Business of the House
Debate between Angela Eagle and Nadhim Zahawi(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Ms Eagle
I thank the Leader of the House for his statement.
Every time that I have raised the question of the Health and Social Care Bill, the right hon. Gentleman has claimed that he supports it, and I was beginning to worry that he might actually be a true believer in it. So I was delighted to read that Downing street sources had fingered him as one of the Cabinet’s heroic three who had briefed Conservative Home about their opposition to the Bill. May I welcome him to a just cause? He joins the company of patients, doctors, nurses, midwives, royal colleges and health managers—in fact, he joins just about anyone who has anything to do with the NHS. These are all the people who were locked out of No. 10 when the Prime Minister held his self-styled “summit” on Monday, which was just another public relations stunt from a Prime Minister who thinks that that is what his job is about. A year ago, the Prime Minister said he had to listen to those in the NHS, but now he shuts the door on them if they dare to disagree with him.
Yesterday, the hon. Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson), explaining all this away, said that we should ignore the views of the royal college because general practitioners had been opposed to Labour’s 1948 Bill founding the NHS. That was not the best argument for a Conservative MP to advance, because if Labour had listened to the Conservatives then, there would be no NHS today. The Conservative party was wrong then and it is wrong now, so will the Government see sense, listen to even the Leader of the House and drop the Health and Social Care Bill.
Fifteen Liberal Democrats signed early-day motion 2659, which states:
[That this House expects the Government to respect the ruling by the Information Commissioner and to publish the risk register associated with the Health and Social Care Bill reforms in advance of Report Stage in the House of Lords in order to ensure that it informs that debate.]
Yesterday, there was an almost identically worded motion on the Order Paper, but astonishingly only four Liberal Democrats joined us to vote for it—the rest abandoned their principles and shamefully scurried through the Government Lobby or sat on their hands. This week, Russian scientists announced they had grown an extinct plant from seeds frozen in the permafrost for the past 30,000 years. Liberal Democrats have clearly decided to put their principles into a similar deep freeze. Let me tell them that they are kidding themselves if they think they can store them away until the next election.
There are rumours going around that the Deputy Prime Minister, who astonishingly did not turn up to vote last night, is encouraging Liberal Democrats in the Lords to wreck the Health and Social Care Bill. So will the Leader of the House find time for a debate on coalition unity, to give Liberal Democrats a chance to make up their minds on whether they are in the Government or not? They cannot be a bit of both.
The House was grateful to the Leader of the House for announcing the forthcoming parliamentary calendar. The Government are planning for the House to rise on Tuesday 27 March, Tuesday 17 July, Tuesday 18 September and Tuesday 13 November. In total, two thirds of the days on which the House has risen since the election have been Tuesdays. Will the Leader of the House now find time for a debate on why the Government are so keen for the House to rise on Tuesdays? The Prime Minister operates a lock-out policy at No. 10 for his health critics, he cannot stand criticism, he gets rattled at the Dispatch Box and now it looks very much like he is running away from Prime Minister’s questions at every opportunity.
Today, Royal Bank of Scotland has announced that its losses doubled last year. There have been 3,500 job cuts and front-line bank staff have been offered a 1% pay rise. With ordinary families struggling, can it be acceptable that RBS is planning to pay £400 million in bonuses to top bankers—from a state-owned bank? Is that the Government’s definition of “We’re all in this together”?
Nadhim Zahawi (Stratford-on-Avon) (Con)
Anti-business, that’s what you are.
Ms Eagle
I am pro-fairness, not anti-business.
The House was conveniently in recess when last week’s appalling unemployment figures came out, and when the next figures are due the Prime Minister is out of the country. The Prime Minister runs away from engaging with health critics, he cannot face talking about the economy and he has no solution to the unemployment crisis. So will the Leader of the House now find time for a debate on the economy so the Government can explain their failing economic policies?
