John Hayes MP: speeches

Speeches

• 15 May 2025 · Solar Farms · Hansard source

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  There is a further point about suitability. My hon. Friend, as a Lincolnshire MP, will know that our county produces a hugely disproportionate amount of the nation’s food. Compromising food production puts food security at risk, because the solar farms, which are industrial developments, use up land that could otherwise feed the nation.

• 15 May 2025 · Solar Farms · Hansard source

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  That concentration is ironically on some of the best land for growing. That is the problem. There seems to be a correlation between the most productive farmland and the concentration of solar applications.

• 15 May 2025 · Solar Farms · Hansard source

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  I am delighted to endorse everything that my right hon. Friend and neighbour has said about national economic resilience. The point about grading land is critical. To be fair to the Government, they have said that land at grades 1, 2 and 3a at least should be protected, but the problem is that the solar developers deliberately attempt to distort those distinctions by regrading land using organisations that are part of their own corporations.

• 15 May 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  As short as possible, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Leader of the House will know that I have raised the issue of crossbows in this Chamber before. They are murderous devices in the wrong hands. In response, the Government have helpfully tabled amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill, yet I have still received no information, despite the Prime Minister’s promise that I would, about the response to the consultation. It is now well over a year old, yet we have heard nothing. May we have a statement to the House on the Government’s response to the consultation on crossbow ownership and sale as soon as possible please?

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman will know that thousands of young people—perhaps not in Chelsea but in most of the country—are NEETs, meaning they are not in education, employment or training, and that number is growing. Why should those young people, who are desperately seeking access to education or jobs, have to compete with large numbers of people from abroad? Is that what the people in Chelsea and Fulham really want for the people who live in the rest of Britain?

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his tribute to the Conservative party; it has indeed been a great party and remains so. On entanglement, he makes a valid point about co-operation and collaboration, but that has always been the case. Of course we must work with other countries, but the core issue here is authority. Entanglement means granting authority to a power outside this country. Surely this movement of young people, which is a dressed-up form of free movement, is just that.

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes a profound argument. He highlights the EU, which sees itself as a supranational body, and NATO, which, by nature, is anything but that, in that it is a confederation of sovereign nations. That tension lies at the heart of the EU’s ill-concealed and now evident disdain for NATO. I do not know whether the Government are careless or unknowing of that. They are either complicit or ignorant; I wonder which one my hon. Friend thinks it is.

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  rose —

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  I will happily give way—let us see whether the hon. Member is a self-loathing individual.

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  I am immensely grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. The last time we exchanged comments in the Chamber, I think they were about Asquith, but I cannot match that today. The right hon. Gentleman is making some sensible points about trusted traders and easing barriers at the border, but he will know, when he speaks of safety and security, that our key security relationship is the Five Eyes relationship: with America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Of course we co-operate with Europe, but any changes to our relationship around security with Europe would endanger the security of this country, if we compromised that core relationship. In particular, given that those Euro-enthusiasts on the continent have always wanted a pan-European army and a pan-European security policy, will he talk a bit about defence and defence procurement?

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman was pointing to an empty Bench when he talked about Reform, by the way, because its Members have not turned up. On the structural funds, I know the hon. Gentleman would not want in any way to say something misleading. After Brexit, my constituency attracted Government funding of something like £60 million or £70 million for roads, a new leisure centre and the regeneration of our town centre. In the last year we were in the EU, does he know that it cost us £17 billion to be a member? What sort of price is that?

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend is absolutely right; Sir Bill’s political career has not ended; his parliamentary one has. I can, like my right hon. Friend, acknowledge that Sir Bill has texted me this afternoon, along with no doubt many others— [ Interruption. ] — including my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green, I just gathered. This tension—between the will of the people as expressed in the 2016 referendum, and the prevailing assumptions of what I described earlier as the liberal establishment—underpins this debate. In the spirit of generosity, which I tend to employ—there are exceptions, by the way; Members can intervene on me, if they like—I note that there are those on the Government Benches, such as the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy), who acknowledge, albeit grudgingly, that the referendum result cannot be reversed and that we cannot go back into the EU. That was not what those people said immediately after the referendum, of course. They fought hard for ages to try to frustrate the outcome. They used every parliamentary technique they could conjure, as well as extra-parliamentary techniques, including well-funded legal cases, to try to derail Brexit. The scepticism personified by my hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Joy Morrissey), who said she was doubtful about the Government’s intent, is well founded. I know that the Minister will want to reassure us, when he rises at the end of the debate, that that scepticism—in his case, at least—will not prove to be a prediction of what might happen next. Scepticism is well founded, though, because of the history. It was a Labour politician who said, “You don’t need a crystal ball when you’ve got the record book”—Aneurin Bevan, of course. We have the record book when it comes to Labour, and, worse still, when it comes to the Liberal Democrats. I hope the Minister will be crystal clear, as he has been invited to be throughout the debate, on dynamic alignment, or, as I think it would be better described, dynamic realignment: realigning our relationship with the EU. Such alignment would bring us closer not to our friends and neighbours in Europe—of course, co-operation and collaboration is a natural part of mature policies—but to the EU, in terms of governance, regulation, law, interference in our affairs and, crucially, jurisdiction. It is the exercise of authority that we are really debating here—not the ability or, indeed, the willingness to share, but the danger of succumbing to a power that takes authority further and further from the British people. The hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) talked about some of the challenges the world faces and the answers to those global challenges. He was right to do so, by the way; I thought the first half of his speech was very good, although it got worse as it went on. The answer to those challenges is not to become more globalist or to give in to the forces he described that exert power in an unaccountable way, but to bring power back to the people. When those of us who advocated Brexit spoke of taking back control, we did so partly because we wanted power to be vested in this Parliament, which is accountable to the people whom that power affects. You, Madam Deputy Speaker, are almost a model for this, and others would do well to follow your model. We are answerable to and known by our constituents; they understand that we make decisions on their behalf. New Members of the House will be coming to terms with what that means and its relentlessness. I do not mind it myself, but I can see how it could wear down souls less forceful and robust than me. It is that constant interaction with our constituents that is the lifeblood of democracy. Whoever knew who their Member of the European Parliament was? I could not remember who the Tories were, let alone the Members from the other parties. People certainly did not enjoy that kind of intimate relationship and sense of mutual ownership when we were members of the EU. We feel as though we own our constituencies and they feel as though they own us, and quite right too. [ Interruption. ] I am being chided, Madam Deputy Speaker. I first heard of my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Sir Ashley Fox) when he arrived here—I never knew who he was before then. I say that without disrespect.

