Alistair Carmichael MP: speeches

Speeches

• 4 Dec 2025 · EU SPS Agreement · Hansard source

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  1. What his Department’s priorities are in negotiations with the EU on a sanitary and phytosanitary agreement.

• 4 Dec 2025 · EU SPS Agreement · Hansard source

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  I am sure we all understand the reasons for the Paymaster General’s absence today, although I am less clear on his reasons for being absent from the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee next Tuesday; he has declined our invitation to attend. A bold deal is indeed something to be wished for, but only if it does not bring with it lots of unintended consequences for the farmers, food producers, chemical companies and others whose work will be impacted by it. If Ministers will not engage with the Committee, will the Minister give me some assurance that there will at least be engagement with those vital industry interests?

• 4 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T4. May I take the Security Minister back to the subject of the security of undersea cables? He may know that in Shetland we have had two catastrophic breakages this year as a result of fishing boats breaking the cables. It has now become clear that there is no basic sharing of information between the Government and cable companies, and the cable company in that case had to submit a freedom of information request to get VMS—vessel monitoring system—data. Surely we can do better than that.

• 3 Dec 2025 · Pension Schemes Bill · Hansard source

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  I have several BP pensioners, with BP obviously having operated the Sullom Voe terminal in Shetland for many years. The injustice they suffered, which left them with a pension worth about 11% less than it should have been because of the decisions of the trustee in 2021 and 2022, showed the inadequacy of the control and independence of the trustee in relation to the company. Does my hon. Friend agree that that requires urgent attention?

• 27 Nov 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Reaching a sanitary and phytosanitary agreement with the European Union is one of the most significant developments that we are likely to see for farmers and other food producers. It could bring massive opportunities, but also significant risks, especially for arable farmers. Although any agreement will be implemented by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, it is being negotiated by the Paymaster General, so the EFRA Committee invited him to give evidence to the Committee on 9 December. We sent the invitation on 17 September; after four reminders, we eventually received an email on 13 November indicating that the Paymaster General was “content to decline the kind invitation to give evidence on this occasion.” The Select Committee is not quite so content with this situation. Will the Leader of the House have a word with the Paymaster General and his diary secretary to see whether he might be able to make himself available for 9 December? This is a basic discourtesy to Parliament.

• 24 Nov 2025 · Gaza: Humanitarian Obligations · Hansard source

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  I commend the hon. Lady, who is making a very important contribution. This is looking to the medium and long term; but, candidly, if there is to be any civic infrastructure in Gaza, the seeds of that must come from the west bank, and in the west bank it is under threat day and daily. Therefore, although she is right to say that the international focus has to be on Gaza, we cannot ignore the fact that Palestinians in the west bank are undergoing a horrific programme of settler oppression, settler violence and settler expansion, which threatens both Gaza and the west bank.

• 19 Nov 2025 · Specialist Manufacturing Sector: Regional Economies · Hansard source

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  I agree with everything that the hon. Gentleman is saying, but may I encourage him to go one step upstream and look at some of the wider policy context? If we are to regrow our manufacturing base, as we absolutely need to, we have to accept that it will be about future technologies, not just replacing what we had in the past. In my constituency, the development of tidal energy offers a supply chain of 80% UK product, which would then be exportable. If we could capture that, we would have something special—but for that to happen, we need a better policy framework to come out of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.

• 30 Oct 2025 · Farming Sector: US Trading Relationship · Hansard source

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  The Secretary of State is right that any threat of an imminent increase in US beef imports in particular is clearly not the problem, but it has not gone away either. The US Department of Agriculture has a foreign agricultural service with 100 different offices, embassies and trade missions. They work with US farming groups around the world to promote their product, and they are not spending that money just to stand still. What will the Secretary of State be doing to ensure that our farmers have the same opportunities, so that they can see free trade agreements not just as threats but opportunities too?

• 30 Oct 2025 · Farming Sector: US Trading Relationship · Hansard source

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  13. What recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on the potential impact of the trading relationship with the US on the farming sector.

• 23 Oct 2025 · Fishing and Coastal Growth Fund · Hansard source

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  I welcome the Minister to her new position. I have to say, though, if ever there were an illustration of the scale of the challenge facing Ministers in turning around the Department, this is it. Let us not forget that this fund was created because the Prime Minister rolled over for a further 12 years the catastrophically bad deal that Boris Johnson gave us for five years. If the Minister is sincere when she says that the aim of the Government is to maximise local investment, then using the Barnett formula to distribute the funding is ocean-going madness. By volume and value, Shetland alone accounts for 9% of the fish landed in this country, but Scotland as a whole will get only 8% of the funding. When will the funding formula be reviewed, and when will we hear exactly where the money will be spent and what it will be available for?

