argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-20
Topic: Government Operations
Sylvia Eileen Hermon (Independent, Unknown): I am grateful to the Solicitor General for his generosity in giving way again. As he knows, we do not currently have a functioning Assembly in Northern Ireland, so we do not have Ministers who can abide by his direction about explanatory memorandums that will be issued when EU regulations and directives are brought back, in this context to Northern Ireland. Will he confirm that the Departments in Northern Ireland will have an obligation—a duty—to provide explanatory memorandums in that connection?
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-20
Topic: International Affairs
Kelvin Peter Hopkins (Independent, Unknown): Does my hon. Friend agree that if Parliament appeared to be dragging its feet on leaving the EU when a majority of the people decided that we should leave, the people would get frustrated with Parliament? We have to remember their wishes.
EU Exit Negotiations — House of Commons, 2017-12-05
Topic: International Affairs
Sylvia Eileen Hermon (Independent, Unknown): Although I readily accept that there are 10 duly elected DUP Members in this House, nevertheless the DUP does not speak for or represent all the people of Northern Ireland. Will the Secretary of State therefore take a few moments to explain to the House, and particularly to all the people of Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, the benefits for the whole country of the proposals the Prime Minister took to Brussels yesterday? I was profoundly embarrassed on her behalf.
Report on Recent Terrorist Attacks — House of Commons, 2017-12-05
Topic: Law and Crime
Sylvia Eileen Hermon (Independent, Unknown): The Home Secretary will be well aware of the serious continuing threat from dissident republicans in Northern Ireland. We also have no Assembly and no Justice Minister. When she reviews the finances of the police forces that have to tackle terrorism, I urge the Home Secretary, for whom I have enormous regard, to give the Police Service of Northern Ireland additional funding for its counter-terrorism role. The other budgets are controlled by the Assembly, but PSNI should have further funding for that role.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-04
Topic: International Affairs
Brett Charles Anthony Elphicke (Independent, Unknown): May I gently point out to the hon. Gentleman that at least there are three DUP Members in the Chamber, whereas by my count only two Scottish Labour MPs are present The hon. Gentleman talks a very good game for defending the Union, but the fact is that the leader of the SNP in Scotland, Mrs Sturgeon, and the Mayor of London have been very quick to start talking about how they would like divergence and special deals, which would completely wreck the union of the United Kingdom.
Abattoirs — House of Commons, 2017-12-07
Topic: Agriculture
Brett Charles Anthony Elphicke (Independent, Unknown): Does my right hon. Friend agree that the slaughter of UK animals should take place in UK abattoirs overseen by appropriately qualified vets, and will he take steps to ensure that the evil and cruel trade of live animal exports is ended when we leave the EU?
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Brett Charles Anthony Elphicke (Independent, Unknown): Looking at this matter independently, as one does these days, it strikes me that my right hon. Friend’s argument raises a serious question about why clause 9 needs to be in the Bill at all. We are going to have a withdrawal agreement and implementation Bill, and if the Government cannot say what it is that might be urgent, why should we have this clause at all?
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Brett Charles Anthony Elphicke (Independent, Unknown): I have listened carefully to my hon. Friend’s argument on clause 9. It seems to me that the initial intention was to do the withdrawal agreement by regulation, since when the principle of a withdrawal agreement implementation Bill has been conceded. Under the circumstances, is not the proper thing to withdraw clause 9, to prevent Opposition Members, particularly from the SNP, from using it as a Christmas tree to put Brexit-stopping measures in place?
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Sylvia Eileen Hermon (Independent, Unknown): Forgive me for correcting the Minister. I do not mean to be rude, but clauses 7 to 9 extend to Northern Ireland, so these powers will also be extended to Northern Ireland—schedule 2 extends them to Northern Ireland—so if we had an Executive up and running again, Ministers in a devolved Assembly could make regulations that affected the Good Friday agreement. The protection to the Good Friday agreement—the Belfast agreement—has to be written into clause 9, so I suggest that the Government take it away tonight, redraft it and come back on Report with something that satisfies everyone in this House, including the Minister.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Brett Charles Anthony Elphicke (Independent, Unknown): The Committee will know that, from my point of view, we cannot get out of the European Union fast enough. Time and again, I have said that we need to be ready on day one and be prepared for every eventuality, deal or no deal—or, should I say, regional deal or global deal—but we must remember why we are taking back control. It is because of the vision we have for our country and because of our values. Those values include the rule of law, natural justice and the sovereignty of Parliament. The rule of law exists to ensure that executive power is not abused, and that is why I object to clause 9. It is not right that a measure of this sort should be put through by any form of statutory instrument I welcome the fact that the Government are going to bring forward a withdrawal agreement and an implementation Bill, and nothing I have heard today has indicated to me any sense of urgency or any reason why a statutory instrument will need to be put through in a hurry. As far as I am concerned, I am prepared to stay up all night long to pass legislation to get us out of the European Union as soon as possible. For that reason, I urge the Government to withdraw clause 9, and I have to say that I will not be able to support it on stand part.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Sylvia Eileen Hermon (Independent, Unknown): I am grateful to the Minister for pre-empting the intervention, but he is referring to my earlier intervention regarding clause 9. Will he use this opportunity to confirm at the Dispatch Box that neither clause 8 nor clause 9, which we have just passed as amended, will be used in any circumstances to amend the Good Friday agreement by regulation?
