argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: Government Operations
Oliver Letwin (Conservative, Centre-right): I am delighted by my right hon. and learned Friend’s intervention, because I agree that he has succeeded in doing that. He has not created the so-called meaningful vote that the right hon. Member for Leeds Central and the Opposition want. He has instead pointed out an issue with the use of the order-making power in this Bill. The question is: is it a good amendment in those terms? We have accepted that it is not a question of creating or not creating a meaningful vote, to use the term used by the right hon. Member for Leeds Central, but just a question of trying to get the Bill into good order—a pursuit in which my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield and I have joined on many occasions during Committee proceedings. However, I think that on this particular occasion, this particular amendment is not a particularly good way of doing that. I will explain why I think that is the case, and I hope that the Government will instead come forward with another way of achieving the same effect It is a very odd situation indeed to have an amendment to what will become a section of an Act that refers to another piece of primary legislation as the basis for an order-making power in the first piece of legislation. In fact I think it is virtually unprecedented.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Dominic Charles Roberts Grieve (Conservative, Centre-right): The Bill is unprecedented, because it is asking us, in the light of what the Government themselves say they are going to do, to sanction a power that undermines a further statute that the Government intend to pass, which should be the source of power for removing us from the EU.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Oliver Letwin (Conservative, Centre-right): Now I am beginning rather to agree with my right hon. and learned Friend. Therefore, my suggestion is that if that is the purpose of his amendment, it would be far better that it come back as a Government amendment on Report that achieves that effect in a different way and directly, without the gross inelegance of referring to another piece of legislation. It should mainly limit the power in clause 9 to things that are urgent and immediate, and perhaps even specify what sorts of things they might be As a matter of fact, I rather share my right hon. and learned Friend’s inclination to believe that clause 9 in its present form came forward before the Government were clear about the need for the implementation and withdrawal Bill, and that Ministers and officials have so far been quite hard pressed to identify exactly which powers are required in clause 9 under the new dispensation of that forthcoming Bill. The Government therefore have a good opportunity to promise from the Dispatch Box today that they will come back on Report with an amendment that is correctly phrased in such a way as to limit the order-making power in clause 9. That would avoid the possibility—this is the point that I want to make to my right hon. and learned Friend and other hon. Friends—of suggesting that we are in any way creating a launch pad for the efforts of the right hon. Member for Leeds Central and Opposition Front Benchers to create what they call a meaningful vote, which is in fact an ability to trigger us not leaving.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: Government Operations
Dominic Charles Roberts Grieve (Conservative, Centre-right): There will undoubtedly be an opportunity at the end of this process, if this House were so minded, to reject a deal. I have to say—my right hon. Friend may agree with me—that ultimately the House could bring this Government down, if it had to or wanted to do so. That is our constitutional ability My right hon. Friend’s main point does not find favour with me, because the only way we will get something sensible on Report is by getting amendment 7 on the statute book and on the face of the Bill. I asked repeatedly for an engagement along precisely the lines that my right hon. Friend has identified, and it was consistently rejected. That is why I will vote for amendment 7, and if I may say so, I would encourage him to do likewise.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: Government Operations
Oliver Heald (Conservative, Centre-right): Does my right hon. Friend agree that the current plans create the risk of parallel legislation, with an Act of Parliament dealing with our withdrawal agreement going through at the same time as all sorts of orders, because there is no trigger mechanism for, or constraint on, the order-making power? Therefore, is not my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), the former Attorney General, doing the House a service by seeking to avoid the risk of parallel proceedings, which is something that this House never does?
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Oliver Letwin (Conservative, Centre-right): Now that there is to be an implementation and withdrawal agreement Bill I do not personally yet understand the need for clause 9. However, the right way to deal with that is for the Government either to say that they will consider getting rid of clause 9 or to make the kind of restricted amendments on Report that I was describing. In any of those ways, the problem would be resolved without the need for this kind of tension, and that would surely be desirable.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Oliver Letwin (Conservative, Centre-right): It was with some regret that I gave way to the hon. Gentleman. I have never known him to take a position that was not partisan and slightly ludicrous, and that was a classic example. Here am I irenically trying to achieve a result that would be in the interests of the nation—good legislation that has the effect my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield agrees he is trying to achieve, but which would not have the disadvantage of enabling the Opposition Front Benchers, the right hon. Member for Leeds Central and others, including the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), to achieve the meaningful vote they want to achieve. But what does he want to do? He wants to create some trouble. Well, that is fine—that is what happens in Parliament. My suggestion, however, is not that the Government should be defeated tonight or engage in some huge reversal, but that they should make the sort of change they often make in Committee and on Report—there is, after all, much time to consider the issue on Report if necessary. I want them either to make an adjustment to clause 9 or remove it. That would overcome the difficulty without creating a platform for ending our withdrawal, which is I think the subterranean motive of many on the Opposition Benches—although not, I stress, of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Oliver Letwin (Conservative, Centre-right): It is very odd—it is as if the hon. Gentleman has not been here, but I have seen his body here all the time. The fact of the matter is that the House has had a series of votes, it is going to have a further series of votes, and then it is going to have a whole pile of votes on, inter alia, the new implementation and withdrawal Bill. In fact, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield is totally in agreement with that. There is no question of whether we give the House a vote. It is going to have a vote. The question is: what is the articulation of that with clause 9? That is what those of us who are being serious about this have been trying to discuss I really feel that I have come to the end of my remarks. I apologise, Sir David, that I am long past time. I hope you will accept that it is because I was answering points from other Members.