Topical Questions
How does the abolition of a rural district council such as New Forest, and its absorption into a unitary authority dominated by an urban centre such as Southampton, increase devolution and local democracy?
Conservative and Unionist Party MP for New Forest East since (defected).
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| Party | Office | Area | Period | Began | Ended | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conservative | MP | New Forest East | – | elected | left the party | Party history |
| Conservative | MP | New Forest East | – present | defected | — | Party history |
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How does the abolition of a rural district council such as New Forest, and its absorption into a unitary authority dominated by an urban centre such as Southampton, increase devolution and local democracy?
Like the Home Secretary, I come from an immigrant family that came here legally, but I fail to understand why she thinks not being able to get settled status for 20 or even 30 years will deter people from coming here illegally, provided that there is no prospect of them being removed from the country because of laws like the European convention on human rights?
The Minister is a genial sort of fellow, and I want to believe him when he says that he wants to proceed by consensus. Will he accept that there is no consensus at all on splitting the New Forest and putting the Waterside under the control of Labour-dominated Southampton? Well over 30,000 people signed the petition to keep the forest together, and it was handed in at Downing Street on the very day that the Government rightly withdrew the plan for Hampshire.
The Defence Secretary, who opened the debate for the Government, is undoubtedly a versatile and an entertaining politician, but he did himself a little less than full justice in being so casually dismissive of the remarks made by the Labour Chairman of the Defence Committee, the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), who, for the record, I have found to be thoughtful, knowledgeable and patriotic. He deserves to be listened to, just as his predecessors in the role, including me, were listened to with, I believe, respect by Conservative Governments, even when we were criticising them. Criticise them we did. As long ago as June 2018, the Defence Committee published a report entitled “Beyond 2 per cent”—that is HC 818, for those nerds interested in looking it up—which called for a level of defence expenditure approaching the figure of 3% of GDP, which the United Kingdom still maintained as late as the mid-1990s. The mid-1990s were six years or so after the fall of the Berlin wall, and when Government Members keep saying, as the Chancellor said yesterday and as the Defence Secretary repeatedly said today, although he did not take interventions on it, that they are proud to be part of a Government who are behind the biggest increase in defence spending since the end of the cold war, the question we need to ask is this: how much do they think this country spent on defence during the cold war? When the cold war was over, the threat diminished. The threat is now high—as high as it ever was during the cold war. During the 1980s, as I have said many times, we spent between 4.5% and 5% of GDP, calculated by today’s method of calculation, on defence. In June 2025, the Hague summit declaration called for NATO members to spend 5% of GDP on defence by 2035, consisting of 3.5% on core expenditure and 1.5% on wider defence-related items. We are already beginning to hear how the 3.5%, or even the 3%, will be made up by creative accounting. Let us bear in mind that 3.5% is to be on core defence. The creative accounting elements, if they are lucky, may deserve to be included in the 5%, but that is it.
Does the Foreign Secretary accept that it would be a disservice to the democratic process to identify attempts to interfere with it with invalidation of the result? Does he, like the Prime Minister, now accept that whatever Russia tried to do, it did not have any decisive effect on the referendum on whether to stay in or leave the European Union?
I welcome the fact that the Government are experimenting with a scheme of tagging prisoners at the point of release, but a question then arises. Those of them who do not have an address to go to and who choose to remove the tag are going to be very difficult to find. Is there a solution to that?
If rule No. 1, as far as resilience is concerned, is “be prepared”, does the Minister agree that rule No. 2 should be “have a reliable back-up system”? In that connection, does he share my concern that both in the field of telephony and in the field of banking, back-up systems do not seem to exist? In particular, were the Government consulted before British Telecom decided not only to move to an internet-based telephone system, but to dismantle the copper wire system, which could have given us useful resilience in an emergency?
Do the Government now accept that the former Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero got this important policy seriously wrong, and if so, why was he promoted to become Foreign Secretary?
I congratulate the Secretary of State on what, in my opinion, is the best statement I have heard from any Government Minister on any subject since the last general election. It has rightly brought forth supportive comments from both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Front Benchers and from Back Benchers. I have an interest in the question of impartiality in schools. It is rather disconcerting to realise that 40 years ago, in May 1986, I was working with a group of peers, led by Caroline Cox—Baroness Cox—and the late professor Lord Beloff, to amend the 1986 Education Bill. Two provisions put forward in that Bill were carried forward as sections 406 and 407 of the Education Act 1996. Section 406 bans political indoctrination in schools, and section 407 lays down that, when politically contentious subjects are discussed in schools, they must be presented in a balanced and appropriate way, with opposing views fairly discussed. May I suggest that the Secretary of State, when she writes to all schools, should include, as an annexe, a single page setting out the provisions of sections 406 and 407 of the 1996 Act, because they are as germane today as they were when first formulated for the previous Act 40 years ago?
<Question HRSContentId="{2FB49CDB-BA6A-4C78-A5A0-1FA21DDA9481}">14. <QuestionText HRSContentId="{B8932A2F-D7FB-4E1F-8A99-E2BBDD859ED2}">What his policy is on the future of the British military base on Diego Garcia. </QuestionText></Question>