Extracts from Parliamentary Proceedings - Oct 17

The Minister of State, Department for International Trade (Conor Burns): t sounds like my hon. Friend is drawing up a very exciting programme of autumn travel. He is absolutely right that our departure from the European Union will offer huge opportunities for the United Kingdom in the vast and growing Asian market, which I saw at first hand only a couple of weeks ago in Vietnam.

Extract from Oral answer (Lords) on South Africa: Money Laundering and Corruption

Lord Hain (Lab): I am grateful to the noble Lord for his Answer. Will the Chancellor follow the US Treasury in imposing sanctions on Rajesh Gupta, Atul Gupta and Ajay Gupta, to block all of their property and interests in property within the UK’s jurisdiction and, like US persons, prohibit UK citizens and UK-based financial institutions and other UK-based entities from engaging in any transactions anywhere across the world with them? Will the Chancellor also immediately contact the Dubai, Hong Kong and Indian authorities and ask them to do the same?

Through their corrupt criminality and shameful looting, blessed by former President Zuma, the Gupta brothers have ripped off South African taxpayers by well over £500 million, a lot of it laundered through London, Dubai, India and Hong Kong, and assisted by London-based corporates such as McKinsey, KPMG, Bain & Co and Hogan Lovells. Any failure by global Governments to act against all this would echo their failure to impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa.

The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con): My Lords, I am sure the noble Lord will appreciate that I cannot say any more on the specific matter he has raised at this point. We are in touch with the South African authorities. The noble Lord is also very much aware of the strong stance that the UK Government and indeed the United Kingdom have taken over several years in further strengthening our work on tackling corruption and illicit finance. He raised a specific question on the UAE and India and whether my right honourable friend would write. I have been informed that the South African authorities have already made mutual legal assistance requests to the Governments of those countries. Additionally, similar requests have been made to the Governments of Canada, Switzerland, Mauritius, Hong Kong and China. As I said, I am aware of the letter the noble Lord wrote to my right honourable friend and I know the Chancellor will respond to him shortly...

To read all the exchanges, CLICK HERE

Extracts from Queen's Speech debate (Lords)

Lord Rooker (Lab):...His team is determined to cut “red tape”, as they call it. I will use just one example, from the Prime Minister’s right-hand man, the Leader of the House of Commons. He might present himself as a comedy toff but, in my view, he is in reality a hard-right bully. At the Treasury Select Committee in 2016, the now Leader of the House of Commons opined that standards that were good enough for India would be good enough for the UK after Brexit. I have never been to India but I have enormous respect for the world’s largest democracy. There are thousands of members of my professional institution, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, in India. I have looked at a couple of areas as comparative examples. ILO data tells us that, in India 403,000 people die each year due to work-related problems; this amounts to 46 deaths per hour. Work-related deaths in GB, including where the public were involved, totalled 239 in 2018-19, which amounts to 0.027 per hour. India’s population is 20 times the size of Great Britain’s. So if Britain was same size, there would be one extra death every two hours. That is from an academic paper by MMK Sardana, whose abstract says that India should copy the UK, not the other way around.

I looked at deaths from fire accidents. According to information from the National Crime Records Bureau in India in the four years 2010-14, 114,000 people lost their lives in fire accidents—that is 62 deaths per day—and two-thirds of them were female. In Great Britain in the same four years, the loss of life was 1,478, which amounts to one death a day. Scaled to Indian levels, that would be 20 per day. I have used these examples for a reason. In March 1974, in maiden speech in the Commons, I used the subject of industrial accidents as my theme. I had worked in engineering as both a safety officer and a production manager.

A third example is air pollution. Before the clean air Acts, black smoke emissions in the UK were up to 50 times higher than today. Not only did unregulated coal burning darken the skies but there were high death rates from respiratory diseases among the old and the very young. The effect of pollution in India today is comparable with that in Great Britain’s industrial cities in the late 19th century. I picked that up from a paper by Professor Tim Hatton at the University of Essex entitled, India’s Pollution Today is as Deadly as the Black Smog that Covered Britain during the Industrial Revolution.

