Debate on the Address — House of Commons, 2019-12-19
Topic: International Affairs
Crispin Jeremy Rupert Blunt (Conservative, Centre-right): Obviously, it is a pleasure for me to welcome the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) back to her place in the House and to congratulate her on her victory. I enjoyed listening to her warm-heartedness. I particularly liked the power with which she presented the case on the new deal, which obviously has been something she has been working on with the all-party group while she has not been in this House I gently invite the hon. Lady to open her warm heart to the possibility that there may be allies all over this House who share the same public policy objectives—to serve their constituents and to make sure that the benefits system and everything else works in the right way. One of the issues on which she alighted in her speech was the consequence of our current drug policy and the work that is going on cross-party in Scotland. I understand that all the parties there are in agreement about how policy can be improved. It has been my pleasure to work with her hon. Friend the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) on this issue It is not only the hon. Lady who I hope will reassess her view about what she believes are the motivations of those who sit on the Conservative Benches. I will come on to what a one nation Government actually means, and I look forward to the reassessment that will have to take place. Hon. Members on the Opposition Benches, if they have a warm heart and are open to evidence, will have to reassess the way that they have conducted the political conversation, which has become much too strident. Obviously, that has been reinforced by having to deal with the issue of Brexit over the past few years. We now have the opportunity of a Conservative Government who can begin to change the tone. I hope that the tone and the co-operation that we have will change across the House Before moving on to the main points of my speech—[Interruption.] And before the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) leaves his place, I just want to pick up on a couple of points he made in his speech. I hope he will recall that in 2013 it became the Conservative party’s policy to have a referendum for the United Kingdom to leave the EU. The Scottish National party then decided to have its referendum on independence in the knowledge that that referendum would take place in 2014, and we know what the outcome of that referendum was. I congratulate SNP Members on their astonishing result in the 2015 parliamentary elections. Of course, they did not raise the issue of a further independence referendum because they had had one just a year before, and it was understood by all—including their own leader—that this was a "once in a generation" event I say to right hon. and hon. SNP Members gathered on the Front Bench that my colleagues in Scotland are absolutely right. The Union was on the ballot in every constituency in the United Kingdom, because if the Conservative party had not obtained a majority, quite obviously the price of the SNP’s support for being part of an alternative coalition to the Conservative party would have been to revisit that issue; that is unarguable. Who knows when in the course of this Parliament it would have happened, but it was pretty clear from the language of the Labour leader in the course of the campaign that it would have been conceded at some point during the Parliament. For me, that is not "once in a generation". I would have thought that the difficulty that the United Kingdom has had in extracting itself from the European Union over the last two and a half years might just cause a conversation in Scotland about the price of breaking up a Union that is infinitely deeper, infinitely longer lasting, and which I would argue is the most successful political Union in the world.