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Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman cannot talk about a Bill which is already before the House. There will be other occasions when he can talk about it, of course. Meanwhile, he can talk freely about the problems of Gravesham, but not about the Bill.
Mr. Arnold: My Sikh constituents, largely because of their origins in the Punjab, depend for their livelihoods on labouring jobs--they work in construction, on roads, in market gardening and so on. For two or three years, they have been telling me that the pay for their jobs is being undercut by people who will work for very much less. They specifically asked, "What are the Government going to do about it? We know that these people are illegal immigrants and bogus asylum applicants." In fact, the Government are acting, and I support them.
Denton, in my constituency, received a good Christmas present from the Government. It has received nearly
£2 million from the challenge fund to support project Denton. Moneys from the single regeneration budget will go to a very old part of the borough. It is an area of small streets, in which a new factory has developed. The factory provides 250 jobs in an area of high unemployment. Comma Oil mixes and bottles lubricants and other fluids for the vehicle industry.
Heavy goods vehicles have rumbled through the old streets of Denton to reach the factory, to the distraction of residents. The clear solution was to build a new highway on the other side of Denton. We have never been able to implement that solution, because the local highway authority, Kent county council, has been resolute in not including it in its programme, despite the fact that the Labour co-chair of the relevant county council committee is the local ward councillor.
As a result of wonderful co-operation between the public and private sectors, a deal has been put together that includes a new road. It also includes training and youth opportunities, as well as anti-crime improvements. The deal is a considerable success. It will ensure that the factory will remain in the area. It was going to go elsewhere. I can now disclose that it would have gone to Huntingdon. I could not admit that earlier, because, if the proposed move to that particular constituency had been known about, there might have been a temptation not to approve our grant! Comma Oil is to stay on the site, and there will be an additional 50 jobs. The opening up of other land will create another 250 jobs.
The remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Field) stirred a memory for me. He talked about parishes and a local population, virtually without exception, wanting to create a parish council. That is the position at the village of Vigo in my constituency, which is currently part of the parish of Meopham.
Mr. Tony Banks (Newham, North-West):
The hon. Member for Gravesham (Mr. Arnold) should not be suspicious on every occasion about people who nip out from work to get married. Mrs. Banks and I did precisely that. We married and went back to work the same afternoon. She is not, as far as I am aware, an illegal immigrant.
There seems to be a practice--it has almost become a tradition--of Members presenting the House with compilations of their favourite speeches, or perhaps of speeches that they did not make, during these Adjournment debates. I suggest that letters to Ministers or local press releases might be equally appropriate ways of drawing attention to the points they want to raise.
I do not wish to be churlish, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I join all those who have wished you a happy Christmas. Long may I catch your eye, Sir. You might have a happy
Christmas, but after the vote last night, I doubt very much whether the Prime Minister will be able to enjoy his Christmas. I am sure that he would like to wake up on Christmas morning to find all the heads of his Euro-sceptics in his Christmas stocking. He would then, of course, find that his parliamentary majority had disappeared. He is not, of course, able to rely on some Conservative Members these days. I endorse the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick), who said that the country desperately needs a general election. I suspect that parliamentary arithmetic will force one sooner rather than later on the Prime Minister.
I was not going to be here this morning. I had intended to travel to Zurich for a Council of Europe meeting. Unfortunately, being a practised wally, I left my passport at home. When I reached Heathrow, I found that the British immigration service was more than happy to let me leave the country. I do not know whether that tells me something of which I should be aware. British Midland was superb in arranging things. Unfortunately, those at the Zurich end refused to let me into Switzerland. Who would wish to impersonate a British Member of Parliament these days? That would be outrageous. This episode takes up the theme of illegal immigrants that the hon. Member for Gravesham introduced.
I would not fancy the chances of young Master Tell if I were to shoot at the apple on his head this morning. He would end up looking rather like King Harold.
The debate gives me the chance to raise the case of Mr. Mark Votier. He is a constituent of my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Miss Hoey), who is a good friend of mine. She knows that I am raising Mr. Votier's case, and supports me in doing so.
Mr. Votier is a freelance journalist. He was commissioned to film a Japanese whaling expedition in the Antarctic. He was so shocked by what he saw aboard Japanese whaling ships that he released the footage of his film to journalists throughout the world. We saw examples of that footage in newspapers such as the Independent and The Guardian earlier this month. As a result of releasing his film, he is being sued by the Japanese Government's Institute of Cetacean Research for £60,000-worth of damages. Total costs will be another £200,000.
The Japanese are killing minke whales in the southern ocean sanctuary. This year, they will kill no fewer than 440 whales. Mr. Votier went to the area as someone who was not passionately committed to the preservation of whales. If he had been, he probably would not have wanted to go to the area to see what was going on. There are, of course, brave people who are supportive of the anti-whaling movement who are prepared to expose themselves to both dangers and horrors. However, Mr. Votier saw things that appalled him.
Mr. Votier found that 50 per cent. of the minke whales that were caught were only wounded by the harpoon, not killed. The Japanese butchers then put into the minke whale a lance through which they passed an electric force. The force is not sufficient to kill the whale instantly. On average, they took at least eight minutes to die. On one occasion, Mr. Votier saw a minke whale thrashing around for 23 minutes waiting to die while the Japanese put an electric shock through it. That is a whale dying in agony. The Japanese have no right to do this.
We should make a strong protest to the Japanese authorities. The British representatives at the International Whaling Commission met in May. They attempted to use examples of Mr. Votier's film to demonstrate that so-called scientific whaling is butchery by the Japanese. The Japanese vetoed the attempt. They said that the film that the British representatives wished to use--it was shot by Mr. Votier--was illegally obtained.
When Mr. Votier was commissioned, he was told that he must exclude from his film all unsightly tasks--in other words, the sort of things that tell us the truth about what the Japanese are doing to whales in the southern ocean sanctuary. He was told that his film would have to be submitted to the Japanese authorities for censorship.
A spokesman for the agriculture and fisheries division of the Japanese embassy in London denied that whaling was unscientific. He said:
The United States, using the Pelly amendment, has censured Japan for its so-called scientific whaling, and Japan is now 90 days away from having sanctions imposed on it. Incidentally, the sanctions will not affect electrical equipment or cars exported by the Japanese-- I wish that they did, because that might concentrate their warped little minds. The sanctions will relate only to fishing, but they are still worth imposing, which is why I am asking the British Government to do something.
"We need to gather scientific data on the age, sex and population of the minke whales in the antarctic."
He claimed that 400 whales had to be slaughtered to satisfy statistical best practice.
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