Robert Walter: The Leader of the House will be aware that the South West Regional Grand Committee met in Exeter at the beginning of September. She will also be aware that the Government were heavily defeated on the motion that was on the Order Paper. That was a result of the frustration felt by Members who were present about the fact that after we had heard the speeches of the Minister, the Opposition...
Robert Walter: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government what steps his Department is taking to protect (a) the green belt and (b) open green spaces in Dorset.
Robert Walter: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Robert Walter: For the past five minutes or so, I have listened to the hon. Gentleman's tale of doom about what is going to happen to Germany. Can he tell me how much money the German taxpayer has used to bail out those other economies? I am not aware of any.
Robert Walter: I do not propose to say much about the European Union, although I want to talk about European affairs. However, I cannot help reflecting on the statistics just cited by the hon. Member for Glasgow, South-West (Mr. Davidson), and by the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) earlier, about some of the votes in the European parliamentary elections. The hon. Member for Ilford, South told...
Robert Walter: I am interested to hear the hon. Gentleman's view on that. Today I want to deal with a question of democracy in Europe: the denial by Governments of well-established principles of democracy in the Council of Europe. Her Majesty's Government are not only complicit in that denial, but are a leading advocate of it. I should give a little background. Mr. Terry Davis, a former Member of this...
Robert Walter: And the anthem.
Robert Walter: I am grateful to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for calling me early in this debate. I have some regret, however, that that is as a consequence of the face that not a single Labour Back Bencher is rising to make a substantive contribution. That is symptomatic of this Government's attitude to rural communities and the effects of the recession on them. That may be the reason why, after the European...
Robert Walter: I do not have those figures immediately to hand, but I will come back to the hon. Gentleman. The percentage is relatively low—probably just over 2 per cent., but the trend and the effect of the increases on the community are worrying. All those people have lost their jobs, with little prospect of getting new ones in the short term. My constituency has a high proportion of retired people,...
Robert Walter: The Minister said that he thought that rural areas were holding up well. How does that translate into the 212 per cent. increase in male unemployment in North Dorset in the past 12 months, or does the Minister think that all those people are registering new tractors?
Robert Walter: I am very willing to help. None of the correspondence to which I referred relates to recent events; it all relates to matters that took place before the extradition.
Robert Walter: I am very grateful for the opportunity to raise again in the House the case of my constituent, Mr. Giles Carlyle-Clarke. It will probably be helpful if I provide a little background to this case, which I think concerns a serious question of human rights. It is also no coincidence that most of the extradition cases that find themselves being discussed on the Floor of this House concern...
Robert Walter: She is still an MP, of course. On that occasion, she was reluctant to respond and it is also true that she sought Mr. Speaker's assistance in trying to rule the debate out of order on the basis that it might be sub judice. Mr. Speaker supported my position and the debate went ahead, although the Minister was still reluctant to give answers to some of the questions that I raised. I know that...
Robert Walter: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what directions he gave to the UK Permanent Representative to the Council of Europe on voting in the meeting of Ministers' Deputies on the transmission to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe of the list of candidates for the post of Secretary General of the Council of Europe.
Robert Walter: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what discussions he has had with the UK Permanent Representative to the Council of Europe on the short-listing of candidates for the post of Secretary General of the Council of Europe since the resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the electoral process for the Secretary General adopted on 29...
Robert Walter: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what discussions he had with the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Mr. Prescott) in his capacity as leader of the UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, before directing the UK Permanent Representative to the Council of Europe on the position to be taken in the meeting of Ministers'...
Robert Walter: To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland how many prisoners serving sentences for each category of offence have been released on licence under the Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act 1998; and how many such prisoners were classified as belonging to a ( a) loyalist and (b) republican organisation.
Robert Walter: Like my right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot) and others, I was a little perplexed by "Defence in the UK", the title of today's debate. I have a major military establishment in my constituency; I referred to it in my interventions, particularly on the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (John Smith), whose constituency will get my defence college when it...
Robert Walter: I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention and share his frustration about the Greek veto over Macedonia's participation in NATO. If we can, we ought to knock some heads together. I remember being in Skopje not long ago with a former Greek Defence Minister, who as we walked into the meeting said that he could not give a stuff what they called their country, but as soon as we were in the...
Robert Walter: The hon. Gentleman is doing a brilliant marketing job, but I am not sure that the instructors at the Defence College of Communications and Information Systems in Blandford would accept his description of the current CIS training regime as "chalk and talk". Could the hon. Gentleman give us some idea—I alluded to this in my question to the Minister earlier—of the likely time scale? It seems...
