argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
International Students — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Michelle Emma May Elizabeth Donelan (Conservative, Centre-right): I certainly will. I am leading a two-tier covid response to attract international students: first, by working across government to remove and reduce the logistical barriers faced by students, including visa issues; and secondly, by communicating that the UK is open for business via advertising and open letters to international students, our embassies, and international media.
Further and Higher Education — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Gillian Keegan (Conservative, Centre-right): There is a lot of work going on to ensure that we support the university sector through this crisis. On 20 April, the Home Office updated its visa guidance to provide greater certainty for international higher education students in the UK impacted by coronavirus. On 22 May, the Home Office announced that visas due to expire before 31 May would be extended to 31 July 2020 for those unable to return home. More work will be done in this area.
Childcare: Social Distancing — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Victoria Grace Ford (Conservative, Centre-right): Social distancing is challenging with young children, so we have worked with stakeholders on a detailed planning guide to keep early years settings safe. This includes advice on keeping people, including children, in small, consistent groups and implementing hygiene measures. Thanks to the sector’s work in reassuring families, 234,000 children were in childcare on 11 June.
Childcare: Social Distancing — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Victoria Grace Ford (Conservative, Centre-right): We all recognise how important early years settings are, both for children and for their parents and carers. Early years settings have been able to open their doors to all children from 1 June. I spoke to sector representative organisations and childcare providers in the first week of wider opening to understand the detailed challenges they face. We know that it is a difficult time for many businesses, and we will continue to ensure that early years providers get the best possible help from all the Government’s support schemes.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Civil Rights
Nicolas John Gibb (Conservative, Centre-right): I have seen the hon. Member’s letter. On this anniversary of Windrush, as much on as any day, we need to understand the strong feelings on this issue. People do suffer racial prejudice, and we need to eliminate discrimination and bigotry wherever it occurs in our society. So far as the curriculum is concerned, we give schools the autonomy to decide what and how history is taught, provided it covers a wide range of periods of British and world history, but that very autonomy means that schools can and do teach about black and Asian cultures and history. The citizenship curriculum and the new relationships curriculum teach the importance of respect for other cultures and respect for difference.
Reading Terrorist Attack — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Civil Rights
Priti Sushil Patel (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about ensuring that communities and, in particular, minority groups within them, are not vilified at this time. This is a moment when we should all be coming together to be supportive across all communities and, in particular, as I discussed with the hon. Member for Reading East this morning, across communities locally and multi-faith groups. Obviously, so much more work needs to take place, but great work is taking place and we should not lose sight of that right now.
Reading Terrorist Attack — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Priti Sushil Patel (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend raises important questions. Surveillance and monitoring of individual subjects of interest is crucial to how they are managed and watched within our community. She asked specifically about resources. I speak to those services every week, and we have these discussions. However, while resourcing is one thing, this is about access to information and intelligence and how it blends together and is combined. To be specific in answer to her question, the services have the resources that they need. There is always more work to do, and I am sure there is more that can be done in the future. I have already said in my statement that we need to listen and to learn from what has happened—that will evolve over time, as the investigation proceeds—and if we need to do more, that is exactly what we will do.
Reading Terrorist Attack — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Immigration
James Sunderland (Conservative, Centre-right): As a Berkshire MP, I place on record my personal sympathies to all those affected so gravely in neighbouring Reading. In the past 24 hours we have seen media speculation about the immigration status of the alleged perpetrator. Will the Home Secretary please reassure me that it remains her priority to return people who come to the UK and are proven to commit crime?
Reading Terrorist Attack — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Priti Sushil Patel (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend is right about the real threat and the present danger of extremist ideologies. Of course, extremist ideologies manifest themselves in many forms—we all recognise that—and we see that internationally. As I said, we see that online and through individuals who are networked. We cannot tackle these issues on our own. That is why our work with the Five Eyes community and many other international partners is so valid. We have to continue to grow the work that we do, learn from each other, grow our own intelligence networks and, importantly, understand the tactics and techniques that can make a difference in this space.
