Speeches by Byrne.

“Just to give you an example of the confusion that bedevils us at the moment, as recently as last year we were saying that we absolutely needed primary steelmaking capabilities as a sovereign capability. We all came back here on a Saturday to put through the Steel Industry (Special Measures) Bill, and we spent £400 mill…”

“The biggest threat to business right now is from spiking gilt prices that are driving up interest rates. They are rising in part due to the expectation of a costly energy subsidy for businesses and households. Is it not now time to grasp the nettle and shift the policy costs of transition off electricity bills and on t…”

“Thank you very much for that statement, Prime Minister. I know you are chairing Cobra on the war in Iran later this afternoon. Things are moving very quickly and the fog of war remains thick, but what is your central planning scenario for how this conflict ends, and what is your view about the timeframes?”

“Then will you revisit the decision made by Ministers a couple of weeks ago to not publish a list of sovereign capabilities? We are expecting businesses to be psychic at the moment and guess what we will build, what we will buy and, crucially, what we will safeguard against investment from China.”

“The Select Committee recently flagged that small businesses in our country now face pandemic-level pressures. In April, standing charges for energy are set to rise by 60%, with no price cap protection. Now, soaring oil and gas prices threaten to be the final straw for thousands of SMEs. Will the Secretary of State make…”

“This is the most extraordinary country on earth. It is the home of the industrial revolution, and the home of the scientific revolution. It is a country with an abundance of ideas, and also a place that is blessed with trillions of pounds of long-term investment capital. If we in this House cannot put together a shared…”

“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The chief executive of Fujitsu came before the Committee to say that Fujitsu did indeed have a moral obligation to make a contribution. That is why we were so surprised when earlier this year, when we asked for him to return, he said that no provision had yet been made. For a company…”

“At the end of a long day, let me express my gratitude to the Backbench Business Committee for providing us with this time to debate the supplementary estimates and the priorities of the Department for Business and Trade. I rise to open this debate and simply make three broad points. This is an important debate because,…”

“The plan that the Chancellor has set out this afternoon shows that inflation, debt and bills are down, and that headroom, growth and living standards are up. That is testament to a plan for stability that is working, but that stability would be undermined if she surrendered to the idea of the £47 billion-worth of unfun…”

“I, too, want to welcome the Bill; I think it has a lot of good measures. However, whether it becomes the watershed Bill that I think it could be depends on whether much of the debate we have heard tonight gets translated into successful amendments over the next couple of weeks. We all have an ideal of democracy in this…”

“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I believe that I heard the hon. Gentleman accuse a political party in the Chamber of a “criminal abuse of democracy”. Did I hear that correctly? Is that remark in order, or does the hon. Gentleman—I use that word loosely—now need to back up his allegation with some hard eviden…”

“I think the diffidence that we have heard towards international law this afternoon is as unwise as, perhaps, it is unsurprising. For the sake of clarity, can the Prime Minister confirm what would have needed to have been true for it to be legal for him to have joined the offensive strikes last week? Surely that would h…”

“Martin, you know about this!”

“It is new money in the sense that they have had to put extra money into steel and the Post Office. There are obviously then questions about whether that money is being wasted, because there is not a steel strategy that tells us that this is a sensible investment. On the Post Office, the big question is: when on earth i…”

“Thanks, Chair. I appreciate that you have already given us one, and we are back for a second. There are three reasons for asking again. First, DBT got the biggest single uplift in supplementary estimates, so of all the supplementary estimates tabled, DBT was top of the list. It is about £1 billion extra—it is an 18% in…”

“The hon. Member is exactly right. When the Committee published our report, we lamented that there was not a full-scale, full-blown implementation plan alongside the proposals. To a degree, those are difficult things to write, because it is difficult to forecast how quickly the treaty will go through the ratification pr…”

“I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate. I want to start with huge thanks to my colleagues on the Business and Trade Committee for helping to inform the debate with a report that was agreed cross-party and that provided, if anything, a reasonably warm welcome for the Government’s work in securing this…”

“The evidence that we took in the Business and Trade Committee did raise concerns about the impact of the deal on both the brick industry and the ceramics industry in the UK. The Minister knows that the Trade Remedies Authority is not really equipped with the tools that it needs to defend us in this new world; nor has t…”

“My hon. Friend is right. I salute her work on the Committee, which is far stronger for her contribution. The bottom line is that the Government has said, in strategy after strategy, that sovereign capabilities are important and that they need to be developed. What we have in the response that has been published today i…”

“It is an open secret in this House that every day, every week, there is some controversy between the growth Departments and the security Departments in government. If we are to stand on our feet in the years ahead, we have to make sure that our industry is fighting fit and not undermined by unfair foreign competition. …”