Sittings of the House (22 March)

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

I will come on to that point in a moment, if I may, when I address some of the issues that the shadow Leader of the House raised at business questions.

The motion adds a further sitting day and its effect will therefore be to allow the four-day Budget debate to take place, as well as to accommodate the opportunity for the Backbench Business Committee to schedule business, including the traditional pre-recess Adjournment debate, on the last day before recess.

Sitting on an additional Friday would allow a continuation of the Budget debate but it would not be its last day, so there would be no requirement for Members to vote on that day. That is the best option to provide the balance between the certainty requested by the House, which the publication of the calendar in mid-October permitted, and the disposal of business before it, including providing the Backbench Business Committee with access to the debate opportunities that it would expect.

It may be helpful if I remind the House that there is a precedent for the proposal to sit on a Friday to allow the continuation of the Budget debate before a recess. Just last year, the House agreed to sit on Friday 23 March to continue the Budget debate, and I am not aware that any issues were raised following that sitting. The precedents go further back than that, as another occasion occurred under the last Administration on 11 April 2003.

As you said, Mr Speaker, an amendment in the name of the Opposition has been selected, which seeks to amend the motion to produce the effect that the House would sit not on Friday 22 March, but on Wednesday 27 March. I fear that the Opposition, in tabling the amendment, might just be thinking back to their time in government and imputing similar motives to this Government. I think they are wrong in that.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

What a gross calumny!

[Mr Lansley]

The hon. Lady set out her reasons during business questions on 7 February. I addressed her points then, but it may be helpful for me to recap. Her first reason was that Members might already have made arrangements in their constituencies for Friday 22 March. This is valid up to the point that Members are just as likely to have made arrangements in their constituencies for Wednesday 27 March—the date proposed in the Opposition amendment. It is important to bear in mind that only those Members who wished to speak on that day in the Budget debate would be affected. Others might have commitments in their constituencies that they regard as inescapable, but on three other days they would have the opportunity, subject to catching the Speaker’s eye, to contribute to that debate. It is not a case of “speak on that Friday or lose the opportunity”.

There is a choice here, but my preference—and, I believe, the preference of Members—would be to sit on that Friday and not on the subsequent Wednesday. While the calendar is always issued with the proviso that it is subject to the progress of business, the Government are conscious that having announced dates, Members and staff might have made arrangements for the Easter recess, which it would now be inconvenient, to say the least, to change. Indeed, as I have said, the Friday would not involve the prospect of voting, and I can add that we do not intend to arrange ministerial statements for that day. Those with necessary constituency business will still be able to deal with it, which might not be the case were the House to sit on Wednesday.

The second reason given by the shadow Leader of the House was that if the House rose on a Tuesday, there could be no Prime Minister’s Question Time during that week. I do not think that anyone could accuse the Prime Minister of avoiding his duties in the House. [Interruption.] I must tell the right hon. Member for Warley (Mr Spellar) that his view is contradicted by the facts. The Prime Minister has made more statements to the House per sitting day in the last Session than his predecessor, spending more than 30 hours at the Dispatch Box in so doing. He also gives evidence to the Liaison Committee, and he takes all his responsibilities to the House very seriously.

I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) should take a look at the 2013 calendar that I published. It shows six occasions on which recesses have been proposed. There is the February recess, which we have already had, and there are the Easter, Whitsun, summer, conference and Christmas recesses. The plan was for the House to rise on a Tuesday on two of those occasions, on a Thursday on three of them and on a Friday on one of them. No pattern is involved; it is simply a matter of trying to ensure that each of the recesses has the right balance of time overall. A simple examination of the parliamentary calendar will show that there are no grounds for the supposition that we have avoided a Wednesday sitting.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

This may seem a dry issue on which to take up the House’s time. After all, recess dates are rarely the subject of much contention; they are rarely, if ever, noticed, and much less often divide the House. So what is the problem with the sittings motion, and why are we trying to amend it?

We decided to table our amendment because, after two and a half years of experience, we have begun to perceive a pattern in the Government’s behaviour, and especially in that of the Prime Minister. We have realised that he does not much like being accountable to the House at Prime Minister’s Question Time, and that he therefore arranges for the House to rise on Tuesdays as often as he thinks that he can get away with it. The hon. Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) made that point from the Government Benches. That way, the Prime Minister avoids Prime Minister’s questions, which take place on Wednesdays. In contemplating this emerging trend, I thought it might just be one of those random patterns that occurs by accident, until I noticed that our Prime Minister seems to be anxious for the House not to sit long enough for him to have to face Prime Minister’s questions, especially after a Budget.

