues to insist on her right to carry on regardless. This is a Government becalmed in a sea of their own troubles and neglecting the country: presiding over increasing levels of poverty, homelessness and inequality, and ducking crucial reforms on social care, leaving millions relying on charity to eat.”
“I agree with my hon. Friend. This Government are paralysed, dealing with their own obsessions, not with the real need and crucial policy issues in the country. Yesterday’s defeat on the draft withdrawal agreement was a catastrophic loss of the Prime Minister’s own personal plan to engineer a hard Brexit in the UK, and it was entirely deserved. The Prime Minister has been humiliated by losing the vote on a plan she devised after little or no consultation with her own Cabinet. She finds herself in this position because of a series of colossal misjudgments that were entirely her own and for which she must now take personal responsibility.”
“Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) as Foreign Secretary—and she wonders why the UK is now a global laughing stock. This Government are paralysed by their own obsessions. They have proved incapable of addressing a country crying out for change. It is time for them to go.”
“Instead the country has been presented with a parade of incompetent Ministers who were simply not up to the job: a Home Secretary forced to resign over the Windrush scandal and the “hostile environment”, which saw UK citizens treated like criminals and deported back to countries they had left as small children; and a Transport Secretary handing out shipping contracts to a company with no ships and no access to commercial ports, and who presides over the chaos of the railway timetable disasters and blames everyone but himself—a man who cannot even organise a fake lorry jam on the M20. There have also been three Brexit Secretaries in two years, each of them undermined by the Prime Minister, and then there is perhaps the Prime Minister’s crowning achievement: appointing the right hon.”
“This Government refuse to acknowledge that years of cuts in public expenditure targeted most heavily on the poorest have resulted in much of the suffering and burning injustice she promised to end. The Government have issued countless press releases and have held a series of never-ending consultations on everything from social care, restaurant tips and rogue landlords to domestic violence, but nothing has changed.”
“Yesterday, she even dangerously claimed that she is now the champion of “the people” against Parliament. She has failed to unite the country because her only interest is in uniting the Conservative party, and that has proved to be impossible. This is a Government who do not seem to understand that demanding that people unite around their own partisan viewpoint can never heal divisions. They are not capable of reaching out, listening, compromising and responding to genuine fears, and as such they are not fit for purpose. On taking office, the Prime Minister promised to tackle “burning injustices” that made life difficult for those she called “just about managing.” She failed to acknowledge that much of the suffering in our country has been caused by the previous Governments in which she was a senior member.”
“I entirely agree, and some of the imbalances caused by that Government in the way our unwritten constitution works need to be addressed. The Prime Minister decided to kowtow to her own Brextremists rather than reach out. She tried to exclude Parliament from the process completely. She triggered article 50 without a plan and then called a general election, which shattered her own majority—but of course she is doing her best to avoid a general election now. The UK is now angrier, more divided and more fearful for the future than I have ever known it, and democracy itself is being questioned. Instead of trying to bring the country back together by reaching out, the Prime Minister has set herself up as the embodiment of leave voters, ignoring those who voted to remain.”
“The Minister should not patronise the Opposition by pretending that somehow we do not all do our constituency duty and we have not been to visit our local jobcentres. I can assure him that we have, and the problem with this benefit is that it was introduced to save money. Large cuts in welfare systems and payments were made. The Minister has put a little bit back, which has got to be welcome, but he has not put back what was taken away, and what was taken away is leaving my constituents relying on food banks with not enough to eat. He needs to recognise that reality.”
“As Speaker, you have an absolute duty to ensure that this House of Commons is taken seriously, which is why I commend you for the decision you have taken today.”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Do you agree that over the past few years we have seen a big evolution in the way the Government treat motions in this House? That was partly brought about by the Wright reforms, but we have seen the widespread ignoring of motions passed in this House, and the beginning of a practice of not voting on motions—especially Opposition motions—that the Government feel are somehow awkward for them. Do you agree, Mr Speaker, that this has taken away from the importance of the decisions that this House of Commons makes? Do you therefore also agree that allowing this House of Commons to vote on more issues, in a context in which those votes have to be taken and put into effect, empowers this House of Commons and demonstrates that it is taking back control?”
“Will the Minister be up front with the House and admit that universal credit has been a disaster right from the beginning? It has been delayed, it has cost money and the Government are having to delay it further because they are worried about its effect. In Wallasey, there was a 39% increase in food bank usage after the roll-out of universal credit. It is causing real distress, and there are still £4.7 billion of benefit cuts to be administered between now and 2020. Will he admit that this is a rolling disaster area and commit to properly reviewing it and doing the right thing?”
“I am sure my right hon. Friend has noticed that the Office for Budget Responsibility said in its report on the recent Budget that there has been a loss of 1.5% of GDP since the referendum, and that the uncertainty was likely to make that worse, at least in the medium term. This Parliament has a duty to ensure that we mitigate that as much as possible, which is why I will be supporting her amendment.”
