Nuclear Safeguards Bill — House of Commons, 2018-05-08
Topic: Energy
Kwasi Alfred Addo Kwarteng (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful for the opportunity to speak tonight as I spoke in this important debate at an earlier stage—on Second Reading. I was pleased to hear the speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Trudy Harrison), who gave a good, comprehensive analysis of why civil nuclear power and the nuclear industry are so important, not only to her constituency but to the country as a whole. In this debate, we tend to get forgetful about the immense contribution Britain has made to the nuclear industry and nuclear science. At the beginning of the 20th century, we had people such as Thomson and Rutherford, and others in the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge and at other universities. They pioneered nuclear technology and advances in the nuclear industry. It is sad to hear speeches in this House that yet again undermine, frustrate or seek to question our capacity to get this right and to institute safeguards In that regard, the Bill is an excellent piece of legislation. It is sensible and it tries to construct a framework that will allow us to leave Euratom and go our own way. After all, we are members of the International Atomic Energy Agency—it has a structure and about 169 countries as members—and we should celebrate that. To hear people in this Chamber, one would think that without Euratom we were absolutely nothing and there would be no safeguards and no industry. We have heard the doom-mongering prophecy of thousands of job losses, to which the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock) alluded in his mildly entertaining speech. We have had all these bugbears and goblins, and all this terror, held before us, but we are taking a simple step: we are going to leave Euratom and institute our own Bill, as we are doing, that will provide for safeguards in the industry. We also have the IAEA as a backstop. All this fear-mongering and these doom-laden prophecies of job losses are grossly exaggerated. The other thing to say on the amendments is that in eight years in this House I cannot remember a Government who have been so accommodating and open to amendments as we have been on this Bill. In general, we see Governments, including the one of which I am a member, rejecting amendments; sometimes the amendments make sense and often they do not. In this instance, I have been surprised and impressed by the fact that our Front Benchers and the Government as a whole have adopted many of the amendments proposed in the Lords I want to talk a little about the House of Lords amendments and the processes they are going through. The job of scrutiny that the Lords are doing is good, but in the context of Euratom and debates about the EU there is a suspicion—I am not saying that all the people in the other place are influenced in this way—that a lot of these debates and institutions are being set up as straw men with which to block Brexit. When people say we should stay in this or that institution, there is always the suspicion of it being a rearguard fight to reverse the decision of the referendum of June 2016 and somehow to stay in the EU by other means. I am not suggesting the majority of their lordships are influenced by that, but in these debates there is always the suspicion that people are trying to use proxies and excuses to prolong our membership, unnecessarily, of these European institutions Euratom is a creature not of the EU but very much of the philosophy that was underpinning countries of western Europe coming together. I believe Euratom was established in 1957, roughly at the same time as the treaty of Rome, but we did not actually join it until 1973. To hear some of these speeches, one would think that we had no nuclear industry and no nuclear expertise before we joined Euratom. As I was trying to suggest, that is, of course, completely false.