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Edward Vaizey (Conservative, Centre-right): I am very grateful, Mr Amess—[Hon. Members: "Sir David Amess."] I am so sorry. I should remember that nearly everyone who is speaking in this debate has a knighthood I am very grateful, Sir David, for the chance to speak in this important debate. It has been extraordinarily interesting and, actually, enjoyable. I want to make a brief detour on amendment 7, because the dialogue between my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) was absolutely terrific. Listening to my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset took me back—to a certain extent—to meetings that I had with him when I was a Minister. You could not go in and order a cup of coffee without engaging in a two-hour debate about exactly what was meant In the end, however, the answer emerged, and it emerged in this exchange. Notwithstanding all the technical debate, it is extremely simple. Clause 9 was written before the Government realised that they would have to put the withdrawal agreement into a statute, and now that they have to put it into a statute, both clause 9 and, potentially, amendment 7 have reached their sell-by date. The offer from my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset is serious and real: to come back, effectively, with a rewritten clause 9 which tells Parliament exactly what the Government need to do as we implement the withdrawal agreement in legislation. Do they need some powers—I could understand that—to do some things that are essential preparatory work? I thought my point was good enough to stimulate—
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Jacob William Rees-Mogg (Conservative, Centre-right): What my right hon. Friend is saying is spot-on: clause 9 gives some powers that trouble even Eurosceptics. I have never felt comfortable with the self-amending part of the Bill, and the solution advocated by my right hon. Friend, and proposed by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin), is very attractive.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: Macroeconomics
Edward Vaizey (Conservative, Centre-right): I can barely stand up again, because I am slightly overwhelmed by the outbreak of consensus I shall end this section of the speech with some unashamed flattery, as I look at the triumvirate of titans on the Treasury Front Bench: three Ministers for whom I have the utmost admiration, including my constituency neighbour, the Solicitor General, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Robert Buckland). They have heard this debate, and they are thoughtful and effective Ministers and I am sure they will have taken the mood at least from a certain part of this House about the brilliant opportunity for a solution to this Gordian knot.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: Energy
Edward Vaizey (Conservative, Centre-right): If they can justify it, of course The second part of my remarks, which will be as brief as possible because so much time has been taken up, is about amendment 300, standing in my name, which has the largest number of signatories of any amendment to this Bill. I am astonished that only four of them are Conservatives, but I think that reflects the standing in which I am held in my own party; I could not even persuade the leader of the rebel alliance, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield, to sign my Euratom amendment, and I really do not want my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset to talk about bad law when he comes to look at it The point of the amendment is simply to put the issue of Euratom under parliamentary scrutiny, and I note the comments made by the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) in her excellent speech about the importance of Euratom in our medical life, and her own real experience at the chalkface in her extraordinary work. So Euratom is not an esoteric issue; it affects us all. It has been debated in the House before and I shall not spend a lot of time talking about how extraordinarily successful our nuclear industry is. My own personal interest comes from the fact that although Culham is not in my constituency, many of my constituents work there, and it depends on Euratom. I thank the Government for last week’s announcement of £86 million of investment in Culham for two new centres of excellence for the testing of components and for fuel storage; that is a real vote of confidence in Culham The point, of course, about Euratom is that nobody voted to leave it. Euratom was not in the European Union Referendum Act 2015, and was not on the ballot; it falls under a separate treaty. So the British people did not have a chance to have a referendum on our membership of Euratom The reason we are leaving Euratom is technical. Legal advice, which we have not seen, deems Euratom to be inextricably linked to the European Union and therefore an article 50 notice would be defective if it did not include Euratom. However, the mood of the Government and, I think, the House is that we are leaving Euratom on a technicality, not because we object to being governed by Euratom. There is no mood among the general population to leave Euratom as far as I am aware, and I think that only one hon. Member has managed to stand up and say that there is a plausible reason to leave it.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: Energy
Edward Vaizey (Conservative, Centre-right): The implications of leaving Euratom, some of which have already been identified by the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire, also extend to our nuclear industry, which provides 20% of this country’s energy. At the moment, we simply cannot move nuclear material around unless we are members of Euratom. So when we leave Euratom, we will have to have, in effect, a Euratom-style arrangement to allow us to move goods around. "Goods" can mean a variety of things. We imagine highly radioactive canisters being moved in special trains at the dead of night, but the movement of goods also involves mundane things such as heat pumps, motors, spares and other components, all of which, because they are part of the civil nuclear ecosystem, have to be moved under the terms of these treaties Euratom covers not only objects but the freedom of movement of people. We depend on our membership of Euratom for a nuclear power industry, for our medical industry—isotopes have been mentioned—and for the Joint European Torus at Culham, where Britain