Conduct Of Government Ministers

EDM number 2015 in 1992-93, proposed by Rhodri Morgan on 13/05/1993.

That this House condemns the reiteration by the Prime Minister in an answer to the honourable Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East concerning the threat to 6,000 jobs at Swan Hunter, of the wildly inaccurate claims made first by the Secretary of State for Wales in the coal industry debate on 21st October 1992, Official Report, columns, 525-6 that the number of jobs created on the industrial estate adjoining the BSC Shotton steelworks was as great or greater than the number of jobs lost in the steelworks, a claim which although patently at variance with reality was repeated by the President of the Board of Trade in the coal industry debate on 29th March 1993, Official Report, column 32; notes that in reality less than half of the job losses at BSC Shotton since 1980 have been replaced by the jobs created on the Deeside Industrial Park estate next door; and calls on the Tory propaganda machine to desist from this insidious practice in the belief that it thereby becomes the accepted wisdom and to cease the attempt to give unsubstantiated reassurance to anyone threatened with job losses whether in the Yorkshire or Nottinghamshire coalfields or the Tyneside shipyards, that the creation of adequate alternative jobs is anything other than a long drawn-out and problematic process.

This motion has been signed by a total of 58 MPs, 1 of these signatures have been withdrawn.