Extract from Home Office
Questions: Net Migration Target: International
Students
Mr (Ealing, Southall)
(Lab):...We are now coming to the end of a very successful
two-year pilot allowing Chinese nationals a two-year,
multiple-entry visa for the price of a six-month single-entry visa.
It looks as though that will be made permanent in the new year.
Will the Secretary of State commit to introducing the same scheme
for Indian nationals, our best allies in trade post-Brexit?
The Minister for Immigration (Brandon Lewis): I
was in India just a couple of weeks ago, and I had some
conversations about the pilots we are running in China. The hon.
Gentleman is a little premature, because the pilot with China is
still running. It is based on a different situation from the
situation with us and India, but we will look at that pilot, and
I will feed back after it has ended and we have a chance to
review it.
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Extracts from Commons
debate on Duties of Customs
(Aberdeen North)
(SNP):...It is undoubtedly the case that we
benefit from being members of the EU single market and members of
the customs union. Even those who are most vociferously in favour
of Brexit agree that we benefit from those things. The lower
estimate of the effect on GDP due to leaving the customs union
and the single market is that we will lose 3.8%. The upper
estimate of the effect of the trade deals that we will strike
with Japan, the USA, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India all
added together is a gain of 2.37 percentage points. That is
significantly less than the 3.8% that we are going to lose, so
even on the best estimates, we are going to be down. The EU is
pretty close to striking a trade deal with some of those
countries anyway, so the benefits to us are notional rather than
actual...
Mr (Nottingham East)
(Lab/Co-op):...That may be so, but this is not an
either/or situation. This is not about selling a fantastic
Scottish whisky product to China or to Europe; we should be doing
both. German car manufacturers and French food producers are
trading exceptionally well with the far east, while remaining a
member of the customs union and of the single market. My quibble
with Ministers and some Government Members is that they give an
impression that this is a binary, either/or arrangement. They
say, “Oh well, we can ditch our trading relationships and
partnerships with our nearest neighbours, because we might
eventually be able to do something with
China, India, Australia or Brazil,” but we
should be able to do all those things. We can do all those things
simultaneously, while remaining part of the greatest free trade
area of any set of nations anywhere in the world, but we are
about to throw that overboard for no reason resulting from the
referendum, but due to Government policy...
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Extracts from Delegated
Legislation Committee's consideration of the Draft
International Development Association (Multilateral Debt Relief
Initiative) (Amendment) Order 2017
The Minister of State, Department for International
Development (Rory Stewart):...That is not enough
in and of itself. We have also put new processes in place to
ensure that as those countries get money again, it is invested
back in education and health, rather than going to building up
more debts. We need to be particularly careful, because since the
1970s and 1980s when they accumulated the debts, the nature of
international finance has changed. Increasing numbers of private
sector actors in China, India and the City of London could
be lending large amounts of money—there could be eurobond offers,
for example, from the City of London—without the kind of
conditionality that would have come with the previous debts. That
could lead to countries again accumulating a large debt burden
that it would be difficult for us to deal with...
...Some 80% of the African Development Bank’s staff are
themselves African, including very distinguished former senior
Ministers from those countries. Its particular expertise is in
both infrastructure and regional work between different
countries. We have a new opportunity, working with the African
Development Bank, and we believe that DFID can play an important
role with the bank in convening the flows of new capital into
Africa. There is a big push to get from the current billions of
pounds of investment going into Africa to the potential trillions
that could come in from the private sectors of
China, India and the City of London...
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