Speeches by Bryant.

“I think you know precisely what that means, Mr Byrne.”

“I will. I am not evading. As you can see, I am being fairly open about my views and where the Government want to get to. The second bit is that, if you wanted to have a forced labour ban on imports into the UK, which is more difficult, you have to decide what constitutes the offence, who is committing the offence, what…”

“I will come to that. There are two different elements here. First of all is the question that may be the most effective means of bringing about a change, which is to introduce due diligence requirements on company directors, who could potentially be civilly liable, so that they would have to make sure that, within thei…”

“I am obviously very forgettable. It is a very well-made point. It is utterly bizarre that the British armed forces are not attired using fabrics produced in the United Kingdom. As I say, I do not want to go too far down this route just because our supply chains across the whole of Europe are very complex. A point I mad…”

“It might mean a variety of different things. It is messy. It is not as tidy an answer as I am sure everybody would like. In some sectors like critical minerals, we have to engage with allies who are in the same space as we are to find a means of getting to a place, as we have laid out in our critical minerals strategy,…”

“Was it you who introduced me to the company?”

“For that matter, I remember being in Sarajevo in 2003 and the Italian commanding officer telling me how proud he was that they had moved from Dolce & Gabbana to Versace uniforms.”

“Yes. Let me just finish the point I was making, if that is okay. Nine per cent. of our GDP is industry; Europe’s is 14%. If we want to engage in a degree of reindustrialisation in the UK, then we are going to have to be able to answer some of these questions. That is why the steel trade measure has been quite difficult…”

“Yes. As a nation, we are not as industrially focused as some others are in Europe. Nine per cent. of our GDP is industry.”

“We have done a little bit of that already. One of the first things we did in July 2024—I will write to correct this if I have got this wrong—was a change about steel procurement in particular. I am in favour of that, but I return to my fundamental principle, which is that I am in favour of free trade as long as it is f…”

“I will let you in on a secret as long as you do not tell anybody else. If it were entirely up to me, I would join the European Union, but it is not entirely up to me, I hastily add, and that is not the formal government position. The serious point is that it has a big bazooka, or it calls it a big bazooka, but the trut…”

“We have the presidency of the G20 next year. Somebody else will be making a decision about what should be top of our agenda, but that will undoubtedly be one of the areas that we want to consider, not least because the WTO has failed to address all these overcapacity issues, subsidy issues and the transparency rate. It…”

“Nothing has changed in my views. People in the Department would say that I am just as robust on these issues as I ever was before. One of the advantages of engaging with China is that you are able to say these things directly to the Chinese Government and to raise these issues. I know that the Prime Minister did when h…”

“Part of the answer is the measures we have introduced, but also the Trade Remedies Authority. It has had 30 findings against China, as it were, and indeed there is another one that is going through the processes at the moment. Sometimes there is a reluctance from businesses to engage in that process, and we need to thi…”

“One of the things we are doing that happens tomorrow is the new steel trade measures that we are introducing, because we recognise that, if we are going to make sure that we have more of a level playing field for British steel production, then we have to have quotas and tariffs in place to do precisely that. On the who…”

“I might have to write to you with the precise answer.”

“Certainly the pillars of that, yes.”

“A submission would probably come up to Ministers in my Department. Kate and I would probably have discussed it beforehand. We would have a little bit of a discussion with Lewis as well about how all of that would go down. We would have to bear in mind how that relates to other parts of our industrial strategy and wheth…”

“If I give an example, this goes back to when I was Telecoms Minister. There was the merger of Three and Vodafone, and obviously there were concerns in relation to part of the ownership of Three, because Vodafone had contracts with the MOD and other organisations and parts of Government. First, we wanted to make sure th…”

“We have done 30 anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures against China.”