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-19
Topic: Macroeconomics
Kelvin Peter Hopkins (Independent, Unknown): I congratulate my hon. Friend on the first part of her speech. Some three or four years ago, the distinguished tax expert Richard Murphy estimated the total tax gap at £119 billion a year. To my knowledge, that figure has never been seriously challenged or debunked, and it may now even be higher. Does my hon. Friend accept that if the Government were serious about dealing with this matter, they could pay off the deficit and have plenty more to spend on public services?
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-19
Topic: Macroeconomics
Kelvin Peter Hopkins (Independent, Unknown): I shall speak briefly. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) on her excellent Front-Bench speech Early in his speech, the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) talked about morality. There is morality in paying tax: we cannot have a civilised society without people paying tax to pay for public services and income being redistributed from those who have more than they need to those who have less than they need The crisis in 2008 and the problem of tax avoidance and evasion, overseas tax havens and so on, all arose as a result of Geoffrey Howe’s disastrous decision in 1979 to abolish exchange controls immediately. That led to the crisis and the massive flows of money across national boundaries around the world, causing all sorts of problems. Even the then Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, suggested to the Treasury Committee at the time of the 2008 crisis that if things got really bad, we might have had to reintroduce exchange controls. I am not suggesting that I will be able to persuade the Government to do that at this stage, but in time we are going to have to look at how we manage the vast flows of money across national boundaries around the world. It is the bankers who are the crooks—not the good bankers who look after our ordinary accounts, but those who gamble with money and often worthless bits of paper on the foreign exchanges The hon. Member for Cheltenham talked about morality. Millions of ordinary people in this country do have a very moral sense. Many of them, including me—I am very well paid compared with ordinary people—say that they would pay a bit more tax if they could guarantee that the money went to the health service and to people who are less well off than themselves. At the same time, the mega rich, the corporates and the bankers are resisting any kind of constraint on their activities. I see where the morality lies: it lies with decent ordinary people, not with bankers. We must constrain those bankers somehow and have serious measures that will actually have the effect of stopping the tax avoidance and tax evasion that has bedevilled our society for so long.
Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-19
Topic: Macroeconomics
Kelvin Peter Hopkins (Independent, Unknown): The Minister mentioned HMRC. One of the things the Government have done over many years now is to squeeze HMRC, which has fewer offices and not enough staff. Does he not accept that every single additional tax officer collects many times their own salary? If the Government were serious about tax collection, they would expand HMRC substantially.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-11-21
Topic: International Affairs
Sylvia Eileen Hermon (Independent, Unknown): I do not wish to criticise the UK Government, because in many ways and instances they do lead the way in signing up to the UN conventions. As Ministers made clear last week, in terms of international law the UK adopts a dual system. So it is all well and good for the UK Government to sign and ratify UN conventions and treaties, but they do not actually become part of our domestic law unless there is an implementing Act of Parliament, because of the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. So we send out a signal that we lead the way but in terms of enforceable rights the hon. Lady is quite right: rights for the children are not enforceable before our courts.