• 22 Oct 2025 · Devolution in Scotland · Hansard source

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  What the hon. Gentleman seems to be saying is that Shetland could not control our own seabed. Does he maybe think we are too wee and too poor for that?

• 22 Oct 2025 · Devolution in Scotland · Hansard source

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  I agree with what the hon. Gentleman is saying. I was struck by what the Chair of the Scottish Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Glasgow West (Patricia Ferguson), said about the roots of the Scottish Parliament and the constitutional convention. Those of us who were part of that movement believed that there was a better way for Scotland to be governed, but things have moved on, and now the Parliament is seen as an exercise merely in asserting national identity. Does he agree that if we got back to the Scottish Parliament being about a better delivery of Scottish services for Scottish people, the difficulties that he is identifying would very quickly be solved?

• 22 Oct 2025 · Devolution in Scotland · Hansard source

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  No, this is about the seabed.

• 22 Oct 2025 · Devolution in Scotland · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman will have heard other people make the point about that journey and the need for it to go from the Scottish Parliament down to communities. One of the most clamant cases for that journey to continue relates to the administration of the Crown Estate. We now see Crown Estate Scotland behaving in exactly the same way that the Crown Estate did when it was answerable to the Treasury here in London. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that his colleagues in the Scottish Government should be devolving control of the Crown Estate—especially the marine estate—to communities like mine in Shetland?

• 21 Oct 2025 · Mandatory Digital ID · Hansard source

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  I agree with most of the hon. Gentleman’s conclusions. Does he agree that, in hindsight, the Scottish Government’s use of a covid passport was a mistake, especially in a way that exposed the Government to criticism from the Information Commissioner about the lack of transparency on how that data was used?

• 16 Oct 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  First, I associate myself with the comments about Ming Campbell. Ming was a friend and mentor to me for 42 years, and I wanted to take part in the tributes, but I was with the Select Committee in Brussels. Knowing his commitment to the European ideal, I was pretty sure that that was where he wanted me to stay. Might we have a statement from the telecommunications Minister, the right hon. Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray), about the resilience of links to island communities? For the second time this year, hundreds of my constituents in Shetland are being left without service as a consequence of a breach of the Shefa cable. This time, it is going to last for four weeks. That is a colossal failure of customer service and a failure of regulation. I am now inviting all the parties to come to Shetland for a resilience forum next month; will the Minister speak to his colleagues in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to ensure we get Government co-operation to hold everybody’s feet to the fire on this issue?

• 16 Sept 2025 · Ambassador to the United States · Hansard source

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  Does the right hon. Lady agree that if we are to salvage anything positive from this whole sorry episode, it must be that in the future, Parliament, through the Select Committees, has a role in this process? Does not her experience illustrate that the question of who is in charge of that must remain with the Select Committee and not with the Executive?

• 11 Sept 2025 · Biosecurity at the Border: Britain’s Illegal Meat Crisis · Hansard source

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  Even as things currently stand, we have a mental health crisis in the farming industry. We know from our own personal community experience from 2001 that that was a moment of genuinely acute mental health crisis from which many people have not yet recovered. The truth of the matter is that one of the biggest challenges facing the livestock sector is maintaining a critical mass of livestock numbers. If we were to go through the same sort of cull that we went through in 2001, starting from where we are today, I think we would risk losing that critical mass, and that could have a catastrophic impact on farmers right across the country.

• 11 Sept 2025 · Biosecurity at the Border: Britain’s Illegal Meat Crisis · Hansard source

