John Cooper MP: speeches

Speeches

• 21 May 2025 · Business and the Economy · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman is right. These are not free trade agreements in the normal sense of the words: they are frittering around the edges, as he said himself. The difficulty for beef farmers in Dumfries and Galloway is that prices are rising, which is partly down to a drop in stock because of costs and things like that, so they are unable to fulfil this idea of sending beef to America. That is unlikely—it is more likely that we will see cheap American beef coming here. Again, we go back through the looking glass. Up is down when the Employment Rights Bill makes strikes more likely, yet is touted as a boost to productivity. It is incredible. The minimum wage is up, which is no bad thing, but let us not pretend that that is Government money: hard-pressed businesses have to find that extra cash, again. In short, Labour is not working and, terrifyingly, neither are increasing numbers of our constituents.

• 21 May 2025 · Business and the Economy · Hansard source

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  May I give the House the news that ex-special forces soldiers, including the Minister for Veterans and People, have reached the top of Everest today? Congratulations to them. We also have a mountain to climb to create growth in this country. My hon. Friend mentioned HMRC; does it not reflect the Government? The Government’s attitude to business is that it is a dripping roast to be devoured and taxed to a standstill.

• 21 May 2025 · Business and the Economy · Hansard source

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  As a member of the Business and Trade Committee, it has been a privilege to traverse this land from Exeter to Belfast and from Glasgow to Cardiff to speak with people on the frontline of business. They are a doughty, resilient lot, doing amazing things; Britain’s got talent, but heads are going down. The barrage of red tape is taking a toll. Costs are up, and I must reference the speech from the hon. Member for Loughborough (Dr Sandher), which probably owed more to the boards of the Globe theatre further along the Thames than to this place. In his highly colourful speech, I was not quite sure whether he was blaming Mrs Thatcher or gas prices for high energy bills, but he should really look towards his own Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, because much of the increase in energy prices, which hammer businesses right across this country, comes from carbon taxes applied by this Government. Critically, all this leads to expansion plans being shelved, as confidence slides. That means fewer jobs, especially for young people and those chasing that all-important first job. This Government’s boast is that they are putting money into working people’s pockets. Setting aside the questionable veracity of that claim, there is no doubt that if someone loses their job, or if they do not have a job in the first place, there is no extra money in their pocket. What this Government are creating is a hostile environment for some sectors. Yes, there are millions of pounds—maybe billions—for steel, plenty for unionised train drivers and no-strings pay boosts for NHS staff, but what about agriculture, which is the key driver of the economy in rural Dumfries and Galloway, my constituency? Farmers and many associated businesses might just about survive Labour’s urban-centric indifference, but the active harm it is doing by taking steps such as the upping of inheritance tax and the driving down of agricultural property relief is a disaster. The consequences of Labour’s avaricious increase in employer national insurance contributions are all too real. The Usual Place is a Dumfries charity that does amazing work helping young people with a host of mental and physical issues move into real jobs in catering. It is cutting back on those jobs because extra national insurance contributions put a bounty on each employee’s head, meaning jobs gone and life chances maimed. I hope the charity will celebrate its 10th anniversary next month, but Labour is doing nothing to help it get there. At the other end of the spectrum, I spoke this week with a major firm whose payroll supports a five-figure number of employees. It has a strong social conscience and tries to tap into the huge cohort of economically inactive Britons and get them into the world of work, with all that that means for their pay packets but also for the intangibles such as the self-esteem and dignity that work affords. It calls itself a gateway employer, proud to be the first rung on the jobs ladder for thousands, but it is aghast at Labour’s anti-business approach. Its increased bill for extra national insurance contributions is eye-watering, and now it faces the thicket of rules and regulations that is the Employment Rights Bill—the Deputy Prime Minister’s love letter to the unions. The imposition of day one rights means that a taking a chance on employees with poor qualifications and a poor employment history, or perhaps ex-offenders, is much more risky for the firm. It knows—as do myriad other businesses, large and small—that it is less likely to recruit, while elements of the legislation are designed instead to swell the ranks of the increasingly restive trade unions. We are through the looking-glass with this Government’s unbalanced approach to business. Black is now white.

