Alison McGovern
Main Page: Alison McGovern (Labour - Birkenhead)
Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend’s brilliant contribution is reminding us all of why he is such a towering force in politics. Does he agree that the bedroom tax—it matters little what we call it; it is what it is—is a precise example of the politics of division that he has been talking so eloquently about?
Mr Blunkett
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for her kind words. I want to make the point that there were alternatives, including introducing incentives for people, including older people, to move. It is often older people who require smaller premises and who have larger premises that they can no longer manage. But we will not move them, will we? We will not tax winter fuel or assumed benefits for older people because older people vote in very much greater numbers than younger people. My message today is that politics—democratic politics—can be our solution and that people should engage with it as citizens in their community. They should engage with it through voting, but they should not be misled by organisations and parties such as UKIP that seek to obtain their vote by building on resentment and hatred, which history shows us has brought countries to their knees.
Yes, we need strong borders; we need welfare reform; we need a review of the European Union—but we need fairness at home, too. Today, Sheffield city council’s fairness commission, of all parties and no parties, has presented to Downing street thousands of names on a petition. I mean fairness, not just in respect of dealing with the recession and austerity, but fairness in the sense of what Barbara Castle used to call the social wage—the investment in our decent public services. That is the message we should be putting out today.
Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)
I want to raise two matters in this debate on the Queen’s Speech that are of serious concern to my constituents: food prices and the price of public transport.
However, although we are talking about the cost of living today, it is important first to recognise that people are facing a significant amount of insecurity in their working lives. The Department for Work and Pensions has recently been rapped for the way it uses statistics. Nowhere is that happening more than in its communication about what is going on in our labour market, as people face the prospect not only of employment but underemployment. To be frank, many people in my constituency face a perfect storm of not getting enough hours to get money coming in and prices increasing at the shops.
Global food price inflation is serious and significant; we have seen two large price spikes recently, in 2008 and 2011. These high, volatile prices are causing serious problems at home and around the world. As a global issue in countries without systems of social protection for the poorest people, they are a total, unmitigated disaster, but the problem of food prices is also troubling every community in Britain—not only the classic poor areas, however we might define them, but every town in our country.
I pay tribute to the people who volunteer their time and effort, and their own cash, to help the charities that are trying to put a sticking plaster on the wound. Their efforts are welcome, but the long-term solution must be to support small agricultural producers to help them to grow, and to ensure that we have a system of social protection that works well to support people’s incomes, so that they can afford the food in the shops. I would also add that, from a global perspective, we need to support measures such as fair trade. Locally in Wirral, we are not going to stand by and let people face those rising food prices on their own, even if the Government are adding insult to injury with their economic management. Wirral council is coming up with a food plan, which will help farmers and producers as well as helping people to access nutritious, affordable meals. I look forward to adopting that approach on my patch.
On transport prices, bus prices are high in Merseyside. This particularly hurts young people trying to get to college or to work. Whenever I meet groups of young people in schools, at youth clubs or at scouts or guides, I consistently hear about the difficulties they face in getting to work, to college or to after-school activities because of the price of public transport.
As we have seen in recent years, cities offer a real chance for growth. Places such as Liverpool and Manchester are progressing and their populations have risen as they have successfully built themselves up as part of our new economy. Connections within and between our cities must improve, however. We need to look not only at capital infrastructure costs but at the day-to-day costs for people who are just trying to get around. Labour’s policy, which we have put forward as an alternative to the Queen’s Speech, involves bus deregulation exclusion zones and represents the right approach to getting more accountability in the provision of public transport. Such a policy would ensure that my constituents could afford to get around.
We know that, when people are thinking about their job options, they factor in not only the length of time it will take to get to work but the cost involved. I find that people on the lowest incomes who are thinking about moving into work or changing to a better job are often rightly risk-averse on account of the transport costs involved. That is why it is incumbent on all of us here to ensure that people can get around.
The hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) has just quoted James Callaghan, in a kind of parody of what Keynesian economics is all about. I would say to the hon. Gentleman that, although it has occasionally been a challenge for me as a progressive politician to get the paradox of thrift on to leaflets, I think that everyone now understands that this Government have gone too far and too fast.
Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)
It is a delight to speak in this Queen’s Speech debate, focusing on the cost of living. It is also a delight to follow the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans), who referred back to sunny Jim Callaghan, who was a Cardiff MP. I would like to pick up on the hon. Gentleman’s theme of pensions. He says that what happened under sunny Jim and subsequently made him end up on the Conservative side of the House. One of the reasons for my ending up on the Labour Benches was the fact that before I came here in 1997, the state pension was £64 and there were searing, scandalous levels of pensioner poverty. I say to the hon. Gentleman, with all due respect, that it was clear that something had gone horrendously wrong when people were literally dying of hypothermia in their homes. We do not see that nowadays, and it is something to which we cannot return.
As my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition has said, the pension reforms that will introduce a more contributory basis are very welcome. It is good that it will be possible to lift everyone out of means-testing so that people can have what should be theirs as of right, including carers, and mothers can stay at home and contribute to family life. However, when Labour came to office we responded to a very real crisis in the country.
Earlier today, a Member asked my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) what Nye Bevan would say about something. Everyone goes back to Nye Bevan quotations: what would Nye Bevan be saying if he were speaking here today? There is a tremendous panoply of such quotations, but I recall that when his party was in opposition he said, facing the then Prime Minister across the Dispatch Box,
“The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.”—[Official Report, 3 November 1959; Vol. 612, c. 870.]
That is what this Queen’s Speech is. It is indeed a flamboyant label—it is the Queen’s Speech—but the Queen is travelling very light indeed in the new parliamentary Session.
Alison McGovern
While we are wondering what the great Nye Bevan might have said, may I ask my hon. Friend whether he thinks that, if Nye Bevan were around today, he might have said “Vote Labour”?
Huw Irranca-Davies
Nothing but, and never anything else!
I should have liked to see, in the rather light luggage that we are carrying, a consumers Bill to tackle rising energy costs, train fares and so forth. I should have liked to see a housing Bill that would take action against the real scandal in housing: rogue landlords and extortionate fees and charges in the private rented sector. At present, when people come to my constituency office and complain about that, I have to say that we can do little about it.
The Bill that I should really have liked to see, however, is a jobs Bill that would have given the long-term unemployed a duty to go to work, but would also have guaranteed that jobs would be there for them. That would have been a good way to tackle an unemployment rate of 2.56 million—or whatever the figure is now—and the massive youth unemployment that we see in my local communities.
Let me make a point that I suspect Nye Bevan would have made if he were here today. Let me give the House a reality check. For many people in my constituency—not all of them, because some are weathering the storm very well—the main problem is under-employment. They cannot secure the hours of work that they want so that they can put food on the table. Wage reductions are forced on them, or they have to accept them because of the economic climate.
I had thought that the scandal of zero-hour contracts had disappeared a decade ago, but they are back. People are being told “We will pay you when you are on the till; but then you must go home and sit in a corner, and we will pay you when a customer comes through the door again.” It is an utter scandal. We did not crack down sufficiently on the abuse of the national minimum wage ourselves when we were in government, but my goodness, we need to crack down on it now. Yes, we are seeing jobs being created, but my goodness, we are seeing jobs being lost.
A Government Member of the House of Lords, who claims that he was misreported, recently said, in effect—in the context of that long litany of problems, such as the driving down of pay and conditions—that this was a good time for someone to take the opportunity presented by those problems and set up a business, because it could now be done on the cheap. Let me say this to Government Members as well as those on the Opposition Benches: yes, let us encourage start-up enterprises—we rely on small and medium-sized enterprises in this country—but let us not do it on the backs of others. Let us ensure that people are properly rewarded. Let us consider those who, if they had the right jobs and the right pay in their hands, would be spending money like there was no tomorrow, because they would actually have to.