argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Angus Brendan MacNeil (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): I am sorry myself that I missed that quote in Bristol in 1770-whatever it was. This is a good and well-intentioned debate on strengthening standards in public life, but Labour studiously avoids dealing with cash for honours. We should remember that the Prime Minister was interviewed under police caution on this matter back in 2006. I have tried with Labour and I will now try with the Conservatives: will the Tories rule out the practice of cash for honours—a very corrupt practice where high-value cash donors find themselves up in the House of Lords, buying their place in a Parliament in what is meant to be a western democracy, for goodness’ sake?
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Stewart Hosie (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): I agree with the Leader of the House about Members having a wide range of backgrounds. I also agree with Burke that our first duty should be to serve our constituents, but hon. Members are picking up from their second job tens, scores or hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, and one cannot serve two paymasters. Has the time not come to, at the very least, agree to this modest motion today and ban at least certain categories of jobs to avoid the allegation that people are serving two paymasters?
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Macroeconomics
Peter Wishart (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): The hon. Lady will not be surprised to hear me say that I wholeheartedly agree with her. We have a cost of living crisis and it was announced today that inflation is going through the roof, yet we are here debating our income and going over whether we think it is right and appropriate for MPs to earn even more than the very generous salaries that we already get for looking after constituents.
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Philippa Whitford (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): People will know that, as a breast cancer surgeon, I have practised in the past while trying to maintain my licence. I remember being pilloried on the front of the Daily Mail for helping out over Christmas when my colleague had a heart attack. I have no issue with second jobs being regulated, whether by time, money or whatever way the House chooses, but is this not being used as a smokescreen? The issue that was raised at the beginning of this month was not about a second job. It was about corruption, selling influence, selling contracts and selling peerages—and second jobs is being used as a cover for that.
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Peter Wishart (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): I will leave that with my hon. Friend: it is a fantastic quote and I am glad that he has presented it to the House Today we are debating a Labour motion and a Government amendment. We have no problem with supporting the Labour motion. We will vote in favour of it, if we get the opportunity to do so. We are happy to leave it to the Committee on Standards in Public Life. We applaud it for the work that it has already put in, and the House looks forward to receiving the decision as soon as possible and to backing it in its important work Then we come to the Government amendment. My hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) is absolutely right: this is nothing but a fig leaf, a cover up, to try to divert attention and get away from the real issues, including the Prime Minister’s private flat, his villa in wherever it is in Spain and the propriety of so many Members of Parliament. I did not even understand most of what the Leader of the House was trying to explain. If he left it just as: they would do as the Committee on Standards in Public Life suggests, that would be absolutely fine, but it seems like they want to direct the Committee on Standards in Public Life. They want to lead it into certain directions and they want to suggest to it what it should do as part of its work. I think the Chair of the Committee on Standards was absolutely right. It should be left to the Committee to determine and decide. They do not need the Government’s prompting to get these issues resolved. Let us leave it with them. It is a cross-party Committee. It is a Committee that is well chaired by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), who is very studious and diligent about his work Today—this, I think, gets to the heart of it—the hapless International Trade Secretary, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Anne-Marie Trevelyan), was sent out. Somebody gets the short straw every morning and today it was the International Trade Secretary. She could not even make up her mind how many hours we should all get to work on our second jobs. I think it was initially 10 to 15 hours. Then she suggested, I think it was in the Radio 4 interview, that it was up to 20 hours. They cannot even decide among themselves for how many hours they should get to do their second jobs.