“The Secretary of State has waxed lyrical today about the NHS becoming a learning organisation, being transparent and admitting its mistakes. Will he therefore set the trend and lead by getting up at the Dispatch Box and apologising to this House for the fragmentation and chaos caused by the Lansley Act?”
“I have some sympathy for the Minister, because he is doing his best to give the House assurances about what is likely to happen, but the fact is that he is appearing on behalf of a Prime Minister who has completely shredded her credibility by doing what she did yesterday. She was prepared to send out her Cabinet colleagues to make one assertion with confidence in the morning, while she was plotting to reverse it at the same time as she had them in front of the TV cameras. Despite the Minister’s personal integrity, why should we believe a single thing that he tells us today?”
“The right hon. Gentleman and I both entered the House at the same time, and I doubt that either of us has been in a situation quite as dangerous and fraught as this. Surely he will agree that, after yesterday, the Prime Minister has shredded her credibility and that many people on both sides of the House now find it almost impossible to believe a word she says. She asserts one thing one day and the opposite the day after. She sends her Cabinet out to assert that the vote is going ahead even as she is planning to pull it. Surely he must understand that we cannot go on with this Prime Minister at the helm.”
“In my 27 years in this House, I have rarely seen a Government in such a farrago of chaos as the Prime Minister has caused with her negotiations. Last week, she said: “I caution hon. Members that not only has the EU made it clear that the withdrawal agreement cannot be reopened—we have agreed the deal and the deal is there”. —[ Official Report , 4 December 2018; Vol. 65, c. 755.] She has now abandoned the vote and come back to the House to tell us that somehow the unopenable deal is open again. She is seeking assurances that will not be worth the paper they are written on, because she has done her legal deal already. Why on earth does she not just abandon this dancing on the head of a pin and let us vote on this appalling deal?”
“Will she now confirm—and not just read out the phrase she has read out twice already—that when we resume this debate, the Government’s motion will not be neutral and will be amendable, and that the Government will accept the spirit of the vote we had before we began the debate?”
“The Leader of the House was extremely coy in her answers to the questions from the right hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening) and my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) about whether the amendment to the motion that we were discussing—before the Government decided to pull it today—which was passed ahead of the debate and which replaced the neutral and unamendable motion that the Government were planning to put to this House, would be replaced with one that was amendable. She has been asked twice now, and she has been very coy and not forthcoming in her responses.”
“I repeat the question from the hon. Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant), because the Minister did not answer it. He surely has to confirm at the Dispatch Box that the deal means that any trade deals that might be signed cannot be implemented until we are out of the customs union and single market. He just has to get up and say that that is true.”
“Does my right hon. Friend agree that that kind of arrangement really puts this country over a barrel in the subsequent trade arrangements, because such a time limit weakens our position and makes it far less likely that we will be able to come to a good conclusion?”
“The Prime Minister interpreted “taking back control” as centralising power to herself and her increasingly dysfunctional Government. Far from reaching out and respecting the sovereignty of Parliament, she attempted to ride roughshod over the constitutional role of this House. She had to be dragged kicking and screaming back to Parliament by the Supreme Court, which confirmed that legislation was required to invoke article 50 and fire the starting gun on the withdrawal process. Once the Prime Minister had triggered article 50, she promptly called a general election in the expectation that she would win by a landslide—”
“She could have involved the Opposition parties in this endeavour, recognising that her predecessor in Downing Street had done nothing to prepare the country for what would happen if the leave campaign won. But she did not. The Prime Minister chose instead to kowtow to the irreconcilable Brextremist ideologues in her own party. In place of a national debate and a hope of reconciliation we were told, “Brexit means Brexit”. In her first conference speech as party leader, she set the tone by lambasting citizens of the world as citizens of nowhere, insulting and worrying EU citizens working in the UK. She has since accused them of jumping the immigration queue. Absurdly wrapping herself in the Union Jack to appease her own Eurosceptics, she then set a course in her Lancaster House speech for a hard, “red, white and blue” Brexit.”
“This negotiation is an abject failure by a Government who have wasted two years negotiating with themselves rather than doing the right thing for our country. This could all have been so different. The Prime Minister has badly mishandled the Brexit process from the beginning, making a series of catastrophic misjudgments, and she is now reaping what she has sown. As a newly installed Prime Minister, she could have shown some real leadership. She could have recognised that although the country had voted to leave the European Union in 2016, there was no instruction from the people on what sort of Brexit the Government should pursue. She could have launched a national process of debate and reconciliation to build consensus around the best way forward as a way of healing the raw divisions that the referendum exposed.”
“The Prime Minister promised to provide a detailed and substantive document on our future relationship with the EU alongside the draft treaty. She has actually supplied a half-baked 26-page wish list of banal aspirations that was cobbled together at the last minute and has no legal force. The failure to outline the nature of our future relationship with the EU makes this agreement a blind Brexit, and that is completely unacceptable. The Prime Minister expects this House to endorse her deal without any clear idea of what our future trading arrangements might be. She asserts that there is no alternative to her deeply flawed deal apart from a catastrophic no-deal Brexit, which we know would decimate our economy.”