That is the crux of the issue before us today. For the second year running, the House has been asked to sit on a Friday to accommodate the debate we must have on the Chancellor’s Budget, and to allow the recess date therefore conveniently to fall on a Tuesday, thus letting the Prime Minister off his Prime Minister’s questions duties.

[Stephen Mosley]

Was the hon. Lady listening when the Leader of the House explained that this year we will be breaking up on a Tuesday twice out of six occasions? That is a ratio of one in three, and therefore a minority, so this is not a trend; it is completely the opposite in fact.

[Ms Eagle]

The hon. Gentleman should hear me out, because I have a few other things to say about the trends we on this side of the House have perceived. Perhaps when he has listened to me he might form an opinion, rather than having an opinion before he has heard what I have to say.

Both last year and this year the Government decided to sit on a Friday and begin the recess on a Tuesday, and this year that means the Prime Minister will next have to appear at Prime Minister’s questions and justify the Budget to the House fully 28 days after the date of the Budget. Perhaps it takes him 28 days to plough through all the Budget documentation, but the rest of us have to react instantly, and so should he.

Let me readily acknowledge that when the original sittings motion suggesting this arrangement was put to the House on 17 December last year, the Opposition did not vote against it, and before any Member on the Government Benches leaps up to point this out, I also acknowledge that six days earlier, on 11 December, the Chancellor had announced that the date of the 2013 Budget would be 20 March. I must confess that I was perhaps guilty of feeling a little too much pre-Christmas spirit towards the Government and might even have been lulled by the season into a false sense of security that they were not being Machiavellian with the parliamentary timetable. I now know I was wrong to be so generous to them.

I often worry about the adversarial nature of our parliamentary system putting people off politics, so I considered the possibility that the observation I have made about our current Prime Minister’s strange aversion to the House sitting on Wednesdays might just be partisan criticism on my part.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

Would it not be perverse of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister to avoid Wednesday questions when he is so much better at them than the hon. Lady’s right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition?

[Ms Eagle]

With all due respect to the hon. Gentleman, that is a matter of opinion, and he and I may disagree about the judgment he has just presented to the House.

I wondered whether this strange aversion to Wednesdays might be randomly generated happenstance or unsupported by any evidence. I was even beginning to chide myself a little for developing such unworthy thoughts about Machiavelli or anybody else, so I decided to check the evidence. I looked back at the record to see how often the House has risen for recesses on Tuesdays, and it turns out that during the period when Tony Blair was Prime Minister the House rose on Tuesdays 22% of the time, and when my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) was Prime Minister the House rose on Tuesdays 29% of the time, but since 2010 while the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr Cameron) has been Prime Minister the House has risen on Tuesdays a whopping 58% of the time.

These figures prove that this Prime Minister is categorically no heir to Blair in his desire to be answerable for the actions of his Government in this Chamber. They prove he truly has an aversion to Wednesdays and a reluctance to let the House sit on Wednesdays if he can possibly avoid it. What on earth can the Prime Minister be scared of?

[Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)]

Did not Tony Blair reduce the number of Prime Minister’s Question Times from twice a week to once a week?

[Ms Eagle]

The length was not reduced; as hon. Members may recall, Tony Blair put the two sets of 15 minutes together into one half an hour. The figures that I have just given the House are unaffected by the changes that were made to Prime Minister’s Question Time, because the half-hour, one-day-a-week session is common to all three figures. That point does not address the pattern of avoiding Wednesdays which the statistics demonstrate we are dealing with in this debate.

[Mr Lansley]

I do not understand the point the shadow Leader of the House is making. She says that when the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) was Prime Minister the House rose for a recess on a Tuesday on 29% of occasions. She can see from the calendar that I published that the House is intended to rise twice on a Tuesday out of six occasions, which is 33.3%. Is the whole strength of her argument really the difference between 29% and 33.3%?

[Ms Eagle]

If one takes into account all the recesses since this Government have been in office, the figure goes up to 58%. That is a difference and it rather proves that this Prime Minister has a strange aversion to the House sitting on Wednesdays. That is what we are dealing with in our amendment.

Why on earth can the Prime Minister be frightened of Wednesdays? Last year’s Budget was enough to put the frighteners on anyone, let’s face it. It certainly set the bar high in standards of incoherence and incompetence, which even our part-time Chancellor will find hard to match this year. Let us remember that we had the granny tax, the churches tax, the charities tax and the pasty tax. The Chancellor had been so busy swanning around Washington in search of President Obama’s coat tails that he had forgotten to pay enough attention to one of his day jobs.

