Ceasefire in Gaza
Debate between Angela Eagle and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster(10 months ago)
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Madam Deputy Speaker
I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman will have to make do with me, which I know is a great disappointment. Mr Speaker will be here in his place tomorrow.
Dame Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Can you confirm that, many years ago, Opposition day debates were taken seriously by Governments, and if a Government lost a vote, as happened on the Gurkha motion when Labour was in government, they would put the motion into effect? Successive Conservative Administrations have largely ignored Opposition day debates. They have refused to take part in many votes, and they have widely ignored the result of votes in which they did not take part.
Madam Deputy Speaker, do you agree that it is a bit rich for that lot opposite to give lectures about the importance of Opposition day debates when they routinely ignore them?
Madam Deputy Speaker
I thank the hon. Lady for her point of order. First, unless there are very exceptional circumstances, Opposition day votes are not binding. She knows parliamentary procedure, so I think she knows that.
Secondly, the hon. Lady is correct to say that the previous but one Leader of the House said that if an Opposition day motion were passed, even if the Government had not participated, she would come back with a response within 20 days. That is my recollection. I do not believe that is currently followed, but the hon. Lady is right that it is what used to happen.
It is absolutely up to the Government, as it is for any Member of the House, as to whether they do or do not vote. It is their decision.
Points of Order
Debate between Angela Eagle and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster
Madam Deputy Speaker
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point of order. Again, I do not have responsibility for answers given. It may well be that he could pursue the matter through further questions to the Table Office. Again, those on the Treasury Bench will have heard what he has had to say, and I very much hope that they will feed back this rather long list of messages to the Government.
Dame Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker—[Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker
I hope it will be quite a short point of order. [Interruption.] It will not be quicker if people are shouting. I ask for some silence, so I can hear the point of order and deal with it quickly.
Dame Angela Eagle
Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. On the Treasury Committee, we have been considering the work of UK Government Investments across a range of issues. We have now got to a situation where quite complex decisions, which appear to have been referred to at board meetings of the Post Office, are obtuse to us. I wonder, given that the disagreement between Ministers and representatives from UKGI who are on the board of the Post Office is very obtuse and hard to unravel, whether you have any advice on how we can bring these important issues to the Floor of the House.
Madam Deputy Speaker
The hon. Lady is a senior member of the Treasury Committee. Again, we have noted what she has said and it will be fed back, but she might like to pursue the issue either through the Treasury Committee, or even perhaps by talking to the Chair of the Business and Trade Committee, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), who I know is looking at this at the moment.
Breaking Down Barriers to Opportunity
Debate between Angela Eagle and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Dame Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler) in this King’s Speech debate.
After 13 years of Tory Government, and three Prime Ministers in the last year and a half, this King’s Speech offered us pretty thin gruel. There was no real vision for the future, there was nothing like a plan to get there, and it was nowhere near adequate to meet the challenges this country is facing. The Speech contained just 21 Bills, six of which have been carried over from last year’s parliamentary Session. Many of those included, such as on leasehold reform, turn out on closer inspection to be pale shadows of what was promised by the Government. There are Bills that nod towards the need for reform but do not actually deliver meaningful change, or delay it so long as to be meaningless. They sit alongside such towering legislative ambitions as a Bill to license pedicabs in London.
That legislative programme leaves the challenges that my Wallasey constituents are facing virtually unaddressed: taxes are the highest they have been for 70 years, mortgages are up, rents have skyrocketed, the cost of living squeeze goes on, inflation remains the highest in the G7, and food inflation is higher still. Growth is projected to be zero next year, and the Bank of England has put the chance of a recession at 50:50. After 13 years of this Government, our rivers and seas are filled with sewage, our schools are crumbling, 94% of crimes go unsolved, our transport system is in chaos, and over 7.5 million people are on an NHS waiting list. Where in this King’s Speech were those things addressed?
Food insecurity was once rare; now, in the past year in a rich G7 country, over 11 million of our fellow citizens have experienced it. In my constituency of Wallasey, the number of emergency food bank parcels provided by the Trussell Trust has increased by 57% since the last general election. On the Wirral as a whole, over 16,000 people received emergency food parcels last year, a third of whom were children, and in the country as a whole, nine children out of 30 in a class are growing up in poverty. This legislative plan does not even mention, let alone begin to address, the daily struggles and hardship that millions of people in this country are now facing.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms) mentioned, there were some notable omissions from the speech, including a promised reform of the Mental Health Act 1983; an employment Bill to give workers a fairer deal; and the Tory manifesto promise to ban conversion therapy for LGBT+ people. There was no sign of the promised reform of audit rules—boring to some, but quite important to the good working of our economy—and as my right hon. Friend pointed out, the promised reform of pensions was also absent. Despite the Prime Minister’s much-vaunted summit, there was no regulation of artificial intelligence anywhere to be seen, either.
We have a Government who have long since ceased to govern, who seem uninterested in tackling the serious issues our country faces and who seek division, rather than solution. We have a programme for the final year of this Parliament that was briefed out by senior Tories as being designed to set “traps” for Labour in the forthcoming general election campaign. The offshore petroleum licensing Bill is one such example: the industry says that the Bill will make no difference whatsoever, and the Secretary of State has been forced to admit that it will not lower energy costs for consumers. While rough sleeping is up 74% under the Tories, we have a Home Secretary who, instead of solving the problem of the housing shortage, wants to make it illegal to give tents to the homeless. She claims they are indulging in a “lifestyle choice” by having the temerity to sleep on our streets. We have five criminal justice Bills that toughen sentences for convicted criminals, but have nothing to say about the huge and growing backlogs of criminal cases —some of which are taking two years even to get to court—or about the plummeting arrest and conviction rates for serious offences. They are tinkering, not dealing with the real issues.
Rather than do the day job, this tired and incompetent Government are grinding to a halt. They seem much more preoccupied with pursuing their own internal factional fights than addressing the growing needs of the country. Even now, it is possible to discern the looming battle to be the next Leader of the Opposition commencing between the current Home Secretary and the Trade Secretary. We can spot the dwindling band of Boris Johnson supporters publishing absurd, conspiracy-laden books such as “The Plot” to explain his defenestration, when the rest of us only need to follow the covid inquiry to appreciate what the real explanation is. As the previous Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) tours the world proclaiming that despite her catastrophic 44-day tenure in office, she was in fact right all along, we can see that the Tory party can never be the change that this country is crying out for.
The change Britain needs is a mission-led Labour Government embarking on 10 years of national renewal—a Government who will secure the highest growth in the G7, make Britain a clean energy superpower, build an NHS fit for the future, make Britain’s streets safe, and break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage. It is long past time for this flailing, divisive Tory Government to recognise that the country needs real change, and to call a general election so that the country can have the new start it deserves—and sooner rather than later.