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  I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for me to make the statement, which marks the publication of the third report by our Committee in this Parliament. Our report is titled “Biosecurity at the Border: Britain’s Illegal Meat Crisis”, and it really is a crisis. It is a crisis that has been brewing for years, if not decades. It is also a crisis that matters not just on the national level but on the individual and personal level. We should never underestimate the impact that animal disease outbreaks have on the mental health of farmers, veterinary professionals and others in our rural communities when biosecurity breaks down. In 2001, over 6 million animals were slaughtered across the United Kingdom following the outbreak of foot and mouth disease. Rural communities were devastated. The cost of the outbreak to our economy would be £13.8 billion in today’s prices. Experts at the time concluded that the infected meat that precipitated the outbreak had been imported illegally. In January this year, foot and mouth disease was again reported, this time in Germany. Experts there told the Committee that it was likely caused by illegally imported food. That single outbreak of foot and mouth disease cost the German economy €1 billion, and it required the culling of 336 animals and the testing of thousands more. In response, the UK Government announced import restrictions, but still, at-risk commercial consignments bypassed border control posts for six days, despite the ban on affected products. We will address that matter in our next report. We have no idea how much unchecked produce was able to enter through personal imports. We do know that, although border officials are now making far fewer seizures of animal products than in the years following the 2001 outbreak, they are seizing unprecedentedly high volumes. Last year, 235 tonnes of illegal animal products were seized at the UK border. Given the low levels of checks taking place, that must be just the tip of the iceberg. Port health workers tell us that they have seen a huge deterioration in the hygiene presentation of illegal meat, and say that shipments are increasing in size. That meat is heading to our high streets, our farms and our kitchen tables. Frontline workers are anxious that a disease outbreak is imminent, and we should share their anxiety. In her evidence to the Committee, the chief vet described port health authorities as our eyes and ears at the border. In that, she is quite correct, but still, Dover is the only port health authority in Britain being funded to support the work of Border Force in seizing illegal meat and dairy products. Even Dover’s funding has been under threat. This year’s funding was secured at the last minute and only after the intervention of stakeholders, including our Committee. We visited Dover and saw the entirely unsuitable facilities in which port health workers are being required to work. We saw vans stuffed with room temperature meat products packaged in plastic bags, newspaper and cardboard boxes. This meat had travelled across Europe, unrefrigerated, from countries where African swine fever is widespread. The Minister responsible for biosecurity committed to visiting the Port of Dover to see the situation for herself. At the time of our report’s publication, she still had not done so. I find that regrettable and very much hope it will be attended to in early course. The relationship between DEFRA and the Dover Port Health Authority is poor. That serves no one’s interest and requires immediate ministerial attention. We know that when commercial imports from certain countries have been banned, criminals have found a new way to make money and are bringing in products undeclared, under the guise of personal imports. DEFRA has reassured us that Border Force is delivering “intelligence-led checks”; we are concerned that this language hides the reality on the ground. The reality is a limited and incomplete intelligence network, strained enforcement capability, and port facilities unsuitable for seizing significant volumes of potentially contaminated meat. At the very least, farmers and the public deserve greater transparency about the risks we face. We have called on the Government to start publishing quarterly data relating to seizures of illegally imported animal products. We have also asked the Government to model the amount of animal products entering Britain, and the risks this poses to our livestock. Meat smuggling was described to our Committee as “the biggest threat to food security we have had for a long time”. We do not know how these animals were reared and slaughtered, or how the meat has been handled or stored. It carries increased risks of viruses, bacteria and parasites that can make people sick, and falls far below the strict standards that we require of British producers and legitimate importers, and that consumers expect. Illegally imported meat and dairy products are being sold online and via door-to-door sales to households and businesses. Illicit products can be found in markets, shops, takeaways and hospitality venues, where consumers trust that the food they are buying is safe and meets high welfare standards. In some cases, meat is misrepresented as being of British origin. We heard that the cost of living crisis is fuelling the market for cheap, illegally imported meat, as is demand for culturally preferred products, like pork from eastern Europe. Other meat and dairy products are illegally brought into Great Britain for personal consumption because individuals are unaware of the prohibitions or because they are willing to take the risk. DEFRA banned imports of most animal products from the EU in April this year, but many travellers do not know what the rules are or why they are in place. We think travel operators should be legally compelled to inform travellers of food prohibition rules for EU countries, as they are for other countries. There is currently no ownership in Government of the issue of illegal imports of animal products. Responsibility is so fragmented across agencies that outdated, inefficient ways of working have been allowed to persist, and the scale of the crisis has escalated to an intolerable tolerable degree. We have called on DEFRA to establish a taskforce to bridge the divides. It should lead on the design and delivery of a strategy for tackling meat smuggling. We also found that Border Force is not adequately fulfilling its responsibility to enforce rules at the border. It has too many competing priorities, and officers lack understanding of the risks and rules associated with products of animal origin. Port health authorities are willing to step up and support Border Force, but are needlessly inhibited by a lack of powers and funding. Such authorities should be given stop, search and seize powers in relation to animal products, and funding for enforcement presence at the border. There is currently no deterrent to meat smuggling, so smugglers are operating with impunity. DEFRA must immediately deliver a plan to start to fine and prosecute repeat offenders and those who are attempting to smuggle significant amounts of animal products. Successive Governments have been aware of the scale and risks of illegal meat imports and have failed to deliver a response proportionate to the challenge. We have identified the risks and some of the solutions. It is essential that DEFRA takes those risks seriously and acts to mitigate them with urgency. The stakes are too high for further inaction.