This is a Government led by a Prime Minister who dodges Prime Minister’s questions and a Deputy Prime Minister who spends most of his time attacking the Government of which he is a member. Their disastrous economic policy has resulted in unemployment at its highest level for a generation and their health policy is opposed by just about everyone who works in or cares about the NHS. No wonder recesses cannot come fast enough for the Government.
The Economy
Debate between Angela Eagle and Nadhim Zahawi(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
We have had an interesting debate. On this very day a year ago, the Chancellor came to the House to announce what he and his spin doctors from Tory central office characterised for reasons of base propaganda as his unavoidable Budget. In reality, they and he knew that it was nothing of the kind. He used such misleading language because he wanted to disguise the central feature of his purpose that day. His aim was to create the image of a Chancellor with little option, as he fought to defend the country from the attentions of the bond vigilantes, stalking the world’s treasuries, looking for countries to kill.
In fact, the reality was very different. The Chancellor deliberately talked up the dangers in the bond markets by irresponsibly claiming that Britain had been on the brink of bankruptcy. He knew then, and he knows now, that it was all overblown rhetoric designed to disguise the fact that his Budget was actually a political choice made by the Conservative-led Government and their Liberal Democrat human shield, and it was an extreme choice. At a time when the economic recovery had not been locked in, he made a political choice to embark on a programme of tax increases and spending cuts greater than any which had ever been tried in Britain’s peacetime history.
Ms Eagle
No, I will not give way.
The Chancellor’s choice to cut further and faster than was economically necessary ensured that the UK plan to deal with the deficit went from one that was in line with the plans of other G20 countries to one that was far more extreme than anything undertaken in any other advanced economy. In other words, it was a reckless and risky experiment with our economic future.
Loans to Ireland Bill
Debate between Angela Eagle and Nadhim Zahawi(14 years ago)
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Nadhim Zahawi
What the Chancellor is saying is particularly pertinent, given that the Post Office cash machine in Portcullis House was provided by the Irish banks.
May I ask a quick question?
Finance Bill
Debate between Angela Eagle and Nadhim Zahawi(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
We have had an interesting debate on the Third Reading of the Finance Bill, although it has gone over a lot of old ground, with no surprising new positions taken on either side. The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury claimed again that the Budget is progressive—a claim that I shall dispute soon. The hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock), who is not in his place, set up a straw man to knock down and will come to realise that literature reviews do not translate into effective speeches. The hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) paraded his conscience around the Chamber again but told us, unsurprisingly, that he would be supporting the Budget after all, even though he admitted that it was regressive. People will note his crocodile tears. In the usual way, the speeches made by the hon. Members for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) and for Stourbridge (Margot James) supported their side of the House.
I commend the speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), who put before the House the real cost increases for women—especially those with young children—under the Finance Bill. That seemed to prompt much hilarity among Government Members, which I thought revealed more about their attitudes than about her concerns. She also mentioned the housing benefit and disability benefit changes outlined in the Red Book, and many millions of vulnerable people will be worried about those as the spending review approaches.
My hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) made an extremely good speech and put some facts about recent economic history on the record and my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) pointed out the fallacy of private sector see-saws suddenly moving in to take over the spaces that the public sector has vacated. Such things are such an important part of the ideology of the Government. The hon. Member for Stourbridge at least did the decent thing by recognising that there had been a global recession, but she said that we were not prepared for it, although she knows that net Government debt before the credit crunch was the second lowest in the G7.
The Finance Bill puts into place a Budget strategy that is a huge gamble with the future prosperity of Britain. The Chancellor began by telling us that it was an emergency—that it was the “unavoidable Budget”. He has tried throughout this process to persuade the country of two things: first, that Labour somehow created the deficit all on its own; and secondly, that the only solution is to cut it further and faster than our plan to halve it over the lifetime of this Parliament would have done.