Reading Terrorist Attack — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Immigration
Lee Anderson (Conservative, Centre-right): My constituents in Ashfield stand together, united in grief over this cowardly attack on innocent individuals. We are a peaceful and tolerant nation with a proud record of welcoming refugees and asylum seekers, the vast majority of whom have come to the UK and contributed positively to society, such as the men I used to work with down the pits in the ‘80s. These were displaced people. At the end of world war two, they had no country and no home to go to. We gave them a home and, in return, they grafted down the pits to raise good, decent families and made our country a better place. However, there is something wrong if an individual has entered this country illegally, been granted asylum and then goes on to be a security risk. Could my right hon. Friend please tell me what steps her Department will take to ensure that we do not have another instance of a potential terrorist slipping through the net of the security services?
Reading Terrorist Attack — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Immigration
Priti Sushil Patel (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend makes some important points about the contribution of those refugees who come to our country because they are being persecuted elsewhere. We rightly give them a home and they establish their lives in our country. We are a free, open and tolerant country and as I have said before on the Floor of the House, we are one of the greatest countries in the world when it comes to giving people the freedom to succeed and to get on and live their lives. We offer that opportunity. I will not comment on anything to do with the individual. There is a live investigation under way, but I do want to reiterate that, when it comes to offenders, and foreign national offenders in particular, this Government are absolutely clear about our approach, which is to speed up the removal of individuals within the law. Naturally, there are complexities in some cases—in fact in many cases—which is why we are pursuing measures that we outlined in the Queen’s Speech earlier this year, and we will continue with our policies and legislation going forward.
Reading Terrorist Attack — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Martin John Vickers (Conservative, Centre-right): I welcome the measures that my right hon. Friend has introduced since she took office, but time and again my constituents contact me and say, "We read of these individuals who pose a threat to our values, our democracy and the safety of our citizens, yet we still allow them into the country and we do not remove them." May I add my support and that of my constituents to the appeals made earlier to remove more of these people, and will she redouble her efforts to achieve that?
Reading Terrorist Attack — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Immigration
Priti Sushil Patel (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend points to some important changes that will be forthcoming, including further and greater criminality checks at our borders through our future borders and immigration work, through our points-based system and many of the changes that we will be bringing forward. That also touches on the Foreign National Offenders Bill, as highlighted in the Humble Address earlier this year. These are important pieces of legislation which will signal major changes for Britain post Brexit—how we will keep our country and our citizens safe and also have greater control of our borders.
Reading Terrorist Attack — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Other
Priti Sushil Patel (Conservative, Centre-right): What I can say is that I understand that the appointments to the Committee are under way and, when that selection has been completed, all Members of the House will be notified through the usual channels.
Reading Terrorist Attack — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Priti Sushil Patel (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The work they do is vast and complicated and based on intelligence at home and sometimes abroad. We must all reflect on the way they work. They make difficult decisions and judgments based on the information they have. I commend and pay tribute to them in every way for the work they do and the way they do it.
Reading Terrorist Attack — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Immigration
Thomas Patrick Hunt (Conservative, Centre-right): My thoughts and condolences are with the victims, their friends and their families. I take my right hon. Friend’s point about media reports and will be careful about what I say, but I will ask one quite direct question. Does she agree that our legal system has become a roadblock preventing the elected Government of the day from being able to take decisions on the basis of what is in the best interests of the law-abiding majority, by inhibiting our ability both to deal with illegal immigration and to deport those we know pose a risk to our country?
Reading Terrorist Attack — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Immigration
Priti Sushil Patel (Conservative, Centre-right): I have spoken previously on the Floor of the House about the complexities of immigration, the immigration system and immigration law, and I have touched on the difficulty of deporting foreign national offenders. There are many challenges in the system, and we intend to overcome them and to reform the system in any way we can.
BBC Regional Politics Coverage — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Neil Quentin Gordon Parish (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend the Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—I got the constituency right—makes a really good point. Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland have quite a lot of regional coverage, and rightly so. They could do with more, but so could the rest of the regions The merging of those 11 shows into one "Politics England" programme deprives local communities of properly funded regional and relevant politics.
BBC Regional Politics Coverage — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Neil Quentin Gordon Parish (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank my hon. Friend for that. He is my neighbour and it is great to have him here in this debate. I will forgive him for the fact that he has been part of the BBC; we will allow him that much. He raises an incredibly good point. Although we have got regional newspapers, all the time they are getting less. The Western Morning News is not a fraction of the size it was and the Western Daily Press is not what it was. When it comes to representing not only a given area, but a region, those newspapers are very weak compared with what they were.