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  I assume the hon. Gentleman is not advocating returning to the common fisheries policy, which, with its ludicrous quotas and equivalence, was bad for fish, which were discarded live, and bad for fishermen, who were limited by quotas. It was a disaster that had a detrimental effect on the fishing industry across this country. Surely he does not want a return to that.

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  In human affairs, there is a persistent fascination with novelty. It is curious that people clamour for what is different—for the other, whatever that other might look like. It is this fascination that leads to the similar interest in—indeed, preoccupation with—internationalism, even to the point where that means giving up power to someone beyond these shores. It is a damaging preoccupation. At its most curious, it leads to the peculiarity of—I am sorry the hon. Member for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry (Stephen Gethins) is not here, because he made a remarkably articulate speech, as I told him afterwards—a representative of a nationalist party making the case against nationalism, and a Member who believes in sovereignty making the argument that sovereignty does not really matter, although he did qualify that by saying that sovereignty in Scotland meant something different. He and I will no doubt have an opportunity to debate that at some length in future. That fascination fuelled the sentiment that, after the referendum, pervaded the Labour Benches and the Liberals; it is a matter of record that I do not have a liberal bone in my body of any kind, whether socially, culturally, politically or economically, and I shall make the case against free trade in a few moments. As a result of that fascination, the cadre of people who populate a good deal of the establishment—the hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Ben Coleman) will know this, because a lot of the establishment live in his constituency; it is not surprising that they picked one of their own, really—could not bear to come to terms with the result of the referendum. For the people had spoken! And of course, the people’s will directly contradicted the assumptions—the presumptions—of that establishment, which they had foisted on the people for donkeys’ years. I do not say, by the way, that all the guilt lies on the other side of the Chamber. This began with Harold Macmillan, and then was carried on by Ted Heath, who sold out our fishermen. It went on and on; the gallery of villains is almost endless. One thinks of Roy Jenkins. There were noble exceptions, including Labour’s Peter Shore, and Tony Benn, who made the case for national self-government in what my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) told me was one of the best speeches he has heard in this Chamber in his years here. On our side, there were noble exceptions, too. Enoch Powell stands proud among those, but there were many others. [Interruption.] There was Michael Foot, of course, on the other side. I will not go into the whole list, Madam Deputy Speaker, just in case you thought I was going to. I was thinking of our lamented friend Sir Bill Cash, who gave such great service. He was seen as a bit of an outsider for the great bulk of his career, and then, in the last part of it, was proved right. My goodness, what is better than that in politics? They say all political careers end in failure, but Bill Cash’s didn’t; his political career ended in success.

