Strengthening the Union

Debate between Alison Thewliss and Stewart Malcolm McDonald

Monday 23rd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss]

He knows the suit I mean! If we are talking about clothing, the Union is more like a fur coat, nae knickers type of deal. It is funny how far we have come since the independence referendum and the scare stories that we were given. Lord Robertson said that it would have a “cataclysmic” effect on world security —well, look at where the world is now anyway. There was George Osborne and his currency bluff. There was Alistair Darling and his scares about pensions—tell that to the WASPI women who have not received their pension because of the UK Government’s actions, and that includes parties on both sides of this House. We had talk about border posts between Scotland and England and all the scare stories that went along with it—tell that to those in the island of Ireland who now face that real prospect. I have spoken to people who tell me that the border runs through their kitchen. They cannot even get to their cake to eat it because it will be on the other side of the kitchen if the Government have their way.

I draw the House’s attention to the excellent report by Chartered Institute of Environmental Health on Brexit and food security. It says that there are significant risks to food flow in the United Kingdom, including that the failure to keep food central to the Brexit negotiations could have a catastrophic impact on our food security and for those whose jobs rely on it. It says that UK food resilience is fragile and dependent on “just in time” delivery systems that could quickly grind to a halt if border controls were reimposed. It says that the Government are ambiguous at best on the question of migrant workers and how essential they are to the current working of the UK’s food system and that the current approach is imbalanced, with the specific needs of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, whose economies are highly food-dependent, being repeatedly sidelined. It also criticises the UK Government for their fundamental mistake in aiming only for alignment in farming and manufacturing but not for retail or food service, which are both absolutely huge.

All these concerns fall on deaf ears. These are not scare stories, but legitimate concerns that we never got anywhere close to in the independence debate. The biggest scare story, however, was the prospect of being forced out of the EU. Famously, Better Together tweeted:

“What is process for removing our EU citizenship? Voting yes. #scotdecides”

Scotland decided then, but it is in a very different position now.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

Will my hon. Friend enlighten the House as to why she thinks that account has deleted that tweet?

Jobcentre Closures

Debate between Alison Thewliss and Stewart Malcolm McDonald

Monday 5th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

I am pleased to have one hour and 23 minutes for this debate, having arrived in the House earlier today to be told by the Whips Office that I would do well to have the debate today, as opposed to early tomorrow morning. I take that as an early Valentine’s gift from the Government, and perhaps they will go further by addressing the series of asks that I and other hon. Members have for them.

The Minister will have briefed himself on the folly of the jobcentre closure programme, particularly in the city of Glasgow, where the Government wished to reduce the provision of jobcentres across the city from 16 to eight. Although I am immensely grateful, immensely proud and pleased that the one jobcentre the Government removed from the programme is the Castlemilk jobcentre in my constituency, for which I pay tribute to the trade unions, local campaigners and anybody who signed a petition on the various campaign days we had to save the two jobcentres in my constituency—I pay tribute to everybody who took part in that campaign—the Government, however, continued with the closure of Langside jobcentre, to which I will return later in my remarks.

I will remind the House how this all began. It began with a story in the Daily Record, which is how Members of Parliament representing Glasgow constituencies found out that the Government wished to slash the city’s jobcentre provision in half. That was followed the next day with a letter from the then Minister—now the Education Secretary—to Members of Parliament representing constituencies in which jobcentres were set to be closed.

It is worth remembering that, where Ministers were keen to send jobcentre users to alternative jobcentres, they relied on Google Maps to tell them which bus services people could use to move around the city to get to those jobcentres, despite the fact that Google Maps tells people to use bus routes that no longer exist and have not done for some time. Even after that was pointed out to senior managers at the Department for Work and Pensions and even after it was raised by myself and a number of colleagues in this Chamber, in Westminster Hall and in written questions—even after all that—still no effective transport study was carried out. I believe that it was my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) who said that if a school or a nursery were to close, the local authority would be duty-bound to carry out some form of transport analysis to determine how people would use the service they then had to use instead of the original service they relied on. Government by Google cannot be the way this is done.

We pressed Ministers on several occasions to contact directly every person who would be affected by the closures, but they did not do so. Of course, Ministers know all the people who would be affected, because, as you will know in your role as a constituency Member of Parliament, Mr Deputy Speaker, when someone goes to the jobcentre to sign up for whatever support they are seeking, they do not get to leave that jobcentre until they have given the Government every single detail of their life. So I cannot understand why the Government did not take it upon themselves to contact people directly, instead relying on a couple of posters thrown up in the jobcentre, which many people would pass by.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend will have had the same experiences I have had. Many people I contacted to let them know that this was happening did not know and had not been told about it. Unless they were going into the jobcentre regularly, they just would not find out, so they would go along when they needed the service only to find that it had gone.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. As hon. Members can imagine, this was a big election issue in the city of Glasgow in June last year. During the campaign in my constituency, I told people that I was campaigning to save the jobcentre, and I met folk who used the jobcentre and it was the first time they found out about its potential closure; there can be no excuse for that, because there was no reason the Government could not have let those people know—they had every detail necessary.