• 19 May 2025 · Support for Veterans: Operation Banner · Hansard source

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  Operation Banner defeated the IRA militarily and paved the way for the Good Friday agreement, so why are this Labour Government now pushing two-tier justice, to the obvious detriment of our brave Northern Ireland veterans and to the advantage of Gerry Adams and his Sinn Féin fellow travellers? Where is the justice in that?

• 19 May 2025 · Support for Veterans: Operation Banner · Hansard source

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  13. What steps he is taking to support veterans of Operation Banner.

• 14 May 2025 · Gaza: UK Assessment · Hansard source

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  Does the Minister have any information about how much aid is being held in Hamas-controlled warehouses in Gaza? Is the key to this desperate situation our links to Tehran? At the end of the day, the Iranian regime pulls the strings of its puppet organisation, Hamas, who are holding the hostages in conditions akin to torture.

• 13 May 2025 · US Policy on Iran · Hansard source

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  4. What discussions he has had with his US counterpart on the policy of the US Administration on Iran.

• 13 May 2025 · US Policy on Iran · Hansard source

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  The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is the terrorism export wing of the despotic regime in Tehran. Why are we not joining the Americans in proscribing this organisation when we did proscribe the Wagner organisation in Russia? Is it possibly because the Americans are pressuring us to continue our tenuous diplomatic links with Tehran?

• 13 May 2025 · Mansion House Accord · Hansard source

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  The Daily Mail has said in its coverage of the accord today that industry leaders have warned that the Government must deliver a pipeline of investment opportunities to meet the new targets. What faith can savers have that this Government can deliver on that given that they touted GB Energy as a fantastic investment vehicle when in fact it is a damp squib?

• 1 May 2025 · Energy Prices: Energy-intensive Industries · Hansard source

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  The pretence is that Britain is somehow caught in a storm- tossed sea of international gas prices, which drives up energy costs, but when INEOS reports that it is paying £127 million a year in carbon taxes, rising to £2 billion by 2030, is it not the case that we are seeing the cascade of jobs losses because Labour has made decarbonisation deindustrialisation?

• 30 Apr 2025 · Proposed Visitor Levy · Hansard source

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  With the Welsh bottle deposit scheme going down the same disastrous dead end as the Scottish bottle deposit scheme, and now more costs are being added to Welsh tourism, making staycations more expensive, the Government appear to be creating a hostile environment for business. Add in the review of the UK internal market, which is meant to make doing business across this great land of ours easier. Why are the Government loosening the bonds of our great Union?

• 30 Apr 2025 · Proposed Visitor Levy · Hansard source

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  1. Whether she has had discussions with the Welsh Government on the potential impact of the proposed visitor levy on the economy in Wales.

• 30 Apr 2025 · UK Airstrike: Houthi Military Facility · Hansard source

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  I am relieved to hear that the strategic defence review is coming in the spring—with a great yellow ball in the sky, I assume that will be fairly soon. In all military operations time is the enemy, and I am concerned about reports that the SDR may only be a broadbrush document—an interim document, as it were—and that the important decisions on specific capabilities and weapons systems may not be taken until autumn. Are we marching on to war? If so, should we not be doing so at the double, rather than at a slow march?

• 22 Apr 2025 · British Steel · Hansard source

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  The Minister talks about working at pace. If she wants to see what pace looks like, she might consider the Business and Trade Committee’s report on steel, which was turned around in rapid time—much faster than the snail’s pace review of steel, which has yet to emerge. Will it do so in the spring, or the summer? No one is quite sure. When that review finally emerges, will it address the elephant in the room, which is the ridiculous energy costs in this country? They have been driven up in part by gas, but also by carbon taxes, and by the renewable subsidies laid on by this Government.