Fly-tipping in Rural Areas — House of Commons, 2017-11-21
Topic: Environment
Anne Marie Morris (Independent, Unknown): Fly-tipping is a very serious issue in my rural Devon constituency. I am pleased to see that so many Members, some of whom may wish to intervene during my speech, are still in the Chamber. That clearly shows that this is not just a topic for Devon, but applies to all the beautiful parts of the countryside where there is the blight of tipping What is fly-tipping? It is the illegal disposal of household, industrial, commercial or controlled waste. The challenge is that it is difficult to find any specific legislation that deals with the problem. If we look at the continuum of waste disposal in our beautiful countryside, we see at one end what I would describe as the litter louts who cannot be bothered to put their Coke tins in a bin, and at the other end formal waste disposal, with properly regulated sites and a compliance formula. Fly-tipping comes somewhere in the middle. Individuals are involved, but in this instance it is not the odd Coke bottle but a large item such as a fridge. Those people do not want to pay the tip charge, so what do they do? They stick the item in the back of the car or in a van, and dump it in a country lane Then there is the activity that is closer to the formal waste disposal end. Gangs, or criminals, think, "We can make some money out of this. Households do not want to go to the trouble of getting rid of their own waste, so we, for a fee—and we will not tell them that we will not be paying the tip fee—will take that rubbish and dump it in a lane." I was pleased to read the Government’s recently published litter strategy, but I must add that fly-tipping takes up only one page of it. We need to pay a lot more attention to the grey area between the litter issue and the properly legislated waste disposal issue, because this is a blight on our environment. It is a source of pollution, a danger to public health and a hazard to wildlife, and the bad news is that it is increasing. In English local authorities, 1 million cases were reported last year, which represents a 7% increase on the year before—and remember, those are just the cases that are reported. Many more go unreported, so I suspect that the number is in fact much more significant. The cost of the clear-up has also risen steeply. In the past year, it was £58 million; in the previous year, it was £15 million.
Fly-tipping in Rural Areas — House of Commons, 2017-11-21
Topic: Environment
Anne Marie Morris (Independent, Unknown): My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Central Government and local authorities are effectively contributing to the cost—there is a contribution from the taxpayer through central Government—but there is a burden on individual landowners and a requirement for them to clear up the land, and they get absolutely no contribution towards doing that. This is absolutely something that we need to look at because, as he says, it is not fair. What we want is, in the Government’s words, for the polluter to pay. It seems to me that the victims are paying, not the polluters. Fly-tipping is definitely on the increase. Most of it involves household waste, and to be fair, most of it is tipped on the highway, but an increasing amount is tipped on farmland and in woodland.
Fly-tipping in Rural Areas — House of Commons, 2017-11-21
Topic: Environment
Anne Marie Morris (Independent, Unknown): The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. There is a real challenge to incentivise people in this regard, and we need to use carrots rather than sticks to ensure that they dispose of their waste carefully and responsibly Clearly, we should recognise the environmental damage that waste causes. It is absolutely right that we as a country have taken on board the European waste framework directive, which led to our Environmental Protection Act 1990. The legislation rightly dictated that we should reduce landfill and increase recycling, but there is a cost to that. The challenge is to determine who should bear that cost.
Fly-tipping in Rural Areas — House of Commons, 2017-11-21
Topic: Environment
Anne Marie Morris (Independent, Unknown): My hon. Friend makes a sound point. I am sad to hear that this is happening not just in my constituency, but I am not surprised. He is right to say that shutting the tip has placed a much greater burden of cost on the local authority than simply keeping it open The overall responsibility for these matters lies with the Environment Agency. The question of who has to take action to clear up the mess and sort out the licensing is split between the Environment Agency, the local authority and, in regard to removing rubbish, private landowners.
Fly-tipping in Rural Areas — House of Commons, 2017-11-21
Topic: Law and Crime
Anne Marie Morris (Independent, Unknown): My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The challenge is not just to collect the data. A constituent of mine with a large estate regularly finds that people have been fly-tipping on it. Once, while sorting through the rubbish, he found a receipt from a fast food drive-through that included a date and time stamp. He and the local police managed to find the vehicle registration number, but when they went to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency they were told that it could not release the name because of data protection. There has to be a way of using the evidence that we can get, because we cannot rely solely on catching the villains in the act, which is extraordinarily difficult, particularly in rural areas. Installing cameras everywhere would be prohibitively expensive, impractical and completely unrealistic. There has to be a better way of dealing with the evidence trail. My hon. Friend makes a sound point.
Duties of Customs — House of Commons, 2017-11-20
Topic: Transportation
Brett Charles Anthony Elphicke (Independent, Unknown): My right hon. Friend is giving a typically powerful and effective exposition on this incredibly complex and detailed matter. Does he agree that it is really important for the channel ports that parking facilities and resilience are built in off the M20 so that whatever eventuality arrives with respect to needing to do checks—whether for animal health or customs purposes—we have the right kind of infrastructure and facilities in place on day one?
Duties of Customs — House of Commons, 2017-11-20
Topic: International Affairs
Sylvia Eileen Hermon (Independent, Unknown): I am deeply disquieted by the fact that prominent Conservative Members are seemingly in favour of no deal as we leave the EU, because today’s Belfast Telegraph carries a report saying that republican organisations in Northern Ireland and Sinn Féin are hoping that there is a hard Brexit. They are exploiting that idea to then campaign for a border poll to try to rip Northern Ireland away from the rest of the UK. That is extremely concerning to me, as a Unionist.