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Peter Wishart (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): I am fully aware of what the two different and distinct committees are. What we want to do is ensure that we get the opportunity to back the recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. That is what we are looking forward to doing Just briefly, Madam Deputy Speaker, to remind ourselves of the scale of this problem and issue when it comes to second jobs, The Sunday Times showed us that 138 MPs have had second jobs in the past year and that 12 earn at least an extra £100,000 a year from outside interests. Almost one in four Tory MPs spends at least 100 hours a year on second jobs and 25 MPs spend more than 416 hours a year We in the Scottish National party believe that our job as a Member of Parliament must be an exclusive commitment to our constituents. We also want to see all of Parliament included. That includes that rotten corrupt circus down that corridor there. The House of Lords has to be included in this. I welcome the valiant efforts of my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil) to try to get the issue looked at again—his amendment was not selected—and all my other colleagues who have been trying to press this issue. It cannot and can never be right that someone can be rewarded with a place in the House of Lords for giving £3 million to the coffers of the Tory party. It is a measure that would make a tin-pot dictator in a banana republic blush, with the size and amount of sleaze and scandal.
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Martin John Docherty-Hughes (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): Does my hon. Friend agree that with the Government backpedalling on the previous notion of a new committee, we need to ensure that cross-party support for the present Committee also goes to the upper Chamber, where we stop appointing Members from the Opposition to an unelected, unaccountable House of Lords?
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Peter Wishart (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): Absolutely. We have a duty, an obligation and a responsibility to make sure we have the best possible standards in the unelected Chamber. It is the Prime Minister who appoints Members to the House of Lords. It is lists drawn up by party leaders that give those appointments an opportunity to be placed there. That has to stop. I know this House likes the place up there for some reason, watching people dressed up like Santa Claus prance around the place, but they are put there because they are donors, cronies or placemen. It is an appalling abuse, a corrupt House, and we should be looking at abolishing it, not putting more people in because they happen to give the Tory party £3 million.
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Peter Wishart (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): I agree absolutely and utterly. There is no place in any democratic system for people who are put there by a Prime Minister just because they happened to give his party £3 million. We would never accept that in an independent Scotland That brings me to my next point—I am grateful to my hon. Friend—because the people of Scotland are observing this and they do not like what they are seeing. It is just making them more determined that we get away from this sleazy, corrupt, rotten cesspit of a place and start to be self-governing in our nation of Scotland. They are embarrassed by this place and, unfortunately, Scotland has not been left unscathed by the behaviour of Members of Parliament.
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Peter Wishart (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): I am sorry—not you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I know that you govern yourself very effectively, but they can govern themselves in all their corrupt, sleazy beauty while we could get on with running a proper, democratic, accountable Scottish Parliament in an independent Scotland. That is the answer to what the hon. Gentleman said.
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Peter Wishart (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): I most definitely did, Madam Deputy Speaker. I assure you that I would never mention an hon. Member without giving them notice in advance that I intended to raise the issue The hon. Member for Moray has the very definition of a second job. It is simply impossible for him to give his full attention to his constituents as their MP—as the Prime Minister now demands from Conservative MPs—when he needs to be in the Scottish Parliament as the leader of the Scottish Conservatives Let me give an example: the good people of Moray were not represented in the Finance Bill vote last night. The hon. Gentleman simply was not here. He had to be some place else, quite legitimately, in another job. He has to decide—on the strictures of the Prime Minister, who said this—whether he can be a full-time Member of Parliament and represent his constituents full time in this House or be the leader of the Scottish Conservatives in the Scottish Parliament. He cannot do both. He is not here now—I know he is probably in the Scottish Parliament; he might not be, but he has First Minister’s questions tomorrow when he will have to be there—but I say him to him very candidly that he should decide which Parliament he wants to be part of, because it is quite clear that he cannot do both, and I think his Prime Minister recognises that.
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Stewart Hosie (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): This is in the public domain, Madam Deputy Speaker: if we look at the Leader of the House’s entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, we see that, in 2016, he has an entry for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August and September. How much he earned does not matter, but he claims that he worked 35 hours in each of those months. Does my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) believe that it is possible to be a full-time MP and find an extra week’s worth of work time every month for a second job?
