Liam Byrne: To ask the Secretary of State for International Trade, what recent assessment her Department has made of the extent of prohibitions or controls preventing or regulating goods, wares, articles, and merchandise imports with content manufactured in Xinjiang to the UK.
Liam Byrne: I thank the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) for bringing this debate to the House and for all their work in bringing together the superb set of proposals in the economic crime manifesto. It is an important debate for us to have, even on a day like this, for the simple reason that at the heart of every...
Liam Byrne: Exactly. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will quickly run through five parts of the economic manifesto that have to be at the core of the next economic crime Bill. One of the virtues of having this debate today, at this moment of great flux in our politics, is that I hope to put on the record the cross-party consensus that now exists about the provisions that need to go into economic...
Liam Byrne: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The joy of the Minister’s position must surely be that Members of this House have done the heavy lifting for him. Between us, we have sketched out a pretty comprehensive catalogue of measures for the Bill: we have not quite put the clause numbers in, but I think we have set out most of the measures. Those measures have to start with information about...
Liam Byrne: According to intelligence reports that I have seen, a serving FSB officer reported in 2017, “Aleksandr Lebedev is considered by the FSB to be an important asset”. More recently, he has significantly expanded his businesses in occupied Crimea; pleaded with the Kremlin for economic help for occupied Crimea; and was revealed as the indirect owner of a company called Energomash, which...
Liam Byrne: The World Bank has just mobilised $170 billion of emergency response to the current crisis, but the first question everybody I have spoken to in the World Bank over the last year is: why on earth has the UK cut its commitment to the World Bank when we could be using that to mobilise more money in the future?
Liam Byrne: rose—
Liam Byrne: I hope that the Minister may come on to not just the £10 billion of the aid budget, but the Government’s strategy on the £19 billion of special drawing rights.
Liam Byrne: Will the Minister give way?
Liam Byrne: Let me declare my interest, at the outset of this debate, as the chair of the international parliamentary network on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. I congratulate the Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), on bringing this debate to the House. Her timing, as ever, is impeccable. All of us here in this Chamber are watching...
Liam Byrne: rose—
Liam Byrne: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, my neighbour, but I disagree with him on this point. With the International Monetary Fund, for example, where we have collectively issued $650 billion of special drawing rights, it would have been sensible for the UK to have stepped up and provided some leadership, sharing a much bigger fraction of the £19 billion we have been given. That would have...
Liam Byrne: I am grateful to the Chair of the Select Committee, who is making a brilliant speech. Does she agree that it is in Britain’s interests to use multilateral institutions, rather than to simply donate bilaterally, because that multiplies the impact that we can have?
Liam Byrne: I add my congratulations to the Secretary of State on her new appointment. I serve the most income-deprived constituency in the country, yet I am very proud that my constituency sent more children to university than any other constituency in the west midlands last year. In an interview earlier this year, she said that many of the degrees that those students study were Mickey Mouse degrees....
Liam Byrne: I was relieved to see the G7 recognise that 200 million people now face starvation around the world, along with the pledge to mobilise £100 billion in IMF special drawing rights to help to alleviate the crisis. Last week, however, the Foreign Secretary could not tell us how much the UK has been given in special drawing rights nor what her target was for sharing them back—presumably because...
Liam Byrne: My right hon. Friend is making a brilliant speech. Is he aware of comments by the US trade representative Ambassador Tai, from Speaker Pelosi and indeed from a host of our American allies in Congress? They have been very clear with us that there will be no US-UK trade deal unless there is a durable way forward on the Northern Ireland question. Not only does this reckless approach risk...
Liam Byrne: Could the Minister say a word about how he will use the missions to drive the reduction of inequalities in our country? One approach that the Labour Government tried was the use of floor targets in neighbourhood renewal funds. He may have a different approach, but that detail is terribly important.
Liam Byrne: I think that what unites us across the House is an ambition to avoid the postcode where someone is born defining their possibilities in life. I think that that is something we share, but it is the reality for too many of the people we represent. We now live in a country where it takes five generations for the heirs of someone born in the lowest income group to rise up and even earn national...
Liam Byrne: I am grateful to the Minister for giving way, and appreciate the way in which he is stepping through these points. Is an offence created by the provider of a social media platform if it enables someone to spread harmful messages? Does it count as a proxy, in effect?
Liam Byrne: I apologise to the Home Secretary, who is not in her place, for missing the first 11 minutes of her opening speech. As I think the Minister will have spotted, there is wide consensus across the House about many of the provisions in this Bill that is matched only by a level of frustration that the Bill has been an awful long time coming. We have been debating the risks of hybrid warfare, from...