Speeches by Downie.

“You say you are very good at that and that is fine. How do you make sure that the companies are communicating that? As you say, that is where people will go for their information.”

“Consumers will not read that. They will see the price cap moving and changing. Again, this is about helping people to understand how the price cap is got to. They will just see their energy bill going up or down.”

“To pick up on some of what Melanie Onn was saying, there are certain words and terms that the Government use that mean absolutely nothing to anybody else or through repetition—“innovation”, “sustainability”—at some point they lose all meaning. They are defined as a good thing but no one knows what they mean. Is the ter…”

“Do we need to stop talking about one overarching thing, net zero? Should we now just say, “We are making your energy bills cheaper”? Do the public care how we are doing it? Do we need to get beyond the climate idea? That is one of the purposes, obviously, but do the public just need to know we are doing a good thing an…”

“The risk is that by calling it an agenda, we have made it a target and you can shoot it down. It is something you can use to undermine, as we have seen politically recently. The consensus around the need to tackle climate change and a warming planet has become—because it encompasses so many things, anything that is bad…”

“How do we get out of that?”

“I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement. In particular, the Government are delivering for Scotland once again with more renewable energy investment. He also talked, rightly, about Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine and why they have had a direct impact on ordinary people in this country, who we must protect now a…”

“I totally agree. I will cover those points about the challenges that we face in the Arctic from both those powers.”

“I absolutely agree that we must do more on all those points. Russia seeks to dominate the Arctic routes militarily and economically, while China positions itself as a near-Arctic state investing in infrastructure and shipping lanes to secure influence over future trade corridors. We must understand our geography and pr…”

“I thank my hon. Friend for that excellent intervention. Those are two points I will come on to, as to why the UK must act independently but also with our European allies in the High North and the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap in particular. We must always remember that Putin will respond to actions, not words, and we cannot…”

“I could not agree more. The UK’s position should be very clear: Greenland’s future is to be determined by people in Greenland and absolutely no one else. Initiatives in the UK must be matched with urgency and sustained funding. We must see a clear path to the 3.5%, plus the 1.5%, of defence spending agreed at the NATO …”

“I believe that that is what I did—or I certainly hope that is what I did. I would certainly like to see things move much faster, and in a way that is much clearer about the UK’s defence posture and intentions. However, to justify that action, the British people need to understand the threat that we face, and that must …”

“Once again, I could not agree more. Going back to the poisonings in Salisbury, the UK public need to be very aware that Vladimir Putin is now a threat to our shores—he has been in the past, and he will be in the future. It will be the most vulnerable people in the UK who will pay the price of that aggression, which is …”

“I beg to move, That this House has considered the impact of the Arctic and High North on UK security. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I am delighted to introduce this debate and emphasise the importance, as we have seen in the past week, of the Arctic and the High North to UK security. The UK…”

“I am going to pick up some elements around energy security. There are two aspects. I will start with the security of supply. We have also heard arguments that reducing reliance on fossil fuels strengthens security by limiting dependence on foreign supplies of gas. Do you agree with that? Does replacing the gas to deriv…”

“I would like to move on to more physical security of energy supplies. We have seen in Ukraine and elsewhere—and you alluded to it as well, Doug—that idea of energy as a target of war, via kinetic means, cyber-attack or anything else. You could argue at the moment that oil and gas is vulnerable. I guess that the questio…”

“Is it that, up to this point, we have not thought about physical security of our energy supply, including transit of LNG, in the same way? We have not thought about how we secure our energy supply in every sense.”

“Doug, do you have anything to add to that, particularly on that element about Chinese technology?”

“Can I just ask you about that idea in particular? We know that Ukraine has a more distributed power network now as a result, so that it is not just one target. It felt that that more distributed network is less vulnerable. Yes, there are more targets, but, fundamentally, you cannot take them down as easily, because you…”

“I have a very quick question on SMRs. I was in the US recently and a couple of people mentioned something that they were working on called the Janus programme, which was the involvement of the US Department of War, as we were instructed to call it, on SMR development because of their nuclear skills. Is that something t…”