“After two wasted years of wrangling with her own Cabinet and her own party, the Prime Minister has come back from Brussels with her deeply flawed and unacceptable EU withdrawal deal. And she has achieved the impossible: she has united the country in horror against it. According to all the official forecasts, this is a draft treaty that will make our country poorer. Far from taking back control, the deal we are debating today gives away both our sovereignty and our influence. And as the Attorney General’s advice has confirmed, this treaty gives the EU a veto on our leaving a temporary customs union arrangement even if talks on a new trade deal have irreparably broken down. This is a deal that transforms us from rule makers into rule takers and diminishes our influence in the world.”
“And we are all grateful for that. In the event, the Prime Minister squandered three months’ negotiating time and the first Conservative majority for 25 years. This Prime Minister has repeatedly invoked her own partisan definition of “the national interest” when, in truth, she has acted at all times in the narrow sectional interest of her own deeply divided party. That is why her belated pleas for unity and an end to division rang so hollow when she opened the debate on Tuesday. Rarely has such narrow rigidity and authoritarian instinct met a situation that required maximum flexibility and creativity. Rarely has there been such a catastrophic failure of imagination, political judgment and party management. I cannot support this botched blind Brexit deal. It fails to protect jobs and economic prosperity, and it will make us poorer.”
“Those of us who have been involved in science policy know that having cross-border co-operation without barriers is key to keeping this country at the forefront of future policy, as knowledge becomes more and more specialised. Will the Minister give us a few indications of her Department’s thoughts on these important issues, so we can set a policy context for the draft regulations? The issue is not that the regulations are not technical—they are—but that the context in which ERICs have operated in the past will now change. Will the Minister tell us a bit more about her thought process and her Department’s approach to how we deal with trying to ensure that our commitment to ERICs and our capacity to be involved and to have a leading role in new ERICs is projected effectively in the future in the new context?”
“Does the Minister feel that, as a third country, there is any possibility that we will host a new ERIC? Given that we do not have any idea of what our immigration policy will look like, as the White Paper on that has been delayed until after the meaningful vote in a couple of weeks’ time, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central said, will the Minister indicate her Department’s approach to immigration policy? When I was campaigning for this country to remain in the EU, I went round a lot of universities and one of the main things I was told was that it would be catastrophic for research and being leaders in the field to have a narrow approach to immigration. In particular, there must be collaboration across borders.”
“What effect, if any, will our leaving the European Union have on the size and workload of the ERICs that are hosted here? Might there be moves to take them somewhere else as a result of our move from EU member status to non-EU member status? Will she comment publicly on whether our move from EU member status to third-country status will have any implications for how the ERIC process works, especially with respect to the setting up of new ERICs? Do she and her Department have in mind policy changes, administrative changes or changes of approach, rather than a technical amendment, which is important but not the whole story, to ensure that, in the move from EU member status to third-country status in the ERIC structure, we shore up our involvement?”
“It is a pleasure to have you in the Chair for this Committee, Mr Sharma. I am a member of the House of Commons European Statutory Instruments Committee, which decided to refer this SI back to the Government and ask them to have an affirmative debate on it—perhaps that is why I am here. We did not do that because we wanted to cause trouble; rather, we felt that the structure the SI amends is so important to the UK that we needed some explanation on the record from the Minister for Energy and Clean Growth, which would say a little bit about future policy. She has begun to do that, but I wanted to ask her a few questions about how she and her Department see our ongoing approach to ERICs evolving over time. The Minister rightly says that two ERICs are hosted in this country.”
“Clearly it is worrying that third countries cannot host ERICs given that we are about to become a third country. Will the right hon. Lady indicate the sort of timescale and approach or process that will be in place for trying to negotiate ERIC 2 or whatever we want to call it?”
“That is the key issue that will bind us in the future if we do not get it right.”
“Obviously, any expansion and increased flexibility in that area will be very important to maintaining the UK’s leading place as a centre of scientific and research excellence. The Minister will probably be more familiar with this than I am, given her announcement regarding her personal arrangements, but when I went around the country meeting university researchers, what I heard about that concerned me more than anything else was the bureaucracy involved in granting visas. It takes much longer to get researchers from non-EU countries, as well as to get UK researchers into third countries. There is a bureaucracy issue, a timing issue and uncertainty about whether visas will be granted, which makes it much easier to organise research where there is free movement.”
“The Government, like a third-rate conjurer, hope that if they produce a range of examples for scenarios that are not going to happen, such as no deal or Chequers, somehow we will be taken in by it. Is it not about time the Government do what the House asks them to do, whether on legal advice publication or giving us the facts to make the decision, so that this House can take back control on behalf of the British people?”
“Will the Prime Minister now admit that extending the aspirations into a political declaration that is 19 pages longer than the original series of aspirations is not actually a deal? When will she reach a deal so that, when we vote to leave through the withdrawal Act, we will know where we are leaving to? And whatever happened to frictionless trade? It is not mentioned at all in her list of aspirations.”