15:13 Keir Starmer (Labour)

I am now going to make some progress because I have taken a lot of interventions. I have outlined Labour’s approach, and it is our approach because we believe in international co-operation, upholding international law, and that we need to work alongside our closest and most important allies. Let me take just one example of that: climate change. I listened very carefully to what the Secretary of State said. This Queen’s Speech has 22 Bills—yet what was there on climate change? One mention, in the final paragraph. The climate emergency should be the issue around which our politics evolves and revolves. It is the foreign policy challenge of our time and the defining issue of global security. It should be the focus of the UK’s diplomatic and development efforts, and it, not Brexit, should have been the centrepiece of this Queen’s Speech. The fact that it got just one mention is a measure of the Government’s lack of leadership on this central issue.

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15:55 Stephen Gethins (SNP)

The UK Government’s own analysis tells us that every type of Brexit will leave us worse off and poorer as a result of leaving the EU—every type. We are healthier with the co-operation in medicine supplies and groundbreaking research from our membership. We are wealthier with access to the world’s biggest single market. We are fairer in terms of workers’, parental and other rights, which I would not trust this or any other Tory Government with. And we are greener in tackling the climate emergency and developing technologies, where Scotland is leading the way, even if this Government do not always give us the powers that we need. Of course we can do better. Deepening co-operation between 28 independent and sovereign states—let us not forget that members of the EU are independent and sovereign—will never be easy.

The UK is a Union that likes to say no—no to devolution of immigration and business regulation so that we can stay in the single market, as called for by the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats and others; no to freedom of movement; no to more powers so that we can tackle climate change; no to giving people a choice over their own future. It does like to say yes to expensive new nuclear bombs that we don’t need; yes to austerity, yes to a power grab and yes to hitting the most vulnerable in our society and pursuing the most extreme form of Brexit that no one voted for.

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16:47 Sir George Hollingbery (Meon Valley) (Con)

I have a few more notes for the Department and for the House. We must continue to understand that market access negotiations with third party Governments, outwith FTAs, about difficulties in trading in their countries are every bit as important, not just to individual companies, but to the economy as a whole, for our trading internationally as FTAs. We must not lose sight of the fact that most trade Departments dedicate two thirds of their resource to market access and one third to FTAs. We must also take account of the environment and our 2050 targets when we strike new FTAs. How we can possibly reach our 2050 target if we pursue endless new FTAs that endlessly increase GDP—after all, that is what they are there to do—is a conundrum that the Department and this House will have to crack.

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16:54 Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)

As we face great crises—on displacement, the climate emergency and widening inequality—the case for multi- lateralism is stronger, not weaker. I praise the commitments that the Department for International Development showed last week to replenish the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. It is estimated that that fund has saved 27 million lives, making a real difference around the world. None the less, we need coherence in our policy. In Yemen, we have seen the real difference that aid has made, but our role there is a paradox of aid and arms in that we support Yemen on humanitarian relief and yet we are one of the main suppliers of arms to one side of the conflict. We need to address that. I now struggle with the Government’s suggestion that we have a system of arms control that is one of the most rigorous and robust in the world. I no longer believe that we can genuinely say that. We need to address this issue as a matter of urgency, and one of the ways that we can do that is to improve parliamentary oversight by making the Committees on Arms Export Controls a stand-alone Select Committee focused solely on that issue.

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17:40 Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)

We need, as the Prime Minister said, to step up our environmental leadership. The 2020 UN climate change conference in Glasgow—I do not like using the term “COP26”, which sounds like a futuristic police state drama—will give us an opportunity to demonstrate how we can work with the rest of the world on those incredibly important issues.

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18:20 Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)

“tackling climate change and ensuring that all girls have access to twelve years of quality education.”

As a Labour MP, I know that our party is founded on the principle of equality. In government, we pioneered the world’s first Climate Change Act in 2008 and the world’s first legally binding carbon emissions reduction target, so, of course, I support prioritising climate change and I support prioritising gender equality.

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18:26 Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)

The Government can do better by ending this crisis in investment to ensure that our country’s place in the world is not put deeper in jeopardy. Successive Conservative Governments have created a climate of uncertainty, a clear lack of direction and a meaningless strategy that is just leaving investors nervous. The additional carbon costs that I mentioned are adding to those nerves. The Government can act now by giving carbon capture and storage in the north-east the verbal and financial support it needs but is simply not forthcoming. INEOS, which I raised in this House prior to Prorogation, is an essential part of the supply chain in the Teesside chemical industry. I will be meeting the Secretary of State about that. There is still no chance of that company investing locally, yet it can invest billions in the middle east. All industry can see is the doom and uncertainty of what Brexit will bring and a tariff regime that will cripple their businesses. Perhaps the Prime Minister will prove me wrong and will now take investment in Teesside seriously, not as a means of its being politically beneficial but because it is the right and imperative thing to do. If we are serious about reaching net zero emissions by 2050, carbon capture is not a choice—it is a necessity.

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18:32 Catherine West (Labour)

I would like briefly to bring out a few themes of the debate. Many Members have raised the right to go out on the streets and to have freedom of assembly. Some have mentioned the protests in Hong Kong, which we would all like to be much more peaceful, but even on our own streets, we see the protests of Extinction Rebellion because we know that climate change should be much higher up the foreign policy agenda.

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18:39 Emily Thornberry (Labour)

First, may I ask the Minister why, in the course of a speech of 1,300 words, the Foreign Secretary did not once mention these countries or their leaders? He did not mention Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Cameroon, Brazil or Brunei, and he did not even mention Kashmir. These are not peripheral issues, but ones that should be at the top of the Foreign Secretary’s brief, yet he found time to make jokes about Luxembourg and to tell us how much Donald Trump loves Britain. This is of course the kind of love that expresses itself by ignoring everything that our Government say to him—from climate change, trade wars and the Iranian nuclear deal to the unforgivable betrayal of the Kurds in northern Syria. But even though the Foreign Secretary did not discuss any of those countries, I am delighted to hear that he said in Manchester that he would “relish, not shrink” from our global duty to bring the perpetrators of injustice and war crimes to account. So let us put that commitment to the test.

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18:49 The Minister for Europe and the Americas (Christopher Pincher)

We will be a force for good and a champion of causes that know no borders. On the international stage, we will show the leadership of the next generation, as it expects us to, by hosting the United Nations climate summit—COP 26—in Glasgow next year, in partnership with Italy. We will bring to bear both our world-class innovation and our determination to leave our environment in a better state for our children and theirs, in the United Kingdom and across the world. We will continue to lead global action to help to provide 12 years of quality education for all girls by 2030 and leave no girl behind. We are proud of the new media freedom coalition we have set up with Canada. Some 26 countries are already signed up, having committed to protecting media freedoms, speaking out against abuses and standing up for journalists who are detained, bullied and brutalised around the world.

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