has done extraordinarily well. Huge advantages have been made in robotics and other sciences, and there are £500 million-worth of contracts already in ITER, the successor to Culham, thanks to the expertise we have built up here Let me make it clear that, throughout this process of our technical move to leave Euratom, Ministers have been absolutely brilliant in engaging with me and other hon. Members who share my concerns and have similar interests. They have bent over backwards to do what they can to accommodate our concerns. Looking forward, we need Ministers to give us clarity on a number of issues. We need nuclear co-operation agreements with other countries—the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and possibly the European Union as well—and they need to be in place by March 2019. These agreements can be complex, and they can depend on the legislation in other legislatures. For example, the US Congress would have to pass a new nuclear co-operation agreement with us. We will also need a new safeguards regime, and this will come in through the Nuclear Safeguards Bill as a contingency, although I understand that the Government might want Euratom to continue to cover the safeguarding role.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: Energy
Edward Vaizey (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Lady and her Committee have published an excellent 45-page report this morning, and I read it when it was hot off the press. It makes all the points that I want to make about the need to have as close an association as possible with Euratom, particularly in regard to safeguarding. What worries me about the Office for Nuclear Regulation is that, while the will and desire are there, this is another job that cannot be done overnight. It will need to triple the number of inspectors over the next four years, for example. Training a qualified inspector takes between 12 and 18 months; it takes five years to train an unqualified one. The ONR already needs another £10 million just for recruitment and IT, not even for specialist equipment. Some people argue—in fact, I think it is in the BEIS Committee report—that the specialist equipment at Sellafield, which is currently owned by Euratom, would have to be replaced, at a cost of £150 million We need clarity on the nuclear co-operation agreements, clarity on the safeguarding regime and who will conduct it, and clarity on whether we will reach International Atomic Energy Agency standards, which the ONR is currently aiming for as a realistic target—Euratom’s standards are higher. We also need free movement of nuclear workers in the broadest sense, and I am not talking about nuclear scientists; I mean the people who actually build nuclear power stations. For example, I think the UK has 2,700 registered steel fixers, half of which will be needed to build Hinkley Point C. That kind of specialist construction worker will come under the category of nuclear workers. As for the future of our continued international co-operation, a particularly live issue at the moment is the extension of funding for the Joint European Torus, which is currently going through the Council for the fiscal years 2019-20, and the European Union is keen to get clarity from the Government on our intentions.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Edward Vaizey (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Lady is entirely correct because Austria is an anti-nuclear state, and there is some suspicion that some difficulties may emerge if the matter is not wrapped up before the Austrian presidency The amendment’s purpose is to provide parliamentary scrutiny of the important process of replicating the effect of a treaty that nobody wanted to leave. My challenge to Ministers is to engage with the amendment, and I look forward to hearing from the Dispatch Box whether the amendment is acceptable or whether they have an alternative way of providing the House with a strategy. On that note, after 14 minutes, I will sit down.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Jacob William Rees-Mogg (Conservative, Centre-right): As I have said, I have my doubts about parts of clause 9, but it says that a Minister of the Crown may, "by regulations," do things "for the purposes of implementing the withdrawal agreement" It is hard to see how that could change the Representation of the People Acts. The hon. Gentleman slightly overstates his case.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Philip Andrew Davies (Conservative, Centre-right): Does the hon. Gentleman not concede that there was a meaningful vote on 23 June 2016, when people voted to leave the European Union? The problem with the amendment tabled by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) is that it could be, and no doubt is designed to be, used to try to overturn and frustrate that meaningful vote. [Interruption.] My right hon. and learned Friend laughs, but it is a shame he does not have the courage of his convictions to admit that that is what his game is. If people in this House use that amendment for those purposes, the backlash from the British public will be like none seen before, and he should beware of that consequence.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Kevin Paul Hollinrake (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Gentleman said earlier that he was focused on getting the best possible process. Should we not be focused on getting the best possible deal in our negotiations? We know the EU does not want us to leave, so if he puts a process in place where the EU can simply knock a deal back to this Parliament, does that not give the EU the incentive to give us the worst possible deal, on the basis that we are more likely to reject it? We will simply have endless negotiations.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Anne Margaret Main (Conservative, Centre-right): I am listening to the hon. Gentleman’s argument with great interest, because I was waiting for the "or". He has just asserted what would happen if we did not have a good deal, Parliament rejected it and the negotiators were sent back, but then what? If it is felt that the best deal has been offered, what is his fall-back procedure? We would leave with no deal whatsoever.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-13
Topic: International Affairs
Anna Mary Soubry (Conservative, Centre-right): Is not that the whole point about what happened last week? After what happened on the Monday, when things all fell apart and were ghastly, we saw an absolute desire and it was clear that everybody, including the EU, came together to make sure that our Prime Minister got a deal. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that when we talk to people, we hear that it is now absolutely clear that the leaders and all the various other people from the other EU countries accept that we are leaving? They have heavy hearts about it, but they know that we are leaving and it is now simply a question of sorting out the deal. Of course, it is not as simple as all that, but they have accepted that we are leaving. People really have to stop the conspiracy stories and the myths.