Speeches by Jopp.

“The hon. Member reminds me that I, too, should declare that I am a member of the APPG, and that he is my chair. I received the following email from Kerry Lee: “I am writing to express my full support for your opposition to the proposed redevelopment of Kempton Park Racecourse and to thank you for securing Tuesday's deb…”

“The hon. Member makes a very good point. I think Europe’s largest antiques fair happens at Kempton Park racecourse twice every month. I have been around it and met stallholders who travel from Germany and France. It is absolutely enormous and produces oodles of cash for the Jockey Club—I cannot understand why the Jocke…”

“On Armed Forces Day, I had the huge honour of unveiling a veterans’ buddy bench in Sunbury Park in my Spelthorne constituency. The idea is that the bench is dedicated to veterans; veterans go there, and members of the public are encouraged to go and sit with them. As the Front Benchers go around the country, will they …”

“I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam) on securing this urgent question and thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting it, because Shabir Ahmed is a vile individual and his continued presence at liberty on our streets is an affront to every single value that we hold dear. The Minister has come …”

“More money for defence is a good thing, so I welcome the Secretary of State’s defence investment plan. He has just said that he is confident that we will make good on the commitment to 3.5% in the next spending review. I do not know why he is so confident about that. The current Prime Minister will not be Prime Ministe…”

“T7. During Armed Forces Week, it is such a pleasure to see so many members of the armed forces around the Palace of Westminster, and in particular to see so many members of the senior service in the Public Gallery. When they came in, I thought it might be a coup d’état and that I just had not had the memo, but then I r…”

“Double dip!”

“I am grateful to the Minister for his statement. When the Minister came here with the statement the other day, I asked him about Thames Covers, a boat fitters in my constituency which relies on stainless steel tubing, and got lots of warm words about, “We’re going to go away and consult.” I listened to his statement to…”

“indicated assent.”

“Will the Minister give way?”

“I am so grateful to the Minister for giving way. I am also conscious of the Chair’s prohibition on stretching the envelope and referring only to the Minister’s own words. She said that the purpose of this whole procedure today was to make local government reorganisation easier for residents to understand and for a safe…”

“Will the Minister give way on that point?”

“I am a little unclear on the implications of what the Minister just said. If, for example, Barratt Redrow and the Jockey Club submitted a planning application, under the new national planning policy framework, to flatten Kempton Park racecourse to build 2,000 homes on that land, would no one be able to consider what ha…”

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“I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. Given what he is saying about Northern Ireland, would he support a private Member’s Bill that would set out in law that there should be no further investigations, inquiries, inquests or prosecutions unless, in the view of a Supreme Court judge, new and compelling evid…”

“May I say what a pleasure it is to follow the hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie), who was speaking a great deal of sense? He mentioned the threat that we face in the High North. He might be interested to know that the Defence Committee was in Norway last week. We went up to the Arctic circle, to the…”

“Will the hon. Member give way?”

“I thank the former Minister for his intervention. There is a huge challenge to us, in that we have to turn our ploughshares into swords rather than the other way round. We need industry that is sufficiently flexible to flick the switch and turn the lawn mower factory into the drone factory in double-quick time.”

“My right hon. Friend and fellow Scots Guardsman makes a good point. The zeitgeist throughout that period of time was to say, “Look, wars are a thing of the past. We can take risk against defence.” That risk has rarely crystallised, so people have been tempted to take more and more risk. We have also seen it in the hypo…”

“The other group that has been bypassed, and which I did not mention, is the 18 prime contractors. This is direct to the SMEs. I am afraid that the model that we have developed since the end of the cold war has seen the 18 primes getting rich off defence pounds and SMEs getting legged over. The national armaments direct…”