Financial and Social Emergency Support Package
Debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Rupa Huq(4 years, 8 months ago)
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Jeremy Corbyn
My hon. Friend is right. There are lots of enthusiastic volunteers, which is great, but the initiatives need co-ordination and protection. We are dealing with assisting vulnerable people, so we have to be quite clear that the people who are volunteering are responsible and are doing it for all the right motives. All the volunteer groups that I have been in touch with and met are clear about that. They are well organised and responsible in the way that they are doing it, and I thank them for that. All those efforts will help us to overcome the crisis.
It is also necessary to say thank you to those delivering essential public services, especially our national health service staff on the frontline: the medical professionals, healthcare workers, auxiliary staff, administrators, ambulance drivers, paramedics—the whole team in every health facility. They are already very stretched in normal times; now, they are coming under unimaginable pressure and stress at the same time as being vulnerable themselves to contracting coronavirus. We should acknowledge that and say thank you.
We should also say thank you to those in our social care sector, who are so often unrecognised and ignored, and almost always badly paid. They are caring for the most vulnerable people in our society. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) explained earlier, the problem of contracting the virus in a home where people have not been tested only gets worse the longer we delay.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
I completely agree with my right hon. Friend’s approach and the fact that we should all give a socially distant hug to care workers, and to those in other parts of the economy with precarious employment and housing situations. Does he agree that, against the background of the biggest crisis we will ever know, we need a collective approach, and that policies such as nationalising the railways, providing economic stimulus to kick-start our economy, and free broadband do not look so outlandish after all?
Jeremy Corbyn
It was not so long ago that I was making lengthy speeches about those subjects, and I am quite prepared to hand a copy of our manifesto over to the Government. They are already being forced to implement a great deal of it because of the crisis and because of the deficiency in public services that we exposed during the election campaign.
European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill
Debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Rupa HuqFriday 20th December 2019
(4 years, 11 months ago)
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Jeremy Corbyn
The Prime Minister, your leader—if I may say so, Mr Speaker—said that workers rights were going to protected. They are not, in this Bill.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
Is not the whole point that the withdrawal agreement seems to be diminishing all the time? This is worse than the agreement from the previous Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). There are things that have vanished from the one that we had before the election. It is not only workers’ rights that have been downgraded. It is parliamentarians’ rights, because the legislature’s ability to scrutinise the Executive has been taken away. It is bad for democracy.