• 11 Sept 2025 · Biosecurity at the Border: Britain’s Illegal Meat Crisis · Hansard source

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  First, I thank the hon. Lady and all other members of the Committee for their engagement in this report and for the way in which they approach the work of the Committee as a whole. I may be slightly biased, but I really think they are quite excellent in the way they go about their business—I could not ask for a better membership. What we saw at Dover was truly shocking. We are still close enough to lunch that I am not going to give too many details, but the photographs that were provided to the Committee were truly horrendous. The hon. Lady suggests that the control points at Sevington and Bastion Point could be repurposed, which is an obvious solution. The conditions in which the Port Health Authority workers operate were disgraceful: working in big sheds that we probably would not keep cattle in, with holes in the roof and pigeons flying around. Meanwhile, just a few miles up the road, there are purpose-built facilities where workers would at least be able to change into their personal protective equipment and have proper showers at the end of the day. I place on the record the Committee’s gratitude to, and my personal admiration of, Lucy Manzano and her team at the Dover Port Health Authority, who have done a remarkable job and a significant public service in bringing this to the attention of the wider population.

• 11 Sept 2025 · Biosecurity at the Border: Britain’s Illegal Meat Crisis · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We risk ending up playing a whole game of whack- a-mole, tightening the controls at Dover and seeing the effort displaced to other communities and ports. Notwithstanding that, the priority is still the short straits, as the significant volume of imports come through them. That all underlines the view of the Committee that what is needed is for somebody in Government to take control of this issue, with a strategy for dealing with it, because there is no point in having the best national security at one port if all we do is displace the effort to others.

• 11 Sept 2025 · Biosecurity at the Border: Britain’s Illegal Meat Crisis · Hansard source

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  Obviously, the question of legal commercial imports is slightly different in its operation from what we are bringing to the House’s attention today, but I think we have to look at the whole thing in the round. There are opportunities if we are able to get that SPS deal, and the Committee will be looking at that in the near future. We will be visiting Brussels and speaking to Commission officials about where the deal has got to. We all know it is easy to agree that we need to agree, but actually reaching the agreement will always be the difficult part. Whatever we have by way of an SPS agreement, there will have to be rigorous checks at the border, but it may be that the SPS agreement would make some of that an awful lot easier than it is at the moment, and for everyone—importers, consumers and producers—that has to be good.

• 11 Sept 2025 · Biosecurity at the Border: Britain’s Illegal Meat Crisis · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution to the Committee’s work, which is—I hope the Whips are here to hear this—a textbook example of how a Government Back Bencher should go about his business in Committee. He is absolutely right that seeing scales was worrying. It is obvious that that product is then going straight to the market and goodness knows where after that. Our real concern is that we are bringing in pork products from eastern Europe and places where African swine fever is already present. A lot of that meat is, we suspect, destined for eastern European workers in our pig industry. One does not have to be Einstein to work out the scale and nature of the risk there. We heard two things. One of the witnesses said that we were one carelessly discarded ham sandwich away from disaster—that is absolutely right. The other thing that we were told was that the possibility of an outbreak of African swine fever could be the death knell for the British pork industry as a whole. To my mind, that really illustrates just how high the scale of risk is here.

• 8 Sept 2025 · Indefinite Leave to Remain · Hansard source

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  That is an important point, which is related to one made earlier by the hon. Member for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East (Andy McDonald), and it is about the stability that people have in their life if they know that they have indefinite leave to remain. The industry that I have the most to do with is the fishing industry, and we have seen an increasing presence of transient workers in recent years, outwith immigration rules a lot of the time. In a handful of cases—I stress that it is just a handful—there has been egregious abuse, and that can happen because these people are forced to live in the shadows. Giving them stability allows them to have the same rights and security that we all take for granted.

• 4 Sept 2025 · Climate Change: Food Security · Hansard source

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  In June, the Scottish Government made a very welcome commitment not to pursue a deliberate policy of reducing livestock numbers. Despite that, livestock numbers in Scotland continue to fall and have fallen by 15% over 10 years, so that across the United Kingdom we now risk losing the critical mass we need to maintain the network of abattoirs, hauliers, vets and merchants. If food security genuinely is national security, is now the moment to consider including within the remit of the Climate Change Committee the maintenance of food security?