Governance and Political Stability — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Government Operations
Sylvia Eileen Hermon (Independent, Unknown): Given that we have not had a functioning Northern Ireland Assembly for nine months, why on earth do the 90 Members of the Legislative Assembly continue to receive their full salaries and their full staffing allowance? It is an absolute scandal that that continues to be the case.
NHS Pay — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Labor
Sylvia Eileen Hermon (Independent, Unknown): I am really pleased to hear what the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) has said today, but I want to put it on the record that DUP Members did have an earlier opportunity to support the removal of the pay cap but actually voted against that—all 10 of them—in the debate on the Queen’s Speech. An amendment was tabled by the colleagues of the hon. Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth), and the DUP voted it down, but we always welcome repentance.
Universal Credit Roll-out — House of Commons, 2017-10-18
Topic: Social Welfare
Sylvia Eileen Hermon (Independent, Unknown): No, it was very generous, indeed. Given that the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) said that almost everything is hunky-dory with the roll-out of universal credit, would he and his colleagues not be astonished if the Government did not push this to a vote? The tweeting going on suggests that the Government are going to abstain, but would he not like to have an opportunity to vote?
Universal Credit Roll-out — House of Commons, 2017-10-18
Topic: Social Welfare
Sylvia Eileen Hermon (Independent, Unknown): Instead of praising the Government for what they have done today, the hon. Gentleman, I suggest, should turn his mind to the situation in Northern Ireland. We have no functioning Assembly or responsible Ministers to deal with any of the problems that will arise when universal credit is rolled out across Northern Ireland. May I urge him to give a commitment to the House that his party will get together with Sinn Féin, which makes such a song and dance about welfare reform, and restore the Assembly as a priority?
Budget Resolutions — House of Commons, 2017-11-22
Topic: Macroeconomics
Brett Charles Anthony Elphicke (Independent, Unknown): Can my right hon. Friend recall an occasion when the Labour party talked up the economy, or is it always about more spending, more borrowing, more debt and more benefits and taking the country back to the brink?
Budget Resolutions — House of Commons, 2017-11-22
Topic: Law and Crime
Brett Charles Anthony Elphicke (Independent, Unknown): My right hon. Friend makes a powerful point. She is absolutely right. We need to make sure that social media outfits and technology companies in general are subject to the rule of law with regard to libel and identity so that we know who people are, and so that fake accounts cannot troll, bully, mistreat or hound people, which is unacceptable. We should never tolerate that. These companies should pay their fair share of tax and be as tough on terror as we are. They should seek to join and support the Government and this country’s authorities in cracking down on terror, crime and the mistreatment of our fellow people. If they are trading here, they need to respect our laws and our values as a country.
Funding for Young People in Devon — House of Commons, 2017-10-24
Topic: Education
Anne Marie Morris (Independent, Unknown): I rise to present a petition asking for fairer funding for Devon pupils, on behalf of the residents of my constituency. This petition, signed by a number of my constituents, and a similar petition signed by a further 900 of them, expresses concern about the funding situation in which our schools find themselves. It states: The petition of residents of the constituency of Newton Abbot, Declares that each pupil in Devon received £290 less than the national average; further that Conservatives in Devon believe this is not right; and further that the recent Government consultation was flawed and did not improve the situation. The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to increase the funding for the young people of Devon And the petitioners remain, etc [P002067]
Republic of Ireland Border — House of Commons, 2017-11-15
Topic: International Affairs
Questions: What assessment he has made of the potential effect of a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland on the Northern Ireland peace process.
Sylvia Eileen Hermon (Independent, Unknown): The Secretary of State knows perfectly well that his Cabinet colleague the Brexit Secretary is preparing for a no-deal Brexit. If we have no deal, that will inevitably mean a hard border for Northern Ireland, which would be a catastrophe for Northern Ireland. Just for once, will the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland set aside his diplomatic spiel and explain to the people of Northern Ireland how the Government will take back control of the Northern Ireland border if the UK crashes out of the EU?
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-11-15
Topic: International Affairs
Sylvia Eileen Hermon (Independent, Unknown): That is enormously kind of the Minister, particularly since the Solicitor General earlier this afternoon persuaded me that his colleague would answer the question that I raised with him in an intervention. Before we are asked to agree to clause 4 standing part of the Bill, will the Minister kindly explain clause 4(3)? It states that all of clause 4 is subject not only to clause 5 but, more importantly, to schedule 1, which, as the Minister knows, stops the general principles at midnight on exit day. We listened to a lot of debate and argument yesterday about clarity and certainty for the courts. There is no definition of the general principles of EU law. Why is that, and what does the provision mean in clause 4?