India has room for improvement. There is massive work going on to legislate and improve the situation, and they use our Health and Safety Executive as an example in their papers of how we transformed our situation from myriad old-fashioned legislation in the 1950s and 1960s. So why should the UK follow India in these circumstances? I take what the people in the Cabinet, the bosses who are in the Government—

Lord Flight (Con)

My Lords—

Lord Rooker

No, I will not give way. I take what they say seriously; we have to. We clearly have a Cabinet of people akin to the factory owners of the past, who did not actually work in the factories that they owned, many of which were unsafe, but expected workers to make do and mend. Calling for such changes in deregulation, knowing the actual consequences, is the same as saying that extra Brexit deaths due to less red tape are worth having. I know that is a serious charge, but the reality is that we have to watch what happens with deregulation like a hawk. The Leader of the House of Commons appears to be advocating that standards in India are good enough for the UK after Brexit. I have given just a few examples of some of the consequences of adopting standards in India in the UK. To be honest, I would not be very comfortable with India’s standards in the UK.

Lord Bilimoria (CB):...In her excellent speech in yesterday’s debate on the gracious Speech, the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, made the point that,

“we export twice as much to Belgium as we do to India .—[Official Report, 16/10/19; col. 128.]

As founding chairman of the UK India Business Council, I can say openly that, under the previous Prime Minister, our relationship with India was at its lowest. Now is an opportunity to rebuild that relationship, built by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. Now, with Boris Johnson, I am sure that we will continue to rebuild it. I hope we will send a major delegation to India soon to make that point.

In total, the Commonwealth today, with over 50 countries, including India  makes up less than 10% of our trade, compared to 50% with the EU. We keep talking about doing a free trade deal with the US so quickly. It has just been announced that our whisky exported to the US will be taxed at 25%—before we even start any negotiations. The US representative said very clearly that even in negotiations on a free trade deal or trade agreement it will apply. They will make no exceptions. These trade agreements are really difficult.

The Government intend to roll over existing trade agreements we have through the EU, making up almost 17% of our trade on top of the 50% we have with the EU itself. Could the Government tell us how many of these will be automatically rolled over during the implementation period, let alone in future. 

My noble friend Lord St John spoke eloquently about the environment and how technology is so important in meeting that 2050 net zero target. At the University of Birmingham, of which I am proud to be chancellor, we have now developed a model hydrogen train. It is that sort of technology that we need to be working on. It is great news that this country is ahead of the game. We have for the first time, in the last few months, used more energy in this country from renewable and non-conventional sources. That is fantastic; long may it continue. Coal, which used to be our main power-consuming source, is now at less than 5%. We are a model to the rest of the world.

When it comes to dealing with India  I congratulate the Government on bringing back the two-year post-graduation work visa for international students. Bravo! We have been fighting for that. I helped introduce it here in 2007-08. It was taken away by Theresa May in 2012. Seven years it has taken us, but we have got it back. The interest in India is already up by 50% in many universities, which is fantastic. The Government need to do more. Will they continue with the industrial strategy target of R&D at 2.4% of GDP? We have to do that: Germany is at 2.8%; the USA is at 2.8%; Israel is at 4%. Let us do it. Can the Government commit to that?

...I would go so far as to say that, if this deal goes through, we will go into a long implementation period. It may go on until 2020, for two more years or, as my noble friend Lord Macpherson said, for a decade. My noble friend Lord Kerr said that we have put the cart before the horse. This withdrawal agreement covers just three things: the rights of citizens—UK and EU—£39 billion and the Northern Ireland situation. The real work is still to come. The political declaration has all the agreements on space, security and movement of people that we have to negotiate in the years to come. Our priorities have to be preserving our union, our relationship with the EU and our global relationship with the US, China, Japan, India and the rest of the world. By the way, there was no mention of entrepreneurship in the gracious Speech. We must continue to be a champion of entrepreneurship; this country is wonderful at it...

To read the whole debate, CLICK HERE