• 22 Apr 2025 · Ukraine Update · Hansard source

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  I had better think of something quick. I will return to the question of fishing. It is right that we draw together with our European allies to fight and to bring this war to an end. However, it cannot be right for the French to leverage in fishing negotiations for defence spending. Will the Secretary of State press on the Prime Minister the need to defend our fragile coastal communities and make it clear to Paris that this cannot be helicopters for haddock or mackerel for missiles?

• 22 Apr 2025 · Ukraine Update · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

• 8 Apr 2025 · Horizon Redress and Post Office Update · Hansard source

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  As a member of the Business and Trade Committee, I should remind the House that in March we recommended that the Government should listen harder to our recommendations. I am glad that that seems to have been taken on board, but I am slightly concerned that a lot of back patting seems to be going on, particularly about Fujitsu. Does the Minister not agree with me that he should be telling Fujitsu what to do, not asking it? This Government seem overly deferential to lawyers. He is in charge of this. Can he not get the pace moving, because lawyers are getting their money—their fees—but postmasters are not getting their money at the rate they should?

• 8 Apr 2025 · Blair Mayne: Posthumous Victoria Cross · Hansard source

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  I congratulate my neighbour the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) on securing this important debate—we could almost smell the cordite in his opening remarks. My first encounter with the Special Air Service was when, just as we were getting to the good bit, the John Wayne film on TV was interrupted, and it was over to Kate Adie as men in bug-eyed respirators ended the Iranian embassy siege on 5 May 1980, amid the thunder of flashbangs and the staccato rattle of small arms fire. As a journalist, I later met John “Mac” McAleese, who really was the man on the balcony, not—I hate to break it to Members—that bloke down the pub mumbling about the colour of the boathouse at Hereford, as Walter Mitty characters do. I also became friends with Colonel Clive Fairweather, second in command of the regiment. Sadly, both men are no longer with us, but in life one thing was obvious: neither was a reckless psychopath. They were hard men—yes, of course, for theirs is a lethal business—but rather more planning and preparation goes into tier 1 special forces than novels and TV would have us believe. Controversy reigns over television’s brilliant “SAS: Rogue Heroes” and Blair “Paddy” Mayne’s depiction, but it is nothing new. There were all sorts of claims about the book “Bravo Two Zero” when it emerged after the first Gulf war. Was it fact or fantasy? Peter “Billy Rat” Ratcliffe, former regimental sergeant major of 22 SAS, told me, “Life in the regiment is not really about garrotting 200 sentries, you know.” “But you do know how to garrotte a sentry, don’t you?” I asked. In his Salford accent, he told me, “Oh, yeah, but I’d rather shoot you from a mile away—less chance of being compromised.” That was uncompromising, but careful, thoughtful and cunning too. As such, these men are surely the inheritors of the spirit of Blair Mayne. For certain, he could be a wild man, especially in drink—there is a cottage on the Isle of Arran pockmarked yet by rounds fired from his service revolver after a surfeit of whisky—but it fell to Mayne to protect and indeed nurture the nascent SAS when its founder, Sir David Stirling, was a prisoner of war in Italy and the infamous Colditz. If Mayne were as unhinged as he is portrayed, he would not have been able to apply the quiet discipline needed to forge a bunch of rogues into an effective and elite fighting force. It strikes me that the only recklessness Blair Mayne displayed was for his own safety, never that of his men—his “Blades”, as SAS troopers are known. Concerning us today is the action at Oldenburg on 9 April 1945, but let me be clear that this is not football-style VAR for gallantry medals; we are not reopening cases by the dozen, just this oddity. We may never know what precisely happened there almost 80 years ago to the day. We do know that Mayne was recommended for the VC, and his audacity was the only thing said to have kept him alive. We may also never learn what made the authorities downgrade that VC. Was it professional jealousy? Special forces face that today: the sobriquet “the Hereford hooligans” is unfairly appended to the SAS in many a mess, and SF officers who ought to be generals somehow do not make the cut. Mayne’s hand shaped the SAS, and the regiment has in turn guided special forces around the globe. US Major Charles “Blisters” Beckwith raised the Delta Force—he promised it “Will get you a medal, or a body bag. Maybe both”—after time spent with the SAS. Mayne’s legacy is secure, and there is no doubting his courage. We are not here to critique “SAS: Rogue Heroes”—it is fun and it has a great soundtrack and great acting, although the accents are as sketchy as the history. Instead, we should coolly examine the real Major Mayne and ask why the VC was approved by all who mattered but rescinded in murky circumstances. I am a student of military history, having undertaken a distance learning MA with the excellent University of Birmingham. One of the first lessons learned was that history is not fixed—it is not preserved in aspic—but shifts and changes as new details and perspectives open up. Look at the so-called château generals—men who in life were highly rated by their troops, only later to be accused of being donkeys leading lions. Aside from the few who think that “Blackadder Goes Forth” is a documentary, that trope is happily being revisited. We should have courage enough today to look again at the Mayne case, too. Eighty years on, we can sense something odd about the lack of a VC—“signal”, rather than “single”, perhaps? The military is split in two into ratcatchers and regulators, and we need both. We need regulators with their rulebooks and procedures in times of peace, and we need maverick ratcatchers in times of war. Mayne was a fine ratcatcher, and regulators then and now should not stand between him and this country’s premier gallantry medal.

