Stuart Anderson MP: speeches

Speeches

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  It is interesting that the hon. Member raises the moron increase. I point out that we are no longer in government. The hon. Member’s party was also in government from 2010 to 2015.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  I am happy that you intervened, and if you support tax hikes for your—

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  I certainly do. You raise a huge point—

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  I will gladly take an intervention from any Labour Member whose local businesses say that the tax on local business is good. Anyone?

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  He raises a huge point. In my constituency of 700 square miles, the local pub and village hall are community hubs. After Remembrance Sunday, I took my family to the Queens in Ludlow. I have met many publicans across South Shropshire. Experienced publicans are still just able to keep trading on reserves, but they are not really making a profit. The ones who are just setting out to build up that reserve are going broke. It is just not a viable situation for them at the moment. Council tax bills doubled in the time that Labour was last in power, representing an extra £751 on an average band D home. The Conservatives put in veto powers to ensure that council tax did not increase over a certain amount. We allowed local areas to receive the funding that they wanted by raising council tax within 5%, but without excessive rises. At the moment, less funding is going into rural areas but council tax is going up by a dramatic amount, so people are paying more and getting less. The County Councils Network has named Shropshire council as one of 16 local authority areas that will see significant cuts in direct Government funding. It suggests that there will be about £9 million of cuts to Government funding over the next three years. That will affect many different services, including Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service, which has said so on record. I have written to many constituents as part of my “shop local” survey, and I have heard from almost 10% of them—thousands of people have responded. People say that they love going to the local high street and want to do so. However, the footfall numbers are dropping. Businesses say that they do not have confidence, and that it is getting harder and harder to trade. That is causing major issues on the high street. We must release the stranglehold on the high street and encourage growth. The biggest factor, businesses tell me, is the tax hikes, which are crippling. I make a plea to the Government to change their approach to taxing small businesses, or they will destroy the country.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Gentleman for talking highly of my constituency—Ludlow is lovely. Does he realise that austerity started under the Labour Government when they were last in power? They started measures to make cuts in 2008-09.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  You voted for it when voting for the Budget.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  The Minister talks about the building up of debt. Does he understand that when Labour was last in power, debt went up from 36% of GDP to about 76% of GDP? That massive increase built the foundation of the debt that we have today.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Energy · Hansard source

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  I am delighted to speak in this debate, because this is such an important topic for many of my constituents across South Shropshire. Both individuals and businesses need energy prices to come down—the cost is not sustainable, and it is on the wrong trajectory—and we need to be honest with the British people about the route for achieving that. The Leader of the Opposition has clearly said that the net zero target is not achievable. We are being honest in this discussion. I believe that over the coming few years, all Members in this House will see that the target is not achievable, and it will be reversed. We are trying to bluff the British people—I think that is the word I would use—and make them believe that if we offset our carbon emissions and bring them down that way, it is okay to import all our energy. We have many more reserves that we can use before we need to bring in any energy from overseas; we can pull the reserves out of our ground and use them. There is a lot more that we can do on that. Members may say, “We need to look at solar.” Let us look at rare earth metals, which I have spoken about several times in the Chamber. There are 17 rare earth metals, 90% of which are processed in or through China, which literally uses a scorched earth policy to pull them out of the ground.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Energy · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member raises a very interesting point. China looked at this issue 30 years ago; when I went over to Australia about five years ago, the Australians were looking at it, and the US was looking at it, too. Every country outside of China has left this way too late. Putting in place a critical minerals strategy now is way too late, but we still need one in place. We need to look at this issue. All the magnets that we use in this country, including for MRI scans, require rare earth metals. That strategy should be in place today. We got that wrong—I am happy to admit that we did not get our rare earth metals strategy right—and it is costing us. Everybody is waking up to the need for that strategy, but we cannot say, “Let’s just pull those metals in from China; we are very happy for them to offset our carbon emissions over there.” I also want to look at energy from a defence perspective. We need energy to ensure that we have strong defence. Recently, the Government committed to the NATO standard, which is to spend 3.5% of GDP on defence and 1.5% of GDP on defence-related areas. We should focus on article 3 of NATO—internal defence—and that 1.5% of defence-related spending should be focused on a couple of things, namely energy security and food security. I am a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and discussions are ongoing about how that money should be used. If our tanks do not have any fuel to get where they need to go, they cannot fight; that is before we even look at ammunition and things like that. Rather than saying, “We have to go faster on renewables,” we should be having the bigger discussion about national resilience and energy security. The world is the most unstable it has been since the second world war. We need something in place now, and we need to move to what is sustainable. Defence is key to that. I have mentioned food security. Outside of Much Wenlock in my constituency, which has just been voted the happiest place to live in Shropshire—it is a lovely place to live—there are 600 acres of prime agricultural land that can grow food, and a beautiful view that is one of the best in the country. There is an application to replace it with 600 acres of solar panels. I have not found one person in the constituency who wants to turn that land into a site for solar energy; it is only the landowner who wants to. If we put solar panels all over it, as part of the roll-out of solar at speed—the Minister has mentioned that the Government are going quicker—we will be doing so with no regard for local people and what they want for their communities. This is really detrimental; the discussion about net zero is getting killed because local communities are being overridden. I have talked about the speed of solar, and about defence and food security, but we also need to look at homes that are off the grid. In South Shropshire, only 42% of homes are on gas mains; many are off the grid. I think the average across the country is about 73%. Some of the Government’s plans that the Minister has set out are not working for a lot of off-grid communities. There are a lot of old homes in South Shropshire, many of them built pre-1945, that are too expensive to retrofit.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Energy · Hansard source

