ISIL in Syria

Debate between Alison McGovern and Angela Smith

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

I think that I speak for the whole House, Mr Speaker, in expressing my admiration for you today.

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friends the Members for Derby South (Margaret Beckett) and for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson). I agree with what they said. We come to this House to choose. Yes, we come here to criticise and, at times, to express our anger, but we do not come here to commentate. The purpose of our debate is not entertainment, but education: the education that we need in order to choose. The choice that we must make today is not, as some have implied, on a grand new strategy. It is a relatively narrow choice between a motion that extends our involvement in our existing battle and a vote for the status quo.

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

Does not this choice involve risk? The risk involved in doing something has to be balanced against the risk involved in doing nothing, which equally carries great risk for this country and for the world.

[Alison McGovern]

I could not have put that better myself.

I have to confess that, not for the first time, I am angry with the Government. I am angry because I believe that they have turned their backs on vulnerable refugees from the conflict in Syria, to whom we should have held out our hands. The process that will take in 20,000 refugees by 2020 is too slow. The Government could have demonstrated to the world what it means to be British, but they have not done enough. I know we must put party politics to one side, but that is hard when the Prime Minister tells us we must do our bit and then does his part too late.

What relevance does this have to the choice in front of us today? The answer is trust and commitment. If I vote for airstrikes today, I need to be able to believe that the Prime Minister will stand beside those in the world who will need him tomorrow. Part of the justification for the strikes is to show our commitment to the coalition against Daesh and show that we are truly part of the fight, but if the Prime Minister wants my support, he will have to show his commitment to the bigger fight ahead of us.

The biggest recruiting sergeant for vile extremism is want. It is the dissatisfaction with the chances that the world is offering, whether in the back streets of Britain or the cities of Africa and the middle east, where young people find that the powerful in our world forget them far too quickly. It is this pervasive want that creates fertile ground for the blame and resentment that extremists cultivate.

We are right to be sceptical of our own capacities, but we should not be sceptical about the Syrian people. Rather, we should offer them refuge now, and our backing tomorrow. Whatever choice we make tonight, we will have to live with it. I will have to face my constituents and explain my decision to them, but that is absolutely nothing compared with what the Syrian people have faced. Too often in the past five years, we have we seen people in need and we have turned away. We must not do that now.

I might not trust the Prime Minister that much, but in the end the solution to that mistrust is in my hands. I want him to know that, if I vote for his motion today, I will be here every week holding him to account. We have Back-Bench motions now, and if I do not believe that he has lived up to the trust of the British people, I will waste not a moment before using them. Any support I give to him is conditional, and we will return to this question again and again. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) said so well, if our job is to work for peace, we will do it with scrutiny. We will scrutinise the Vienna process to make sure that it happens.

We are voting today on just one tactic in this greater struggle, and I see the limits in the choice in front of us. My party, the Labour party, has a bigger task, and it is one that I will never just leave to the Prime Minister. The end to the extremism that we face today will come with a decent and fair society, and we must not waste a moment in fighting for that.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Alison McGovern and Angela Smith

Wednesday 20th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Angela Smith]

But the country is becoming less productive. In fact, productivity has declined by 2.4% over the last year, storing up massive problems for the future.

On borrowing, the Chancellor told us that national debt would be falling as a percentage of GDP by 2015-16 and that he would bring down the deficit. It is no secret now that he will miss the first target by a mile, with the OBR saying that debt will not start falling as a share of GDP until at least 2017-18. As for borrowing, it was 6.6% higher for the first 10 months of the 2012-13 financial year than for the same period in 2011-12.

[Alison McGovern]

Is my hon. Friend as worried as I am that so far the Chancellor does not have a very good record at hitting the OBR forecasts? Let us not rely on him for hope.

[Angela Smith]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. Indeed, when it comes to growth, the Chancellor stood at the Dispatch Box in 2010 and confidently told the House that by this financial year the economy would be on the mend, with growth forecast at 2.8%, but we now know that his forecast was out by 2.5 %. Today, he had to downgrade growth for this year yet again, to 0.6%.

We have a downgraded Chancellor who has sucked demand out of the economy with his ill-thought-through VAT hike and his draconian cuts to public spending. Those cuts have gone too far, too fast. If the latest estimates are right, spending cuts have so far wiped 1.4% of growth out of the economy, and the biggest cuts are yet to come. But at least the millionaires of Sheffield and Barnsley will have extra money in their pockets this April when the 50p tax rate is abolished.

The measures that the Chancellor has introduced today will go nowhere near to addressing the problems that he has caused. Instead of plan B, we have inadequate measures that do not even go halfway towards addressing the problems facing the country. The child care package announced yesterday, for instance, is designed to help hard-pressed working families, but unfortunately it will not come into operation until after the next general election. Once again, it is jam tomorrow. There is not much on offer for the parents and families struggling with the costs of child care today.

There is no doubt that house buyers might be thankful for the help being offered today, but a quick look at the Chancellor’s record on housing does not bode well. This is the same Chancellor who, in 2011, unveiled what was termed a “radical and unashamedly ambitious” strategy to give the housing industry a “shot in the arm”. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition referred to this earlier. At the heart of that strategy was a scheme which the Chancellor claimed would help 100,000 to people to buy their own homes. To date, just 1,500 people have realised that dream. That is a 1.5% success rate, which is almost as bad as the Work programme—or as good, depending on which way we look at it.

A year later, we had what was described as the Government

“rolling its sleeves up and doing all it can”.

That included introducing a £10 billion guarantee scheme which, while welcome, has yet to deliver a single penny of support for house building. It took the Government six months to release details of the scheme, and it will not be open to receive bids until April this year. Last year, housing starts fell by 11% to below 100,000, which is less than half the number required to meet housing need, and I am not convinced that the help announced today will kick-start the stagnant housing market.

Then we come to infrastructure. The £3 billion a year—£15 billion over the next decade—is nowhere near what we need to invest in roads, schools, transport and housing if we are going to get the economy growing again and build for our economic future. If, as now seems possible, we are entering the third recession in as many years, we needed to see something much more dramatic today. However, the Chancellor has failed to deliver.

Let us take VAT as another example. The Opposition have said that he should temporarily reverse his VAT hike, because consumers need help and they need it now. Reversing the hike would have alleviated some of the pain they are feeling, and it would have helped the pound in their pocket go a little further.