BBC Regional Politics Coverage — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Other
Robert Alexander Stewart (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank my good friend for allowing me to intervene. As a London-centric Member of Parliament, may I point out to colleagues that we who live in London very much appreciate having a London programme that is not just London-centric—it is about London? We want to know what is going on in London and outer London too.
BBC Regional Politics Coverage — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Neil Quentin Gordon Parish (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is right. We from the provinces and the sticks—not all Members present are, but I am—want those different types of flavour, and London wants its flavour as well. That is the whole argument for regionally-based programmes. London is a very large region with a lot of people, so it is right that it has not just the national news but London-based news.
BBC Regional Politics Coverage — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Neil Quentin Gordon Parish (Conservative, Centre-right): I agree with the right hon. Gentleman too; I am agreeing with everybody tonight—it is very dangerous. He raises a really good point. People recognise the local face on the television and have seen them for a long time, so they trust them. I expect that he and all hon. Members usually find it much easier dealing with our regional BBC colleagues; we have much more rapport with them than with the national journalists and BBC presenters. That, too, is very useful.
BBC Regional Politics Coverage — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Other
Neil Quentin Gordon Parish (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I am sure he is now guaranteed the front page of his local newspaper, at the very least. Again, he raises the point about keeping these regional identities. We still have many regional accents. As far as I am concerned, speaking with a Somerset accent, I would like to keep some of those accents. There are lots of accents heard in this Chamber, and that is absolutely excellent. They link in very much to what we want to see in our regions as well. We all have different types of business interests in our regions, and they must be focused on.
BBC Regional Politics Coverage — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Civil Rights
Neil Quentin Gordon Parish (Conservative, Centre-right): I am not an expert on the Gaelic language, but I can understand the hon. Gentleman wanting to make sure that there is enough coverage. I think it is about the number of people who speak a language at a given time, and there is an argument as to how much coverage there is, but he has certainly put a good point on the record.
BBC Regional Politics Coverage — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Neil Quentin Gordon Parish (Conservative, Centre-right): Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. I think that most Members are probably making interventions rather than speeches. I promise you that I do not intend to speak for four hours, despite what I said at the start of my speech My hon. Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Ruth Edwards) makes a very good point about "Inside Out" and the value that it offers for £6 million. She also emphasises the fact that we are, all the time, looking for a much more local basis for our politics today, which means that this would be going in completely the wrong direction. Whatever the party politics of this country at the moment, we have shown over the past few years that politics is not all about London, but about the whole of the country. People’s views are significantly different across the country and that is what we do not always see.
BBC Regional Politics Coverage — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Neil Quentin Gordon Parish (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend raises an interesting point. I will make that offer to the director-general of the BBC; it will interesting to see whether it happens. I agree with the Secretary of State’s position, and I have confidence in him being able to put our case very firmly to the BBC. As my hon. Friend says, this is a cross-party matter, because we are all politicians; we are all in politics and we believe in representing our constituencies and getting our message across. We need the BBC and the media to deliver our message, irrespective of what party we belong to. It is at these moments that we can come together. Perhaps the public ought to see us on occasions such as this, when we are agreeing with each other. They watch Prime Minister’s questions and ask, "Why are you always shouting at each other?" but in fact we do not; sometimes—occasionally—we agree.
BBC Regional Politics Coverage — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Mark James Harper (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend makes a good point. That is absolutely accurate, and the questions from the local journalists are often far more difficult for the Minister to answer because they are focused on the issue at hand. They do not have any of the Westminster aspect to them; they are straightforward questions. Those journalists are doing what journalists should always do, which is to ask us the questions that the listener or viewer at home wants them to ask. The journalist should be putting the question that the person at home, looking at the screen or listening to the radio, has in their head to the people making the decisions. If they are doing that, they are absolutely doing their job properly My final point is about some of the subjects covered, which I think the hon. Member for Chesterfield also touched on, as did my hon. Friend for Tiverton and Honiton. I will pick two examples. The first, which was a little while ago—well, it seems like a long time ago, but it wasn’t really—is flooding, which impacted different parts of the country in different ways and was something that sadly we experienced ourselves in my county of Gloucestershire. That is one set of circumstances when local reporting is at its best—when journalists get out into communities and report on the aspects of the issue that really matter to individuals I also agree with what the hon. Gentleman said about the coronavirus outbreak, two aspects of which are worth noting. The first is that the huge amount of very locally focused responses in our communities—through local resilience forums, county councils, district councils, volunteers, and town and parish councils—has been covered in local media outlets, including the BBC, in a way that it simply would not have been, and has not been, in national broadcasting.
