Dr Dickson Mabon: As that is such a profoundly overwhelming proportion of the total, does it not suggest that BNOC should remain an integrated trading, exploration and production company?
Dr Dickson Mabon: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that of the 60 per cent. mentioned, 10 per cent. is due to taxation? Is he suggesting that the British Gas Corporation wanted that increase?
Dr Dickson Mabon: The hon. Gentleman is speaking extremely well, but I do not quite understand how he can say tht we are committed to the PWR and that we have missed the CANDU bus.
Dr Dickson Mabon: Is the Secretary of State aware that the announcement of the date is fair, in view of the timetable prior to the inquiry, for all the representations to be made, not only by the governmental agencies but by other bodies, some voluntary and some private? The Government, if they are still in office, will presumably follow the precedent set by the Labour Government and have a debate—with, I...
Dr Dickson Mabon: I had expected another speech from a Government Member, with whom I should have been delighted to cross swords. However, no doubt that will happen on another occasion. May I say, uncharitably, to the hon. Member for Bedford (Mr. Skeet) that I hope that he is not chosen by the Committee of Selection to serve on the Standing Committee, because I do not wish the Bill to be guillotined, because...
Dr Dickson Mabon: I do not complain about that criticism of what I said, but I maintain that essentially the Act is intact. There is one difference between the 1975 Act and the Bill, with which we profoundly disagree, and with which any parliamentarian of any party would disagree, although admittedly when one is in Government the temptations to original sin are sometimes overwhelming. However, a...
Dr Dickson Mabon: I stand corrected. I accept that statement, which supports the criticism that I have made—that it is a bad Bill. The Bill must be considered carefully in Committee. I suspect that whole sections of the Bill will have to be taken away and rewritten. It will not be the first time that a Minister has done that: I have done so on occasion. I remember listening earnestly to the hon. Member for...
Dr Dickson Mabon: It is not a matter for me grossly to misrepresent the Secretary of State or for the hon. Gentleman to defend him wrongly. It is a matter for Parliament properly to decide in the full—
Dr Dickson Mabon: The hon. Gentleman must not be impatient and unparliamentary. He must listen. Parliament must endorse the nature of the articles of association, otherwise we are simply allowing the Secretary of State to decide to change his mind whenever he wants and to give us in the beginning articles of association which we have all presumed to be in a particular form but which turn out to be quite...
Dr Dickson Mabon: I agree, Mr. Speaker. The Minister has had an infernal time in his own constituency and elsewhere. He has lost the gas-gathering pipeline, although that was not entirely his fault. He has lost the Invergordon smelter—again, not entirely his fault, but there we are. But I give him credit for scoring a bull point in having Britoil—if it is ever created—established as a Scottish-based...
Dr Dickson Mabon: It sounds like trunk roads.
Dr Dickson Mabon: May I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on the statement he has just made that Britoil will be a Scottish registered company? That is a tremendous step forward, but shall we be told a little more about the articles of association, the distribution and dispersal of ownership and particularly foreign ownership?
Dr Dickson Mabon: asked the Prime Minister what are her official engagements for 10 December.
Dr Dickson Mabon: Will the right hon. Lady be seeing today one of her senior economic advisers, Professor Alan Budd? If she does so, will she ask him to explain his speech 10 days ago when he said that there was no intellectual foundation for the argument that monetarism can defeat inflation? Would it not be wiser for her to discuss with her advisers how to defeat unemployment?
Dr Dickson Mabon: The hon. Gentleman may hear from the SNP, but he will certainly not hear anything from the SDP, other than what my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) said earlier and what I have said on many occasions, which is that we do not like the Bill.
Dr Dickson Mabon: Does the Minister agree that FLAGS would not exist but for the previous arrangement? I am pleased that the Government have managed to welcome one system for the gathering of gas, but does not that system represent about one-tenth of the patchwork quilt that we must weave together to achieve the scale of gas gathering that a common carrier line would have provided?
Dr Dickson Mabon: asked the Secretary of State for Energy what new plans he has to avoid excessive flaring of gas in the United Kingdom oilfields of the North Sea.
Dr Dickson Mabon: Just as the demand for oil in the first and second quarters of 1979 was due to the unsettling effect of the Iranian situation, whereby the Government were willing to flare gas in order to get a higher production of oil, could not the situation arise, in the absence of a common carrier gas-gathering pipeline, whereby we may have or, to reduce the oil flow to avoid excessive flaring of gas,...
Dr Dickson Mabon: When will the Royal high school be ready?
Dr Dickson Mabon: As regards privatisation, Ministers' earlier announcements have been of two different types. The first proposal was that there should be direct investment in yards, such as Yarrows and in one or two naval shipbuilders. The second proposal was that there should be an equity holding in British Shipbuilders. Which proposal do the Government favour?