Travelling abroad as Sevenoaks’ MP has it’s ups and downs says Michael Fallon
Though I try to keep up my voting record, there are times when I’m not able to be present at Westminster.
Sometimes it’s a longstanding engagement in the constituency – a public
meeting that I’ve been asked to attend or a school concert in the
evening. Most weeks I’m at Westminster from Monday through to Thursday:
I’m usually committed to visits in the constituency on a Friday.
But occasionally I’m on Parliamentary business abroad and simply have
to miss votes altogether. This may be a Select Committee visit: for
example, I’m a member of the Treasury Select Committee: we go each
spring to Washington DC to meet the chairman of the Federal Reserve
Bank, senior officials from the US Treasury, advisers at the White
House, and key Senators and Congressmen.
Our work on Northern Rock last year also involved brief visits to
Stockholm (where they had a similar banking crisis in 1991), Frankfurt
(to meet the European Central Bank), and Brussels (to meet the
Commission which has to approve the Northern Rock rescue plan).
And there are other visits. Last year the Foreign Office asked me to
join a seminar in Kiev for newly elected MPs in the Ukrainian
Parliament. I’ve also paid fact-finding visits to the Middle East, and
I’m often invited to speak at financial conferences elsewhere in Europe.
These trips aren’t always exciting. Usually it’s economy travel,
rushing from hotel to meeting to airport. With email and mobile phone,
it’s impossible to escape Westminster for long. When you get back 36
hours later, the constituency work has simply piled up – which is why I
probably choose to travel less than most MPs.
But it does help to learn from other countries. For example, Sweden is
pioneering a new kind of parent-led school reform. In the United States
some states have successfully reduced benefit dependency with effective
“workfare” programmes.
The banking reforms that we desperately need here to avoid another
Northern Rock disaster have been tried in America. Other European
countries seem to have less social breakdown and many fewer young
people in prison. And these visits are reversed. About twice a month
I’m asked to meet at some visiting delegation at the House of Commons –
Chinese MPs, Bulgarian MPs, senior civil servants from Hong Kong,
officials from the International Monetary Fund.
They want to know how Ministers are questioned, they ask how opposition
works and how governments lose power in a peaceful constitutional way.
Though Parliament’s standing amongst the electorate here has probably
never been lower, what’s interesting is that foreign politicians still
come from across the globe to look at our Westminster system. For them
England is still the “Mother of Parliaments”.