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  Will the Minister give way?

• 12 Nov 2025 · Energy · Hansard source

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  I will conclude with that. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

• 21 Oct 2025 · Mandatory Digital ID · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member has just highlighted the confusion around this. If the Government are considering hard copies, the costs could be into the billions of pounds, as the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire (Pete Wishart) mentioned. There is no money, and there is not a problem in this area, so why create a problem, spending billions of pounds that the country does not have on something that no Government should be doing? On the subject of digital exclusion, a large percentage of my population is not connected or does not use IT. My concern is whether the digitally-excluded pensioners in South Shropshire will be hounded by the police. Will the police be chasing them around, asking them to sign up? Will people find that they cannot get a job unless they have digital ID? There are huge concerns about this. [ Interruption. ] Members can shake their heads, but the scheme is being rolled out to stop illegal immigration. It is a dead cat story, and no Government should be looking to do this. I have major concerns, and so do my constituents. I am worried about the security of the scheme. Look at China and Russia: we have continual cyber-attacks on the UK, as we have just seen with Jaguar Land Rover. With the advancement of AI, if we believe we can keep our data safe, why have spreadsheets been emailed to the Taliban? Mistakes happen, but imagine having the whole country’s data. It was done by a civil servant, and it is a disgrace it happened under whoever’s watch. We should not be joking about things like data going to the Taliban. This is a major issue. It is the start of an authoritarian Government, and I do not believe we should have any involvement with it. It should be cancelled straightaway.

• 21 Oct 2025 · Mandatory Digital ID · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend raises a valid point. That has been a concern in South Shropshire, where I have huge areas that do not have high-speed connectivity. A lot of elderly people are not able to use an iPhone or computer, so they feel that they will be digitally excluded. Whether it is mandatory or voluntary, it is still—

• 21 Oct 2025 · Mandatory Digital ID · Hansard source

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  We should start not by asking what the Government can do, but what the Government should do. Mandatory ID cards are an overreach and far above what any Government should be doing. I have reached out to my South Shropshire constituents with a survey to ask for their views, and they are strongly against it. Among the points they have raised is digital exclusion.

• 21 Oct 2025 · Mandatory Digital ID · Hansard source

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  Does my hon. Friend agree that the way this idea was launched is a complete smokescreen and did not reveal the real reason for digital ID? The real reason is to gain control over the British people.

• 21 Oct 2025 · Mandatory Digital ID · Hansard source

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  As a veteran, I was disgusted to see yesterday that veterans are being used as guinea pigs, with a smokescreen, to test this system. Our veterans do everything for us. They are brave people. They should not be the ones on whom this is tested. Does the hon. Member agree?

• 20 Oct 2025 · Post-16 Education and Skills Strategy · Hansard source

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  Having five children, I understand that not everybody learns the same way, as all my children are different. However, what consideration has been given to the position of students with special educational needs and disabilities and the ruralities of constituencies such as mine, which can pose challenges?