Neither of those assertions is true, and here is why. Extraordinarily, Ministers and Government Members, from the Chancellor on down, have failed to let the words “credit crunch” so much as pass their lips during the entire proceedings on the Bill. The attempt to rewrite recent economic history is one that George Orwell’s Big Brother would have recognised and admired. The fact is that the banking crisis, which started in the American sub-prime mortgage market, caused the biggest global contraction that we have experienced in the real economy since the Wall street crash in 1929 turned into the great depression and led directly to the outbreak of the second world war. Since they will never say it, let me reiterate that this crisis was not caused by the irresponsible public spending of Governments but by the greed and criminal recklessness of the banking and financial sector. Any analysis of current conditions that ignores that basic and obvious fact, even if only for the purpose of generating convenient political propaganda, risks a dangerous miscalculation of the appropriate remedy.
Ms Eagle
I will not give way because the hon. Gentleman has not been here for the entire debate; if he had been, I would have done.
We see in this Finance Bill that the Tory-led Government have made precisely that error with their deliberate, ideologically driven choice to go for a much more aggressive and reckless slash-and-burn strategy for public spending than the objective economic conditions, or even the bond markets themselves, required. The decision to opt for a balanced budget in four years is driven not by the objective economic conditions but by an ideologically driven political belief in a small state, a belief which is now apparently shared by the Liberal Democrats. Similarly, the decision to cut the deficit by imposing a 77% to 23% ratio of public spending cuts to tax rises is a choice driven not by the objective economic conditions but by the same belief in a small state apparently shared by the Liberal Democrats. It is a ratio of pain never before achieved in the UK, and it was not shared with the voters before the election. No mandate for this was established in the general election. Ministers have admitted that the cuts will be painful, but they have failed to acknowledge the scale of the pain that they have chosen to inflict. The apparent relish with which they choose to announce huge and ongoing cuts does them no credit whatsoever, and it will be seared into the memories of the millions of victims of their sadistic fiscal policy for years to come.
The propaganda techniques are chilling. Carefully chosen, extreme examples of excess in public expenditure are leaked by the Government to sympathetic tabloids to be highlighted in screaming headlines and make the case for more cuts. Government websites coarsen the debate still further by parading a stream of ignorant vitriol whipped up by sensationalist reporting, so it is suggested that workhouses are to be reopened, benefit claimants sterilised, and immigrants deported. If this is the nice face of the Tory party, then God help us, and shame on the Liberal Democrats for going along with it. The apocalyptic and absurd scares that they have issued about the UK economy resembling that of Greece—we heard it again today—have been not only fundamentally wrong but deeply irresponsible, and they have risked precipitating the very loss of confidence they purport to avoid.
This Finance Bill signals the biggest and most sustained public spending cuts in UK peacetime history, coupled with increases in taxes such as VAT that will directly take demand out of the economy just when recovery is fragile and still needs nurturing. That is why it is such a gamble. Labour Members are not the only ones who are deeply worried about the choices that have been made in the Bill. Following the Chancellor’s “austerity Budget”, the International Monetary Fund has just cut its growth forecast for the UK for both this year and the next. The OECD has criticised the decision to abolish the future fobs fund and other employment support packages as short-sighted and warned that the scale of job cuts in the public sector will slow down the recovery.
As a direct result of the June Budget and this Finance Bill, the now notoriously named Office for Budget Responsibility has had to revise upwards its estimates of job losses in the public sector. At the same time, it has revised downwards its growth forecasts and hoped that no one would notice that it excluded 550,000 people who work in state-owned enterprises from being in public sector employment, even though the Office for National Statistics classifies them as such: thus public sector job losses are likely to be even higher. The OBR’s prediction that the anticipated “recovery” will generate 2 million extra jobs in the private sector in just five years has caused widespread incredulity, because that target has never been achieved in the modern era. It has certainly never been achieved at a time when huge public spending cuts are likely to dampen employment prospects in the private sector and austerity measures are being imposed simultaneously in almost every developed economy in the world.