Speeches by Bryant.

“I hope you would agree, Mr Speaker, that I have always done my level best to come to the House first with any new announcements. As I told the House last Thursday in written and oral statements, the Government’s new steel trade measure comes into force tomorrow, immediately succeeding the expiry of the steel safeguard,…”

“A submission would probably come up to Ministers in my Department. Kate and I would probably have discussed it beforehand. We would have a little bit of a discussion with Lewis as well about how all of that would go down. We would have to bear in mind how that relates to other parts of our industrial strategy and wheth…”

“I have regularly and repeatedly met industry downstream and producers—I did so again yesterday—as has my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade, the hon. Member for Stockton North (Chris McDonald), the Minister for Industry, who is sitting by my side. We have striven at every point to ensure th…”

“He’s a cheeky one! No, I am not going to sign up to the Lib Dem campaign. However, there is a serious point here: it would be much better if the UK and the EU were to have a mutual exemption in relation to quotas and tariffs in this area. I have made the point already, but I will make it again: we are not the problem f…”

“I will start with the question about the Minister for Industry and his visit to Northern Ireland. He is visiting shipbuilding and aerospace companies. The visit does not specifically relate to steel at all. On steel generally, the Conservatives’ record is absolutely shocking, and we will not be going down the route tha…”

“I am sorry, but the right hon. Member simply is not listening to some of the things I have said. He referred to the business in Rotherham, which is Speciality Steel. Precisely one of the things that we changed—because we listened to people’s concerns—were the quotas that would have been met by Speciality Steel, because…”

“Of course I agree with my hon. Friend. I am, broadly speaking, in favour of free trade, but it has to be free and fair trade, and one of the issues in relation to overcapacity in steel is that there is not a level playing field across the world because of subsidies and anti-competitive practices that make it impossible…”

“As I explained last Thursday, we have introduced transitional arrangements to make sure that for the first quarter, imports are possible where people already have contracts to bring stuff in. As I say, 73% of UK imports of steel will not be in scope of the measure at all and can come into the UK easily. We are simply t…”

“We have always said that we want to provide protection for the categories of steel that are manufactured in the UK and that people can source in the UK. That is our primary aim. We need to keep that under review. As I said last Thursday—the hon. Gentleman will know this, as he was present—we will keep it under review f…”

“A lot of the China strategy is in the trade strategy. There is a slogan, as you know. I slightly disagree with the slogan because the slogan now only has two parts in it, and I think it should have three parts in it, but the slogan does explain part of the strategy. The two bits that are still in this slogan are that w…”

“We have a single strategy but we have lots of tactics. I hear the argument that has been made to you in Committee by several witnesses, which is that businesses get slightly different answers from different Departments, different sectors and so on. The truth of the matter is that that is inevitable. For instance, most …”

“Somewhat, but I do not want to overstate that because I am just being very straight with you that we are endlessly producing strategies, and then everybody wants to revise the strategy six months later. I am not sure that it actually provides any greater clarity for people. That is why we have set up the support servic…”

“That was one for me, probably. I think of it a bit like a Rubik’s cube. The moment you have twisted it this way to accommodate one country, then suddenly you have to twist it in the other direction. This is true of all our trading relationships and all the FTAs that we sort out. For instance, you might have Australia a…”

“If the hon. Gentleman is not prepared to take me at my word, I am sorry but I will never be able to satisfy him. The truth is that I have been very open: I came to the House to make a statement last Thursday; we laid a written ministerial statement as well, which is obviously available to all Members; and I made a comm…”

“I want to achieve frictionless trade, both within the UK internal market—I am determined to protect it as much as I possibly can—and with the whole of the European Union, because it is our single biggest trading partner. It was an act of monumental self-harm when we left the European Union that we did not achieve the f…”

“In the end, there is only one Government, and they are a whole Government and we act collectively. I am making the argument for why I would like us to be able to move in this direction. It is in our economic interests. Incidentally, I am very hopeful that we will get a Swiss deal done fairly soon as well, which could b…”

“First of all, we probably have too many structures of committees. Committees should be able to make decisions. We need to delegate better throughout the whole process of government. We should be less obsessed with Cabinet and more able to use the whole of the Government structure. I would introduce a rule that no Minis…”

“It might be useful, but it might be unachievable. That is my anxiety, because, first, things change pretty regularly, and so people might be relying on what the view was six months ago, which might have changed. Secondly, some of the areas where we would perceive greater risk and we would want to exercise greater discr…”

“For instance, in trade this is writ large, because we are often seeking a mandate to negotiate with another country or bloc. In order to do that, we have to get agreement from maybe seven or eight different Departments, each of which may be going, “We want you to try to achieve this” or “You must achieve this in your n…”

“In relation to that, there are some things we really wanted to achieve, not least because business had sent it to us. The 30-day visa thing that was arranged when the Prime Minister visited Beijing was really important to businesses. If we manage to get a coherent partnership on services, then that will be of significa…”