• 20 Oct 2025 · Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill · Hansard source

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  I am delighted to be called so early. I will speak to the amendments in the name of the official Opposition, specifically on the reports going to the Intelligence and Security Committee, especially on security of the buffer zones, foreign security forces, military operations and personnel movements. The ceding of Diego Garcia is a monumental strategic error that will diminish the UK’s standing on the world stage, and I will gladly set out why I believe that is the case. If anybody thinks they can predict what will happen in the next five years, they have learned nothing from the last five years. When we start extending that to 10-plus years in the current global geopolitical situation, that is so hard to look at. Everybody is playing by a set of rules and working to a past system, which is currently changing. Strategic leadership is the ability to shape the environment we are in. Let us take two strategic leaders, regardless of our view of them at the moment: President Trump and Xi Jinping. They both want the world to change from where it is, and they want to adjust the shape of what it looks like. The world is currently seeing a disruption to the world order as we know it. The international rules-based order is being challenged. We are setting out a deal and a treaty based on an older system that we being asked to believe will be honoured for the next 99 years, but I do not believe it will be.

• 20 Oct 2025 · Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend makes a great point. I spoke to one of the submarine commanders from the US navy only about six weeks ago. He told me that 15 years ago he would see one Chinese ship or submarine per week, and now he sees 100 a week. The whole area is full of them. When we start looking at the security of buffer zones, we see that we cannot move in this area for Chinese submarines. The whole space is swamped with them. We are doing a deal that will remove our ability to sit at the table where we used to have such strength. Our armed forces now would have trouble supporting our allies in any area, particularly the Indo-Pacific— [ Interruption. ] The Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry says that is not true. We have HMS Spey and the carrier strike groups, but we have no permanent presence in the Indo-Pacific. With our current commitments, we would need a brigade strength or more to enable us to have a permanent base, to rotate troops through and to have a credible offering without burning out the UK armed forces, given the numbers who are currently on sick at the moment and the strength of the military. I want to see larger armed forces, but we do not have the ability to offer the level that we want. We believe that the world is playing by an international rules-based order, but not all countries will do that. An international rules-based order is a set of rules set out by, normally, the largest countries around the world. When countries such as Iraq or Kosovo do not adhere to them, they expect everyone else to accept it, but the rise of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea is throwing everything into the mix. I believe that this will be a huge loss for us strategically. I reiterate my point that the ceding of Diego Garcia is a monumental strategic error that, in the next decade, we will come to regret.

• 20 Oct 2025 · Alleged Spying Case: Home Office Involvement · Hansard source

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  Does the Minister believe that the collapse of this case has weakened the UK’s position on the international stage, and that we will see more foreign state actors trying to carry out operations of espionage against Members of Parliament?

• 14 Oct 2025 · Northern Ireland Troubles · Hansard source

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  I am against the repealing of the legacy Act, and I served in Northern Ireland. As I am now doing in opposition, I raised when we were in government the major concern and dishonour when none of those on the Labour Benches had the decency to come to this House and debate all the points the Minister is making now. They let the legislation go through, but it is recorded in Hansard that very few people bothered to come to the Chamber to debate it when we took it through the House. I want to make two quick points on the support for veterans. First, you have spoken about the process they will have to go through; I want to know what support will be available, as you have mentioned. Secondly, given that the terrorists did not keep records but the British Army did, how will you ensure fairer disclosure throughout the process?

• 10 Sept 2025 · Russian Drones: Violation of Polish Airspace · Hansard source

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  I believe that this was a deliberate attack by Putin to test the resolve and resources of NATO and that we will see more in the coming weeks, months and years. Russia was very quick to put out disinformation by pumping the airwaves in the cyber-space. Can we ensure that we are providing all resources to counter disinformation, which is a battlespace on its own, and that we are ramping up against the current threat that Russia is pushing out across NATO countries?

• 8 Sept 2025 · Defence Industrial Strategy · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the Minister on his promotion. I have just returned from the US with the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, where we reviewed disruptive technology from AI to quantum and saw how it has a chance to change the defence industrial base. What consideration of that fast-moving technology is there in this defence industrial strategy?

• 15 Jul 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  The Chief Secretary talks about the Budget. I have spoken to small businesses across my constituency that are feeling the impact of last year’s tax rises, and they are concerned about uncertainty and a lack of clarity. Does he really understand the impact that last year’s attacks on small businesses are having, and how devastating they are for our constituents?