- Will the Leader of the House give us the forthcoming business?
- The business for the week commencing 20 November will be:Monday 20 November—Remaining stages of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill.Tuesday 21 November—Second Reading of the Media Bill.Wednesday 22 November—My right hon. Friend the Chancellor will make his autumn statement, which will be followed by a debate on the autumn statement.Thursday 23 November—Continuation of a debate on the autumn statement.Friday 24 November—The House will not be sitting.The provisional business for the week commencing 27 November will include:Monday 27 November—Conclusion of a debate on the autumn statement.Tuesday 28 November—Second Reading of the Criminal Justice Bill.Wednesday 29 November—Remaining stages of the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill.Thursday 30 November—General debate. Subject to be confirmed.Friday 1 December—The House will not be sitting.
- I thank the Leader of the House for giving us the business.I thank all those who ensured that Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday constituency events passed off safely.I want to ask the Leader of the House about two issues. First, before the ink is even dry on the King’s Speech, the Prime Minister has announced emergency legislation—you could not make it up! The Supreme Court ruling against the Government was as damning as it was clear. It concluded that deep and institutional issues in Rwanda make it not a safe country. That should not have come as a surprise to the Government, because they had been warned for months. The Prime Minister bet the house that he would win and he lost. Before his new legislative programme has even got under way, we have more desperate wheezes to salvage his sinking plan: a new treaty, which could take weeks of parliamentary time to ratify; and new laws, which a former Supreme Court judge branded “discreditable”. Why did the Home Secretary not say anything about that to Parliament yesterday? It is yet another announcement to the media and not to this place.Will the Leader of the House tell us more about how this is all going to work? What legal effect will this emergency legislation have? When will we see it? How much parliamentary time does she think this is all going to take? What will be dropped from the Government’s recently announced Bills to make way for this? If the Government are so confident that this is what it will take, why did they not do it months ago instead of sitting around waiting for this judgment, as though Parliament had not spent weeks and weeks considering these issues and legislating to deal with them? The Government could have amended the Illegal Migration Act 2023 instead, could they not? Or was the former Home Secretary right when she said that the Government“failed to prepare any…credible plan B”?Was the new Home Secretary right when he said yesterday that he did not see a case for coming out of international agreements? Or does the Leader of the House agree with the Prime Minister that we could do so? These are desperation tactics to try to make the Government look as though they are doing something, when the truth is that this is a failed, unworkable and costly plan that leaves their pledge to stop the boats stranded.