BBC Regional Politics Coverage — House of Commons, 2020-06-22
Topic: Mixed Topics
Jerome Patrick Burke Mayhew (Conservative, Centre-right): There have been many good contributions this evening in which hon. Members have raised all the broad issues relating to the decision the BBC has to make. I will not follow those; instead, I will focus on a single specific issue, which is the nature of political discourse and the contribution that local and regional BBC coverage makes to supporting good-quality political discourse. That is a very important issue for our time Perhaps it is because of the rise of social media, but there is an amplification of anger, which we all experience in our political lives and in the political life of the nation. Anger and confrontation, the virtue-signalling "gotcha" moment, the classification of the opponent as the "other", the near-dehumanisation of political opponents —all these things are corrosive of our national political life. In my view, the BBC’s national political output is running very close to following that negative development One has only to look at "Newsnight" to start thinking of it as the telecast equivalent of the "gotcha" tweet, with constant interruptions and the imposition of the journalist’s viewpoint over that of the politician, regardless of their party or political viewpoint, who is being asked to express their view and is then prevented physically from doing so. Compare that with "Sunday Politics" and the regional coverage of the BBC, where we see time being given to politicians to make their political point and then to be challenged on it—not shouted at or interrupted, but respectfully challenged in a hard-hitting manner in a discourse that is polite, where the nuances can be seen, rather than the black versus white that the "Newsnight" type of environment encourages. It is discursive, not abusive, and it can focus on local issues which, as I mentioned in an intervention, are becoming more, not less, important as time goes on. As we devolve power to the regions, as we get more elected metropolitan mayors, as the impact of the actions of our county and second-tier councils is more apparent in the lives and the quality of life of our constituents, so we should focus more, not less, on local issues I regard the national political focus of the BBC as being more equivalent to PMQs, and "The Politics Show" and the time that is given to it as being more equivalent to the quality of this debate. I leave it to the House to decide which is the most edifying.
Veterans: Vexatious Claims — House of Commons, 2020-07-06
Topic: Civil Rights
John Michael Howell (Conservative, Centre-right): Any action the Minister takes is likely to require a derogation from the European convention on human rights. Given that the ECHR is part of the apparatus of the Council of Europe, will he meet members of the parliamentary delegation to the Assembly, such as myself, so that we can help?
Personnel Stationed Abroad: Covid-19 — House of Commons, 2020-07-06
Topic: Mixed Topics
James Stephen Heappey (Conservative, Centre-right): The theatre commander can make a judgment about the degree to which the risk of exposure to a population with a large amount of covid within it is worth the operational needs. That is a decision for the operational commander. In theatre, all sorts of force-protection measures are available, ranging from personal protective equipment to the choice not to continue with operational duties if they are deemed to be too risky.
Covid-19: Tackling Disinformation — House of Commons, 2020-07-06
Topic: Mixed Topics
James Stephen Heappey (Conservative, Centre-right): Again, I am comfortable responding about disinformation, which the military has an active role in countering, but misinformation is the responsibility of my colleagues in the Cabinet Office and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
Defence Science and Technology: Covid-19 — House of Commons, 2020-07-06
Topic: Mixed Topics
Jeremy Mark Quin (Conservative, Centre-right): Defence Science and Technology is drawing on its unique range of specialist skills to support the covid response, including assistance on testing laboratories, statistical analysis, modelling support, decontamination trials, and experiments to understand how the virus survives in the atmosphere and on different surfaces.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2020-07-06
Topic: Public Lands
Richard John Holden (Conservative, Centre-right): In the last few weeks, we have marked the 75th anniversary of VE Day and the 205th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo, just two of the many occasions on which Britain has led the fight against tyranny across the world. Labour-run Durham County Council has recently announced a review of all monuments and statues in the county, and my hon. Friends the Members for Sedgefield (Paul Howell) and for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison) have joined me in asking that statues and monuments to anyone who fought for Britain be excluded from this review. Durham County Council has yet to agree to this request. Will the Secretary of State join me in writing to Durham County Council to support our campaign?