• 7 Apr 2025 · Israel: Refusal of Entry for UK Parliamentarians · Hansard source

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  There is no question but that the hon. Members for Earley and Woodley (Yuan Yang) and for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed)—who are sadly no longer in their places—had a difficult experience in Israel, and that is to be regretted. However, we are hearing today that that somehow makes criticism of Israel impossible in this place, but as we have heard time and again, that is simply not the case. We can speak out in Parliament, and we can continue to do so.

• 7 Apr 2025 · Scunthorpe Steelworks · Hansard source

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  Between 1997 and 2010, about 36,000 jobs were lost in steelmaking, or about half the workforce—that was under Labour, of course. I am concerned to hear talk today about nationalisation, and I say that with due deference to my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Immingham (Martin Vickers); the old joke is that if we want to stop crime paying, we should nationalise it. Given that this Government could not run a bath, never mind the steel industry, would a better idea not be to support the industry with, as I have mentioned before, a golden share to give us some say over what happens? Again, is the truth not that the dogmatic pursuit of net zero is driving up energy bills in this country to a level that is simply not sustainable for industry?

• 27 Mar 2025 · Scunthorpe Steelworks · Hansard source

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  As the grandson of a steelworker in Corby, Northamptonshire, I understand something of the iconic nature of the industry. The hon. Lady tries to blame us Conservatives for what went wrong. Is the situation not too confused? The Government are not sending the right signals to the industry and we are not sure what we want. We already do not make the right kinds of steel for much of the defence industry. The steel strategy will be published in the spring—wonderful. When is the spring? The Government need to get a grip and send out signals now. If we are going to negotiate with the Chinese about the Scunthorpe mill and the amount of money we are spending there, should we not have some kind of golden share so that taxpayers are comfortable about what is going on there?

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

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  The A77 and A75 roads are critical to the people of south-west Scotland, but they are also critical to the UK, because they service the exceptionally busy ferry port of Cairnryan, which links us with our friends in Northern Ireland. The difficulty with these roads is obvious if we ever travel them. There is another difficulty, however, which is that the Department for Transport here does not seem to think this has anything to do with it, and the Secretary of State for Scotland is too busy to meet me to discuss the issue. When the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Elaine Stewart), who is in her place on the Government Benches, and I wrote to the Transport Secretary in Scotland, we received a high-handed letter saying that it would be inappropriate to meet us. What is inappropriate is the way devolution does not appear to be working. Can we pluck from the logjam of Backbench Business Committee debate ideas one on devolution and how it is failing?

