Parliament's party history for this member: Scottish National Party ( – present).
Register of interests
Every entry the member has in the Register of Members' Financial Interests, as Parliament currently publishes it. The wording and values are the member's own declarations; nothing here has been assessed by this site.
Totals add only the entries that declare an amount received: payments for work, donations, gifts, and funded visits (register categories 1.1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). Ongoing employment is listed but not added, because its figure is a rate rather than a sum received. Each entry is dated by when the benefit happened, not when it was registered, and placed under the party the member sat for on that date. A member who changed party therefore has a separate total for each.
Date
Category
Entry
Declared value
Sitting for
Source
3. Gifts, UK sources
British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, trading as The Ivors Academy - £984.00
I was hoping when I turned up today that I would hear the Home Secretary say that she was abandoning all the proposals around ILR. While it is positive that she has responded to the cross-party campaign on social care workers, she still has a long way to go to address the unfairness at the heart of these proposals. The un-British retrospectivity is still in place, and those who thought they had a contract with the UK will still be let down. When is she going to be positive about immigration, including its economic benefits and the value that it brings to our communities?
The area I represent has the biggest river system in the UK and some of the most inclement weather in the UK, so my constituents and I are fully familiar with being prepared and being ready for what could possibly come. What I struggle with a little bit is the other stuff in the statement. I am baffled by the lumping together of storm readiness and other undefined threats that cannot be properly outlined in name. Does the Minister not agree that storms and weather events are critical known stand-alone threats, and that there should be distinct and separate strategies for them? Lumping them together with national security, subsea cables and cyber-threats is confusing and perhaps even unhelpful to people who just want to be prepared.
We heard the Home Secretary make the claim that her changes to indefinite leave to remain would somehow act as a disincentive to people who sought to arrive in the UK on small boats, but she has failed to convince her Back Benchers and some of her Cabinet colleagues. Who has the upper hand on this in Cabinet, and would changes to ILR make a scintilla of a difference to people coming on small boats?
I have to say that I found the Minister’s statement extraordinarily complacent and singularly unhelpful. It is a damning indictment of successive Governments’ failure to get to grips with a full-blown pension crisis. It is not good enough to simply criticise Capita. We know how bad it is. People want real and decisive Government action, so will she commit to bringing the scheme in house, ensuring that meaningful emergency payments are paid out to people who are in real trouble, and get to grips with solving this issue, once and for all?
The hon. Lady has mentioned the ECHR a couple of times, and her motion refers to the UK’s exit from the convention. I know that she is all over her brief, so can she tell me what that exit would mean for the devolved settlement? What implications would it have for the Scottish Parliament?
It would also have huge implications for settlements across the United Kingdom. The Conservatives did not know this, but there would be a massive implication for Scottish devolution, for all our legislation is predicated on a commitment to being compliant with ECHR regulations. Will the hon. Gentleman tell the Conservatives exactly what this would do to our internal arrangements across the UK?
When I saw the motion on the Order Paper, I had to look twice as I was absolutely certain that it must be a Reform motion, but then I remembered that they do not get Opposition days. The motion is indeed in the name of the Conservative party. For all this “I will never work with Nigel Farage” and so on that we hear from the Conservative leadership, they are now literally indistinguishable from Reform, with their antipathy towards asylum seekers, immigration and human rights now defining these new “Reformatives”.<span id="411" class="column-number" data-column-number="411"></span>
The Conservatives are responsible for the crisis that we are currently confronting in the asylum system, having created huge, outstanding backlogs from their time in office that required the use of facilities such as those at Bicester. I know very little about the situation in Bicester, so I am not going to comment on the particularities, but when the Government are dealing with asylum seekers, they are absolutely right to try to ensure that there is equity across the whole of the United Kingdom, so that towns and cities like those in my constituency are not left to accommodate the masses of asylum seekers that we currently have. It is right that every constituency must play its part in trying to clear up the mess that was bequeathed by the Conservatives. The last place where this “not in my backyard” principle should apply is when we are dealing with real people’s lives.
There is blanket opposition to accommodation for asylum seekers right across the United Kingdom, and that has been created by the culture, climate and the language that is used just now when we come to describe asylum seekers. Some of the language that I have heard from Members on the Conservative Front Bench and in some of the contributions by Conservative Members is simply appalling: demonising, othering and trying to present whole communities as deviants—sexual deviancy and the rest. I find that absolutely unacceptable. It is no wonder that communities are really upset about the prospect of people coming into their constituencies.
No one in this world is illegal—<em>[</em><em>Interruption.</em><em>]</em> I hear chuntering from the Conservative Front Bench as usual. People are fleeing for their lives from situations across the world. They are fleeing from oppression—
The right hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) says they are fleeing from France, but where does he think they have come from? They come from some of the worst war-torn countries. I challenge him to go there and live for six months just to see how he would get on—<em>[</em><em>Interruption</em><em>.</em><em>]</em>