Bernard Jenkin MP: speeches

Speeches

• 11 Sept 2026 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  I welcome the speech from the hon. Member for Calder Valley (Josh Fenton-Glynn), who is an example of what we have seen throughout this debate, going back to the early 2000s: people peeling off from supporting assisted dying in principle and, certainly, peeling off from supporting this Bill. I am a case in point. I came into the Chamber to listen to Lord Falconer’s Bill in 2014 absolutely determined that I was going to vote for assisted dying. I sat through the debate and ended up voting against, because I thought that the arguments were not made in favour of the Bill. The second reason we should throw out this Bill is that it keeps changing. Even now, it is not settled. Even now, its advocates want changes to it. They are stuck with the reality that if the Parliament Act is invoked, they will only be able to invoke the Bill as it stands today. They will not be able to have their changes. So if in doubt today, the House must vote no. Thirdly, the question is far bigger, it turns out, than just a matter of conscience or an isolated matter to be decided. It is a massive question that affects public policy and has major public expenditure consequences. That has convinced me that we really should not see another Bill like this one until we have had a Government Bill go through the process of proper scrutiny within Government, with all the consequences laid out and dealt with. It must be a responsible and accountable Secretary of State that presents the Bill; it must not be a Back-Bench Bill. Maybe there should be a citizens assembly on this question—it is a subject that would lend itself to a citizens assembly. [ Interruption. ] Well, it would not take away any power from this House. This House would still be able to decide, but it would inform the debate in a way that the debate is still not informed. My mother and father passed away in recent years, and I am so grateful that my mother never had to confront this question. She often said, “Oh, I just want to die. I am just a burden on the family.” Though she would never have qualified for this Bill, I am so grateful that there were never any circumstances that would possibly have confronted her with this question. I advert to another conversation. I have a very dear friend—someone who has become a mentor—who is a very interesting, clever, intellectual, determined and courageous lady. She has scoliosis of the spine. The last time I went to see her, there she was, hardly able to sit up and in constant pain. We have open conversations, so I asked her, “If assisted dying were available to you, would you take it?” Without hesitation she said, “Oh, yes.” When I asked why, she said, “Because I am a burden to my family.” I said, “Well, I have been voting against assisted dying. I am going to have to rethink my position.” Then she said, without hesitation, “Oh, I don’t advocate it.” She understands the complexity of this, and she knows that it opens a can of worms that we really have not understood fully. I urge colleagues in the House to vote against the Bill today.

• 8 Sept 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  The Minister shakes her head, but she is yet to give a good reason as to why this measure is in the Bill. When we had an Adjournment debate in July with the then Minister for patient safety, the hon. Member for Birmingham Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), she could not answer the question of who would conduct independent safety investigations in the NHS after the abolition of HSSIB. She said that safety investigations would be conducted by the Care Quality Commission, but she could not actually claim that they would be independent; as my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) demonstrated, they would not be. If, as it seems, it is intended that safety investigations should be carried out by the CQC unaffected by the transfer, why make the transfer at all? How much is this transfer going to cost? I asked the Minister, in a letter I sent her after the debate in July, to give us the information on how much the transfer of all this would cost. Nothing has arrived. I never had a reply to the letter. Of course, the Government have changed the Minister and the new Minister for patient safety, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham (Dame Diana Johnson), is not in the House today. I rather suspect that she is more sympathetic to this argument than the Minister sitting on the Front Bench today. In our earlier exchanges we discovered and once again exposed how the safe space will be brutally compromised by the fact that it will be housed in a regulator with, inevitably, other ulterior motives. The chief executive of the CQC is wantonly conflicted in terms of looking after the safe space, so he cannot be the one left in charge of that function. The real point here is that we are missing the opportunity to save so much money. Governments keep having public inquiries. The EPUT—Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust—public inquiry, affecting my constituency, cost in its first year £5 million, and in its second year it is costing another £5 million. The whole budget for HSSIB was only £6.3 million a year, yet it does scores of investigations, not just one inquiry. The Ockenden inquiry cost £14 million. If we could save just a fraction of the cost of medical negligence, which is £3.6 billion a year, HSSIB would pay for itself.

• 8 Sept 2026 · Artificial Superintelligence · Hansard source

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  I am as keen as anybody to get on with discussing the Health Bill, but this topic is too serious an opportunity to miss, given that the hon. Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) has raised such important issues. I really commend his speech and his initiative. Everybody should read it. All I want to say is that a kind of unilateral disarmament on AI is not going to solve the international problem. China, Russia, North Korea, Iran: these are not respecters of international treaties or international laws, even if they were to sign such treaties or laws, and we do not want to disable our own industry. The jury is out on whether AI is an extinction-threatening phenomenon, but I really do commend the hon. Member for raising the topic. I hope he will forgive me for opposing the Bill because I want the debate to continue. Question put (Standing Order No. 23) and agreed to. Ordered, That Alex Sobel, Jess Asato, John McDonnell, Afzal Khan, Dr Allison Gardner, Bambos Charalambous, Sir Desmond Swayne, Charlie Maynard, Manuela Perteghella, Ben Lake, Yasmin Qureshi and Wera Hobhouse present the Bill. Alex Sobel accordingly presented the Bill. Bill read the first time; to be read a S econd time on Friday 13 November , and to be printed (Bill 142).