• 26 Mar 2025 · Fishing Quota Negotiations: Impact on UK Fleet · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) on securing this important debate. I declare a sort of interest: in a previous life, I was a special adviser with the Scotland Office, and I spent the larger part of 2021 working on exports from Scotland to the EU. I have to tell the hon. Gentleman that the EU, far from being our avuncular friends in this matter, were a protectionist bloc. Many of the difficulties we faced, including the transport of live langoustines—he mentioned vivier transport—were to do with problems on the far side of the short strait. It was bloody-mindedness at best and outright protectionism at worst. But let us talk about chips—not the golden-fried essential component of what we Scots call the fish supper, but bargaining chips, for that is yet again what our fishing crews risk becoming. The statistics are superficially simple: the Office for National Statistics says that fishing accounted for just 0.03% of the UK’s economic output in 2021. However, that does not capture the reality that a great many of our fragile coastal communities, not only in Scotland but across the UK, are entirely dependent on jobs in fishing’s at-sea component and its allied onshore processors. If fishing were a trifling little homespun affair, why is the EU so interested in it? With the Business and Trade Committee, I travelled to Brussels to discuss this Government’s reset of relations. What Labour expects from this reset is opaque at best, but the EU—good protectionist that it is—has already drawn up an invoice, and top of its list is fishing. Amid warm words about security and co-operation between Britain and the EU, the French are keen to lock us out of the new £150 billion Euro defence fund, only to then show a bit of ankle on negotiations involving—quelle surprise!—fishing. Just as Labour’s Employment Rights Bill, with its heavy pro-union bias, takes us back to 1979 and the winter of discontent, so fishing is drifting back to 1973. Then, our prized and pristine waters were the quid pro quo for access to what was then the European Economic Community. Today, the dice are loaded in favour of the EU fleet. According to the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation—I note that the hon. Member for St Ives is not a huge fan of it, but I certainly am—the EU catches around seven times more fish by value in UK waters than we land from EU waters. Britain’s status as an independent coastal state was hard won, and we must not allow our fleet to be dragged back into the ambit of the hated common fisheries policy. We cannot allow a linkage between fisheries and access to markets to be established. British fishing is already under a series of threats. Let us be as clear as the blue ocean about the conservation issue: fishermen are to the fore in this area, for they know that if they clear the seas of fish today, there is no tomorrow for them. Things such as spatial squeeze are real. Our seas are vast but not limitless. Boats cannot fish between floating wind turbines or trawl near those turbines’ subsea infrastructure. To say that boats can simply up nets and go elsewhere is to demonstrate a terrifying lack of knowledge about the sea. Fish and seafood are not evenly suffused; they are in some places and not in others. Fishing is food security, as we have heard. It is a livelihood for many—not just for those who literally risk life and limb on the storm-tossed seas, but for those onshore. Fish and chips are as emblematic of this country as the bright fishing boats at quaysides from Kirkcudbright to Kirkwall and more. They must not be frittered away at the behest of an avaricious EU.

• 26 Mar 2025 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Q9. When he was Director of Public Prosecutions, I do not think the right hon. and learned Gentleman would have sat comfortably in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Cameron, but incredibly in Scotland, we have a situation in which the head of prosecutions—the Lord Advocate—does sit in Cabinet. This situation has been thrown into sharp focus lately by a police probe into the finances of the SNP, and has been thrown further into focus because, although not personally involved, the Lord Advocate ultimately sits at the head of the investigation into former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who faced potential criminal charges. This situation has been created by the SNP, who will not fix it. Does it sit with this House to amend the situation?

• 24 Mar 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T6. The Hawk aircraft, most famous in the scarlet livery of the Red Arrows, is at the end of its service life. Can Ministers explain what steps they are taking to ensure that we replace it with a British-built sovereign capability?