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  It is typical of my hon. Friend’s humility and good humour that he should acknowledge that in the Chamber in such an open and frank way, and I pay tribute to him for it. The scepticism that I have described and tried to articulate takes the form of real doubts about what realignment will really mean. Let me just deal with three or four specifics. I spoke earlier in an intervention about security and defence. Of course, it is right that we have a continuing relationship with our neighbours in those terms. We do work with the agencies across Europe, but the critical security relationship we enjoy is with the Five Eyes countries—by the way, we also enjoy relations with many other countries in the world outside the Five Eyes and Europe—and it is vital that we reinforce that relationship. That, of course, overlaps with our commitment to NATO and defence. There may be some virtues in information sharing—indeed, there certainly are virtues in various kinds of co-operation—but anything that undermines the sovereignty of that security and defence alliance seems to be highly questionable and also risky, which is worse. Let me turn now to free movement. Although the referendum was not all about immigration, immigration was perhaps the most pressing and salient matter during those times. People resented and resisted free movement and they wanted to bring it to an end. For many, the term “take back control” epitomised the need to control our borders—to decide who came here and who did not. Although it may be understandable that people want to wax lyrical about young people being able to travel across the continent, what they say less enthusiastically, or do not say at all, is that young people from the entire continent will want to travel here. Until we know the terms of that, that could easily mean those people competing with Britons for scarce jobs. We have large numbers of young people not in education, employment or training. No Government have dealt with that satisfactorily. I started speaking about this more than 20 years ago. Previous Labour Governments and, indeed, Conservative Governments did not really grasp that nettle as firmly as they should have done. Disturbingly, the trend is upwards, and so I do not want people in my country to have to compete for education and training places and for other opportunities with possibly tens of thousands of people who have entered the country by those means. There will be suspicions that it is the beginning of a return to free movement. What did mass immigration do? The Prime Minister was right about this yesterday. He is a very late convert, but the Bible says that we must welcome all converts with enthusiasm. What mass immigration did was to displace investment in recruitment, training and retention of workers and in automation and improving workplaces, making us ever more dependent on low-skilled labour. It had the effect of stultifying the economy. Any suggestion that we may return to that will inhibit—perhaps ruin—the Government’s intention of improving productivity. If we really want to deal with productivity, we have to create a high-tech, high-skilled economy. I am fearful that that broader consideration will not necessarily hold sway when we get into negotiations with the EU on this issue of some relaxation of the bar on free movement, which was brought by the referendum. Mindful that there are enthusiastic, insightful and bright colleagues on all sides of the House, but mainly on the Conservative side, who want to contribute to the debate, I will draw my remarks to a close. I can hear colleagues saying, “No, go on”, but I am going to resist those overtures and finish with this thought: C.S. Lewis said, “We are what we think we are”. I think we are a proud, independent nation that has made a disproportionate contribution as part of western civilisation to world history. I think that our past is noble and should give us a sense of achievement and pride. I do not buy the self-loathing that seems to have taken hold with too much of the very establishment that I derided earlier.

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  rose—

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  Since we are straying into political ideas and philosophy, is not the point that the democratic legitimacy we enjoy in this place is on the basis of popular consent, and there is no more direct expression of popular consent than a referendum, which is why its result has to be honoured?

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend’s scepticism is well founded, because many on the Government Benches—I do not say all—could barely sustain the result of the referendum and regarded it with outrage. The people had spoken and contradicted the long-standing prejudice of the liberal bourgeoisie. That is why they tried to block Brexit—indeed, the Prime Minister tried to block it 48 times. My hon. Friend is right, therefore, to be sceptical about Labour.

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  rose—

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  I invite the hon. Gentleman to look at it through this prism: for all intents and purposes, I am Brexit, I stand for Brexit: I am a patriot, proud of my working-class origins; I am determined to do my best for my constituents and my country; and I am driven by a combination of the national interest and the common good. That was the spirit that inspired Brexit. It inspired those of us who campaigned for it, and those who voted for it, which 75% of my constituents in South Holland and the Deepings did. I am a bit resentful that Boston and Skegness next door had an even higher percentage, but it was only by 1%. As I said, C.S. Lewis said that we are what we think we are. I think that we are a proud country who can stand in the world, in collaboration with other nations, of course, but free and sovereign. Labour cannot have it both ways. It cannot say that we have done a great deal with India because we did not have to kowtow to the EU and that we have done a great deal with the US because we escaped the clutches of the EU, while at the same time saying that we want to creep back in and for them to have more say in any future deals we might do. Let me end with the words of one of my political heroes, Joseph Chamberlain, who understood that to protect our economy we need to protect the jobs, industry and enterprise that are part of it and not to give in to the free trade liberals. He said: “a democratic Government, resting on the confidence and support of the whole nation, and not on the favour of any limited class, would be very strong. It would know how to make itself respected, and how to maintain the obligations and the honour of the country.” No Member of this House should do less than that.

• 13 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  I am extremely grateful to my namesake for giving way. He is making an interesting speech. He is right that global power and its growth is making people feel that they cannot affect decision making; that is a profound point, but we need to root power closer to people, not detach it from them, as happens when power is given over to foreign potentates, whether in the EU or any other part of the world.

• 12 May 2025 · Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill · Hansard source

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  Is not the truth of the matter that showing humanity means recognising, as the Minister has implied, that some people are coming, perfectly understandably, for entirely economic reasons? If you thought you could get a better deal in Britain for you and your family, you would turn up and say you were claiming asylum on all kinds of grounds. That is the real truth of it. The system is being gamed and it has to stop being gamed.

• 7 May 2025 · New Nuclear Projects: Wylfa · Hansard source

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  I call the Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, the hon. Member for Rutherglen (Michael Shanks).

• 7 May 2025 · Automotive Manufacturing: Employment · Hansard source

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  I remind the remaining Back Benchers that interventions should be pertinent and pithy.