Speeches by Cooper.

“Very quickly, Mr Small, I wonder whether I could come to you. We heard about American tariffs. Economic shots have been fired between the US and China, notwithstanding the recent visit by President Trump to China. Are we innocent bystanders in this war? Are we likely to get caught in the crossfire? Is there much we can…”

“Do the Chinese think that they can win without fighting?”

“Again, going back to that leadership question, we heard leadership being mentioned again. Is someone interested in taking a grip of this and taking the lead? Could we have that role?”

“Clare Barclay, you talked there about your mandate letter, but when you spoke to us before you were very keen to tell us about the fact that the Government intended to put you on a statutory footing. In fact, you went as far as to say that the statutory footing was one of the reasons you took the job. That has not happ…”

“One of the difficulties that I have with this Government is that the inevitable never happens and the unexpected always does. Everyone is agreed that this should happen, yet somehow it is not happening. Is that a frustration for you?”

“This is probably for you, David. You have made a very powerful case for the North sea in terms of transition, protecting jobs and securing domestic supply. Looking specifically at gas and something such as the Jackdaw gas field, which is very controversial, would licensing that make a difference to domestic and commerc…”

“Is there any pressure on it, though? Intent is wonderful. I intend to be a dilatory playboy one day, but I have absolutely no idea how I am going to get there. Intent is marvellous. It is wonderful. It is fantastic to have great intentions. You need this, do you not? You need this underpinning. If the Government are se…”

“Mr Clark, you are keen on having a statutory footing. What statutory powers do you need? How are you approaching this? Are you pressing Government on this? Are you asking for this? What are you doing?”

“Does the shadow Minister share my astonishment that the Scottish Government refuse to talk about so-called spatial squeeze? It is a major issue for the fishing fleet, because it simply cannot trawl in between the wind turbines. The Government appear to deny the existence of the problem, but it is a massive difficulty f…”

“T5. Happy St George’s day, Mr Speaker. We face many threats, but happily dragons are no longer one of them. The Government maintain that the messages between Morgan McSweeney and his mentor Peter Mandelson are under the aegis of the Metropolitan police and therefore cannot be released, but surely the questions are crit…”

“There is a lot of that here.”

“We are talking about what Britain can do, and the Government published a critical minerals strategy in November. There has been some criticism of that, a bit of it from this Committee as well, in that it sets targets but not really a road map for how we are going to achieve that. I wonder what you think about that stra…”

“You talked about Europe. Do you think that we should have a strategic alliance with Europe in a general sense, or should we be looking to countries such as Canada, for instance, that have supplies? They have a lot of minerals in the ground. Should we be partnering with them? India, for instance, is another huge opportu…”

“Magnets were mentioned there. Rare earth magnets are critical to things like drones. We think of drones as being relatively simple, but they are not. Rare earth magnets for drones is another area that we are trying to dominate. We are hearing that America is doing this by trolleying money to it, and their pockets are d…”

“Talking about the industrial landscape, the dragon in the room, if not the elephant, is that China does not really play fair, does it? You talk about tungsten. If we were to try to maximise our tungsten reserves, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that China would artificially affect the market by potentially p…”

“I will come to you, James. It strikes me sometimes that we are feeding the Chinese dragon in the hope that it will immolate us last. Is that really where we are? Do we have to go to China and try to be diplomatic and friends with them?”

“Professor, we have a destination in mind. Do we have the road map to get us there, do you think?”

“Have you any sense of who that should be? Is there an existing Department? Should it sit with DBT?”

“Thank you, Mr Speaker. I do not know whether to stand at the Dispatch Box or on it. For want of a horseshoe nail, the kingdom was lost. The defence of our country today rests on modern nail-makers—the small and medium-sized enterprises supplying small but vital parts for frigates and fighter jets and for our fighting m…”

“Listening to you here today, it strikes me sometimes that we are feeding the Chinese dragon in hopes that it will immolate us last. Other countries seem very keen to put in—Rain, you made an excellent pitch for free trade; Adam Smith would have loved that—but we cannot be naive about this. China is a threat. It is that…”