Next General Election

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Monday 29th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Alex Burghart)]

I can see that it is going to be a long year. We will have plenty of time over the next few months to rehearse all the points put across by Opposition Members, and no doubt some of the points that I will put across from the Government. I thank you for your chairmanship, Mr Dowd, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) on moving the motion on behalf of the signatories to the e-petition, which calls for an immediate general election.

I am grateful for the opportunity to respond on behalf of the Government, but I am sorry to have to tell the hon. Lady that the requisite authority has not been delegated to me at this time and I am unable to grant her wish for an immediate election. In the absence of such powers, I can refer her to what the Prime Minister has already said—that he is expecting a general election in the second half of 2024, so it could be as soon as five months away. The hon. Lady will be aware that the authority rests with the Prime Minister and the King, but we will have an election in 2024.

The hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) asked for a ray of sunshine, and here I am. There are extraordinary stories to be told from the past 14 years. There are better state schools, as judged by PISA, the programme for international student assessment. We are doing better in international rankings than ever before, thanks to the reforms and investment that we have made. There are better apprenticeships, helping more young people to earn while they learn and move into work. We have the best universities in Europe, sought after by many; record employment, underpinned by an improved welfare system in the form of universal credit; more free childcare than ever before; a national living wage; same-sex marriage; two new aircraft carriers; and the fastest decarbonisation of any major economy. We appreciate that we still have further to go, but emissions are down by more than 50% since their peak in the ’70s.

Brexit has been delivered, with global free trade deals, notably an enormously important one with the Pacific. We have more money than ever before in the NHS; record numbers of doctors and nurses; neighbourhood crime down by 50%; and 2.5 million homes. Not only have we had better growth since 2010 than Germany, France, Italy and Spain, but the International Monetary Fund expects the UK to have better growth than Germany, France, Italy and Japan in the medium term. Last year, the UK overtook France as the eighth largest manufacturing nation on earth.

These are all the result of choices. They are all the result of the decisions taken by Conservative Governments since 2010. Have this Conservative Government achieved that because we were handed a golden legacy by the previous Labour Government? Not a bit of it. When we took over, the economy was in the sewer. Since that time, we have managed to deal with the largest public health crisis in a century, the largest war in Europe since 1945, the biggest energy crisis since the 1970s and the highest inflation since the 1980s—and still the projections for our country going forward are good, and confidence in our nation’s economy among our international partners remains high.

I look forward to taking these arguments and more to the electorate in the months ahead, and I look forward to rehearsing the back and forth with hon. Members in the Chamber and beyond.