• 2 Sept 2026 · EU Membership Referendum: Impact on the UK · Hansard source

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  I totally agree. Defence is a reserved matter for member states in the European Union. The European Union does not have any troops. NATO is the forum through which we operate, and it is NATO to which we should be committed, rather than setting up a rival defence organisation in the European Union. I will also point out the contributions. According to a table from the House of Commons Library, we were making a gross contribution of £16 billion or £17 billion a year, but, with the rebate, the net contribution was £9.4 billion in the last year of membership. Our latest contribution was £103 million. To all those people who advocate for rejoining or for the reset, where will the money come from? Will it come out of defence or welfare, or will there be more taxation to generate the extra revenue needed once we start making increased contributions to the European Union? There is also the myth-making. There is a myth that there were no small boats until Brexit—what rubbish. The small boats started in 2018, before we left, and by 2020 there were more than 8,500 crossings. That is not due to Brexit. The Dublin regulation was useless. It was in place during those years and it was never enforced. I will finish on the question of forecasts, which are all conjectural. They are all based on what the British economy might look like compared with a basket of other economies, including the United States, which has had a huge fiscal stimulus and an AI boom, and has more free enterprise policies. The fact is that since we left the European Union, Wolfgang Münchau, who somewhat reluctantly voted remain, has made it clear that leaving was an economic non-event. We were growing at about the same rate of France and Germany, and we still are. There has been no smashing disaster in the economy. There is a disaster in Scotland, where the SNP is campaigning against reopening the North sea and supports the high energy costs imposed by the ridiculous dash to net zero—the Government are doing that too—but the fact is that we are better off outside the EU in the long term.

• 16 Jul 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  May I refer the Secretary of State to Question 20 on the Order Paper? Can she explain when the A120 to Harwich will finally be upgraded? Is she aware that a community of some 20,000 people is served by this dreadful road, and that we dread another winter of subsidence and potholes as the existing road collapses, which is long past its renewal date? Given that this road is vital for growth in the east of England, as it serves the Harwich port and the freeport as well as this deprived community, when will we see some plans to upgrade it?

• 9 Jul 2026 · NATO Summit · Hansard source

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  On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. During business questions, I mentioned the interests of council tax payers in Tendring district. I probably should have drawn attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, where it says that I am a council tax payer in Tendring district.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  The Leader of the House did not mention in the forthcoming business that the House is about to be asked to decide on whether to issue a writ for a farcical and unnecessary by-election. [ Interruption. ] Have we had it already? I beg your pardon; I was not in the Chamber. What opportunity do I have to raise the question of how the by-election should be paid for? Many of my constituents live in the tendering district and will be inflicted with the cost of the by-election. It seems most unfair that this political stunt should cost council tax payers in my constituency or in Clacton.

• 8 Jul 2026 · Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness · Hansard source

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  In this paper entitled “Understanding the UK’s Transition to Warfighting Readiness” that I am just about to explain briefly to the House, we refer to Norway’s concept. Norway’s total war concept is being embedded in its national life and embedded across Government policy through all branches of Government. For example, we refer in the report to the need to galvanise our universities to be ready for war, so that research and development programmes are directed towards suitable and useful capability, creating sovereign national capability and protecting those research programmes from foreign infiltration. I love having foreign students in our universities—it is good for the economy and for our universities—but we cannot have Chinese nationals at the heart of chip manufacture and design, robotics or AI systems. We have to protect our national technology from being spied on by people sent to this country to go to our universities in order to collect that information, steal it and give it to our enemies. The context of the document, which is almost old hat even though it is only a few months old, is the changing geopolitical situation, the withdrawal of America from European security, the collapse of the rules-based international order, the failure of democratic governance models to rise to the challenge, the unpreparedness of most western democracies to be ready to confront the hybrid warfare that we already face, and our lack of adaptability. I commend the point made by the former Armed Forces Minister: there is no point in ordering a whole lot of kit that will be out of date as soon as we get to the next war. If the next war starts in the Balkans, the Baltic states or Poland, it will be about drones. The Government are moving some way on that, but we are so slow. The Ukrainians were way ahead of us in helping to protect the Gulf states while we were still sending multimillion-pound aircraft that cost £25 million an hour to fly to shoot down a drone that cost £150,000. We must adapt our industry to produce cheap, numerous capability so that we have the scale to deal with that. We need that whole-of-society mobilisation. We need much more adaptable governance.