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Peter Wishart (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): The short answer is that I do not believe that that is possible. My right hon. Friend the Member for Dundee East (Stewart Hosie) has been a colleague of mine for 15 years in this House, and I know the hours that he puts in to make sure that the good people of Dundee are represented in this place. He would never be able to find those hours, so I do not know how the Leader of the House was able to We also have to turn, ever so briefly, to something else that is going on in Scottish politics and deeply concerns me: dark money and the use of unincorporated associations to give money directly into the coffers of the Scottish Conservatives. We do not know much about those unincorporated associations; sometimes we are given an email address, a telephone number or even the name of a building, but we have absolutely no idea where their income comes from or how they are able to funnel it into the coffers of the Scottish Conservatives. It is a disgrace that they can continue doing so. We must get on with fixing that. In my 20 years in this place, I think I have spoken in every debate on second jobs and standards in this House. As you will remember, Madam Deputy Speaker, we looked at the matter most recently in February 2015 when there was a scandal about a sting operation involving Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind. We all got together like this, we all spoke ever so highly and in detail about what we should do to address the problem, and we declared that we would do something about it. Is it not sad that we are back here seven years later saying the same things, determined to try to clean this place up We should not have to be here again. We should have had this dealt with. We are going through a terrible, terrible period in our politics just now. It is down to Conservative Members: the resolution lies with them. Back the Labour motion and throw out this stupid amendment.
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Angus Brendan MacNeil (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): Does my hon. Friend agree that it is easy to get rid of the stench of corruption, or perceived corruption even, of cash for honours: the three party leaders who appoint to the House of Lords could simply say that they will not put in the Lords those who have donated over a certain sum of money over a certain period of time—perhaps £50,000 over five years?
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Martin John Docherty-Hughes (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): I agree with my hon. Friend. I would go further. I would get rid of it. Just abolish it. What is the point of an unelected, unaccountable Chamber? We could have an elected one, or an enhanced Chamber of the House of Commons, where we can tell Ministers that they have to come to a Committee meeting because the House demands they come to it and will drag them to it. That is more or less what the Scottish Parliament does. We have a unicameral Chamber that has profound powers and can drag people to a parliamentary Committee, under oath, I would think. That is surely what this House should be asking for if you are a democrat and believe in democracy. Get rid of that lot. As a Scot representing a Scottish constituency I also find it an affront that members of the English episcopy have more to say over the affairs of my constituents than I do on many occasions. It is a real pity. Although I am going to support the Opposition motion, it is disappointing that we cannot come to some consensus about the nefarious ability of big donors to utilise the unelected Chamber to change policy and change issues that impact my constituents across Clydebank, Dumbarton and the Vale of Leven—people who need to work two, three or four jobs just to keep their heads above water What about members of staff working in this very House who travel miles from across the south of England to work in low-paid jobs to work with Members and to make sure they have a a decent day’s work, while they all have two jobs paying them millions of pounds? What does that say to people in this place who work two or three jobs just to keep their heads above water? It is a parcel of rogues in a nation and in a Parliament. Quite frankly, the time for this obfuscation and saying that we will just tooter aboot while the place crumbles about is done. Get done with it. Stop it. No more second jobs. Get rid of the House of Lords. And that way we can actually look our constituents in the eye.
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Deidre Leanne Brock (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): The hon. Member speaks about moral vacuity and lobbying loopholes. Many thousands of pounds have gone to the Conservative and Unionist party from unincorporated associations such as the Scottish Unionist Association Trust, but loopholes in electoral law disguise the identity of the original donors. Would the hon. Member support that loophole being closed off in the Elections Bill?
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Ronald Jack Cowan (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): For the record, nobody has actually said that the IWPC is This situation is leading to the acceleration of the removal of all of Scotland’s MPs from this place. The people of Scotland’s representatives will work in a Parliament that is modern, accessible, open, honest and accountable.
Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Stephen Mark Flynn (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): There is phrase that summarises the past couple of weeks quite well that was mentioned to me earlier by a colleague when we were having a conversation—these past two weeks have been a cure for optimism, because what we have seen is scandal after scandal and sleaze story after sleaze story. Frankly, I am livid. I am livid that all of us have been collectively dragged through the mud because of the corruption of individuals within this place. It is not just that, but the fact that the Leader of the House, a man who extols the virtues of Parliament, tried to cover it up—him, the Prime Minister, the Chief Whip, all complicit in trying to drag the reputation of each and every one of us through the mud. Shame on them. I cannot explain how furious I am about this. We should all be furious about this. The notion that we heard earlier from the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker) that it is a plague on all our houses is not something that we should accept. We should highlight those individuals who have acted with impropriety and feathered their own nests, and ensure that they never sit in a democratically elected Chamber ever again, because they have no interest in trying to represent the people. They do not see this place, or any democratic institution, as important—what they see as important is their bank balance and the opportunity to influence This does not start or finish with the stories over the past couple of weeks: it goes much further than that. We heard earlier about the House of Lords, and rightly so—that if you donate £3 million to the Conservative party, you will get yourself a seat in our legislature. How is that possible? It amazes me. When I was growing up I did not have any trust in the Labour party. That is one of the main reasons I focused on becoming a member of the Scottish National party. I believed that Scotland could do things differently because of the trust that was broken by Tony Blair when he went into an illegal war in Iraq. We now have a situation where Labour Members, despite the scandals that are engulfing politics at the moment, will not stand up and say that they will not put Members into the House of Lords. So shame on the Government but shame on the official Opposition too This does not need to be in Scotland’s name. We can do things differently. We will do things differently. We will act in the interests of the people of Scotland. I see the Leader of the House is laughing. I challenge him to rise just now and defend his actions. I challenge him to resign for trying to slur the name of every single politician up and down the land. I challenge him on one more thing: to encourage his Prime Minister to show the bottle to go to the polls to let the people of Scotland decide their own future, because he knows what the outcome will be, just as I know what the outcome will be: the people of Scotland will choose to get rid of this corrupt institution.
Northern Ireland Protocol: EU Negotiations — House of Commons, 2021-10-27
Topic: International Affairs
Carol Frances Monaghan (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): The law firm Carson McDowell has said that not one business has raised concerns about the European Court of Justice or its role as the court of ultimate appeal under the Northern Ireland protocol, so why are the UK Government prioritising a Brexit purity issue as their key demand in negotiations with the EU when it is completely immaterial to businesses in Northern Ireland?
Northern Ireland Protocol: EU Negotiations — House of Commons, 2021-10-27
Topic: International Affairs
Richard Gordon Thomson (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): Lord Frost recently said that there could be "no role" for the European Court of Justice in arbitrating disputes around the protocol. If that genuinely now represents the view of the UK Government, in contrast to when they negotiated and signed that protocol, can the Secretary of State tell the House how he would prefer to see disputes arising from the protocol arbitrated and settled? If he cannot share the text with politicians in Northern Ireland or in this House, can he at least give us a clue about what the outline of such a solution might be?
Leaving the EU/Northern Ireland Protocol: Haulage Industry — House of Commons, 2021-10-27
Topic: International Affairs
Questions: What recent assessment his Department has made of the impact of the (a) UK leaving the EU and (b) Northern Ireland protocol on the haulage industry in Northern Ireland.
Patricia Gibson (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): Logistics UK, which represents 400 haulage operators in Northern Ireland and is responsible for 90% of goods transferred across the Irish sea, welcomed the EU’s proposals to improve the Northern Ireland protocol as a "leap of faith" and a positive step. Why have the UK Government refused to accept those proposals and instead insisted on sinking the negotiations with ideological demands rather than practical considerations?
Jobs and Investment — House of Commons, 2021-10-27
Topic: Foreign Trade
Steven Bonnar (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): The director of a Northern Irish retail consortium has said that Northern Ireland has a unique opportunity to become a hub of investment, because it remains within the EU single market. To have access to the EU single market is a boon for Northern Ireland, and UK Ministers who have previously defended the protocol have stated that it is a boon. Why do the UK Government deny such a best-of-both-worlds situation for Scotland, where the people also voted to remain?