Speeches by Hayes.

“My hon. Friend’s scepticism is well founded, because many on the Government Benches—I do not say all—could barely sustain the result of the referendum and regarded it with outrage. The people had spoken and contradicted the long-standing prejudice of the liberal bourgeoisie. That is why they tried to block Brexit—indee…”

“I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his tribute to the Conservative party; it has indeed been a great party and remains so. On entanglement, he makes a valid point about co-operation and collaboration, but that has always been the case. Of course we must work with other countries, but the core issue here is authori…”

“I am extremely grateful to my namesake for giving way. He is making an interesting speech. He is right that global power and its growth is making people feel that they cannot affect decision making; that is a profound point, but we need to root power closer to people, not detach it from them, as happens when power is g…”

“rose—”

“Is not the truth of the matter that showing humanity means recognising, as the Minister has implied, that some people are coming, perfectly understandably, for entirely economic reasons? If you thought you could get a better deal in Britain for you and your family, you would turn up and say you were claiming asylum on …”

“We will move to the winding-up speeches now but, given how much time we have left, I emphasise that Front Benchers should not fall into the Gladstone trap of becoming intoxicated by the exuberance of their own verbosity.”

“I remind the remaining Back Benchers that interventions should be pertinent and pithy.”

“I call the Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, the hon. Member for Rutherglen (Michael Shanks).”

“Will the Minister give way?”

“Might my hon. Friend add to her list of questions and ask about the experience of other countries that have looked at these matters? For those countries that have used alternatives to having children in trials, how effective have such alternatives been?”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Rebecca Paul) for securing this debate. Everyone, regardless of their particularities, deserves dignity, but that open-mindedness has in recent years been supplanted by an ideology-driven series of …”

“Or in Spalding.”

“My hon. Friend will know Socrates famously said that the only thing worth knowing is that we know very little, but we do know that these marbles are part of western civilisation. They are not exclusively part of Greek civilisation; we all have ownership of them, and the British Museum’s stewardship has been profound an…”

“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. You, like me, have long been a supporter of Britain’s nuclear test veterans, so I wonder whether you could advise me. Given that Government lawyers have finally admitted, after 73 years of denial, that tests may have taken place at the time that those veterans were in the south Atlantic…”

“Thank you for inviting me. You will know that the Groceries Code Adjudicator was put in place by the coalition Government, of which I was a member, following a review by the Competition and Markets Authority about 10 years earlier, in 2001. It was put in place to enforce the groceries code, which was established after …”

“Yes.”

“The chairman of the Sentencing Council has argued that the sentence should be tailored to the offender, but my constituents—and, I suspect, those of the Secretary of State—think that the sentence should be tailored to the offence and its effect on the victim. That is what counts, not the background, circumstances, hist…”

“My right hon. Friend deserves great credit for championing the cause of justice and obliging the Government to follow suit, albeit grudgingly. Leaving aside the fundamental injustice that he describes—the two-tier justice system—does he acknowledge that what the Sentencing Council proposes and continues to do undermine…”

“The right hon. Lady is right about the moving process or trend that she has described, but the trouble is that it is part of a bigger problem, is it not? It is the problem of judicial activism, and it is not new. For some time, judicial activists have sought to do exactly what she has said, and it is they, not people i…”

“Of course that is true, but it is not the whole story because the persecution of Christians predates much of that. For example, in the middle east, the Ottoman empire gave licence for persecution on exactly the grounds I described: aggressive Islamism perpetuated by the Ottomans led to the persecution of Christians, pa…”