Bob Stewart: Although everyone in this Chamber would really like to give nurses a decent pay rise as much as possible, may I ask the Minister how that equates with equivalent grades in the police, the fire service and the armed forces, particularly given that, as she has already mentioned, they are on a pay freeze at the moment?
Bob Stewart: It is a pleasure to speak in the second day of the Budget debate. This Budget has one overriding aim—to kick-start our economy, which shrank by 10% last year. We are now set to borrow a peacetime record of £355 billion this year. This is jaw-dropping, I agree, as is the fact that 700,000 people have lost their jobs since the pandemic started. The Government’s primary duty is to do what...
Bob Stewart: As my right hon. Friend has already outlined, the last airstrike against Daesh took place on 11 February, when two Daesh encampments were destroyed by laser-guided, precision Paveway bombs, without one civilian casualty. Will he join me in congratulating those Royal Air Force aircrew based at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, who, without much publicity or fanfare, and quietly, bravely continue to...
Bob Stewart: May we have a debate on how we can loosen up opening times, as well as other measures, for businesses such as restaurants, pubs, shops and the like, so as to help them maximise their income as well as satisfy the inevitable surge in demand as the pandemic crisis lessens?
Bob Stewart: To ask the Secretary of State for International Trade, whether Gibraltar will be included in a future trade agreement with India.
Bob Stewart: I accept that commission from the Minister. I consider it a great honour and accept it wholeheartedly.
Bob Stewart: On 17 April 1984, Woman Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher of the Metropolitan police was fatally wounded by a gunman. He was hiding in the Libyan People’s Bureau, which was in St James’s Square in London. In this debate, I want to remember her by talking about her life and her tragic death, as well as making a request that she, even now, be considered for a posthumous gallantry award. I...
Bob Stewart: Thank you, on behalf of everyone who is campaigning. The more of us who say it, the better.
Bob Stewart: I give way to my honourable friend—he is my hon. Friend, even though he is in the Opposition.
Bob Stewart: I thank the hon. Member. All I can say to that is that I entirely agree with him on the Police Service of Northern Ireland and its predecessor, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. To make a little aside, when someone is killed in the military, they give out the Elizabeth Cross to the next of kin. I would have thought that that is quite a nice thing to consider doing for the police. It is just a...
Bob Stewart: When I was in the Army, I was badly hurt, and I was put under the care of the NHS. In turn, it sent me to a private practitioner, in Harley Street actually, who did me the world of good, and I paid nothing. Now, as an MP, I am frequently asked, “Are the Government intending to privatise the NHS?”. My reply is, “No, of course they aren’t, and very little of the NHS is privatised.”...
Bob Stewart: I thank my good friend for giving way. He was a commanding officer, as I was, and will have sent people to courts martial when he did not really want to. The Bill brings in the ability for commanding officers to give their men and women additional support when they have to send them to a court martial, and will mean they can involve themselves more in the court martial by saying, for...
Bob Stewart: It is absolutely right that military personnel should get special recognition for housing, education and medical treatment. I particularly like clauses 4 to 6 of the Bill, with the powers to rectify mistakes. As an ex- commanding officer, I sometimes had to send people to district court martials when I did not want to. I would have liked to have had some influence on what happened...
Bob Stewart: I have a long personal memory of Houthi atrocities and well recall the activities against my father’s battalion, the Aden Protectorate Levies, when I was a boy in Aden. Several of my father’s brother officers were killed—one in a very brutal way—by Houthis in June 1955. It does not surprise me that the Houthis have utterly failed to reciprocate the Saudi-led coalition’s unilateral...
Bob Stewart: Yesterday I was speaking on the telephone to Mrs Bunny England, who was a WAAF in the second world war, and, at 92, is very, very young. She tells me that she is housebound and no one has contacted her about a vaccination. I assured her that I would inform the quite excellent and responsive South East London Clinical Commissioning Group about her case, and that I was sure she would be...
Bob Stewart: I was born four years after the genocide of the holocaust ended, but I have been a witness to genocide. In 1992-93, I was the British UN commander in Bosnia, and the whole country was an example of genocide. I do not have much time, so let me concentrate on one incident on one day: the Ahmic house in Ahmići, on 22 April 1993. I approached the house to discover that a man and a boy had been...
Bob Stewart: I thank my really good friend, my right hon. Friend, for letting me intervene. I speak from experience, because I have run an organisation—I will not be too precise—and there were several hundred people on my books. Not one was a child. We did not need a law to tell us not to use children. We did not use children, and there was no flipping law that stopped us.
Bob Stewart: I thank the right hon. Gentleman, who happens to be a good friend, for letting me intervene. I am slightly worried that if we put something into statute and law, it would be utterly tragic if someone who was operating covertly was killed as a result of having a constraint on him or her—there are hers too—that identifies them, and the next thing we know they are stuck in a ditch somewhere...
Bob Stewart: Thank you, Madam Deputy—Mr Deputy Speaker. Forgive me—a slip of the tongue.
Bob Stewart: Forgive me—I am on my knees. Having done this sort of thing, albeit in a relatively minor way, I want to clarify one thing. Often, information was given to people who were doing this kind of work in the field by juveniles. That does not make the juvenile a source. That information can still obviously be passed on, but clearly there are restrictions on using that juvenile in future. However,...