Last year’s Budget was unravelling even before the Chancellor had sat down. It was so disastrous that it spawned its own new word—omnishambles—which became the “Oxford English Dictionary” word of the year. There was open revolt against Budget measures on the Government Benches. Nine Tory MPs and four Liberal Democrats voted against the pasty tax, in defiance of their Whips. Sixteen Conservatives and one Liberal Democrat voted against the caravan tax, with two Liberal Democrat Ministers strangely missing the vote completely. No lesser person than Lord Ashcroft was moved to observe:

“The main problem is not so much that people think that the Conservative Party is heading in the wrong direction, it is that they are not sure where it is heading. And that includes me.”

[Mr Spellar]

Does this not speak to a greater truth, which also affects the issue before us, given that the Budget date had already been announced prior to the motion being put to the Commons? If my hon. Friend has read analyses of how Budgets have traditionally been made up properly, under Labour and Conservative Governments, she will know that many of the proposals in the last Budget had been proposed a number of times before by the civil service and had been batted back. What we have with this Government—here is the relevance to this debate—is a failure of process: a failure to attend to detail and a complete failure to attend to proper parliamentary and governmental process.

[Ms Eagle]

I agree wholeheartedly with the points that my right hon. Friend has made. As a former Treasury Minister, I can attest to the fact that some of the more disastrous bits of last year’s omnishambles Budget had indeed been put to Ministers for their consideration prior to their adoption last year and had been batted back for the nonsense that they were.

Because of the Government’s cynical manipulation of the recess dates, it took 28 days after that botched Budget for the Prime Minister to find himself back at the Dispatch Box to account for it. By then we had also had the fuel strike scare and the jerry can scandal to add to the chaos. Understandably, he was so unnerved that, red-faced and angry, he started attacking his own side. The hon. Member for Clacton (Mr Carswell) was wholly unfairly ticked off for having a sense of humour failure by a rattled Prime Minister who was demonstrating to the House just how easily he seems to be able to channel his inner Flashman. The memory of this omnishambles is obviously still raw. According to samizdats emerging from the 1922 Committee, the Chancellor has admitted to Tory Back Benchers that last year’s Budget was a disaster. Why else would he have been seen nodding vigorously as he was being exhorted, in language so earthy that I cannot repeat it here, not to—how can I put this politely and stay in order—mess it up this time?

Perhaps the Prime Minister’s reluctance to appear at the Dispatch box the day after the Budget debates to answer for his Chancellor’s omnishambles is an understandable human failing on his part, but it is not one in which this House should be assisting or that we should allow him to repeat this year. However, that is precisely what the motion will do unless our amendment is accepted. The Budget will be on 20 March and the Prime Minister is not due to appear at the Dispatch Box to answer questions until 17 April. Once more, that is 28 days after the Chancellor’s Budget statement.

If the Prime Minister finds it impossible to appear before the House to answer questions on the Budget before 28 days have elapsed, he could do what all Prime Ministers in the past have done and let his deputy do it for him. After all, we are told that the Liberal Democrats are intimately involved in all of the decision making about the Budget. We know that they are so central to the Government’s inner core that they make up two of the “quad” who, we are told, make all the final decisions. They are so closely involved in Budget decisions that they leaked most of it in advance last year so that they could take credit for all of the nice bits and distance themselves from the nasty bits. The only thing left for the poor Chancellor to surprise us with was the granny tax, and that was all he had to take credit for. No one seemed to benefit—unless of course they happen to be a millionaire awaiting their huge tax cut this April while everyone else feels the pain.

In the spirit of being a team player and recognising the Liberal Democrats’ acts of selfless sacrifice on tuition fees, why does the Leader of the House not just accept our amendment, change the sittings motion and let the Deputy Prime Minister step in and help out with Prime Minister’s questions straight after the Budget? Surely the Prime Minister trusts him to do a good job.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful speech—unfortunately, she has made some political remarks, but parliamentarily it is a very good speech. However, I have not heard her move her amendment yet. Does she intend to do so?

[Ms Eagle]

Yes, we intend to press the amendment to a vote.

Surely the Prime Minister cannot have taken to heart the content of last December’s leaked Liberal Democrat memo, which urged senior Liberal Democrats to spread the message that

“The Conservatives can’t be trusted to build a fairer society”

and to remind voters that the Tories only want to look “after the super rich”. I am sure, given those comments, that the Deputy Prime Minister would be welcomed to the Dispatch Box the day after the Budget to support all its content. Perhaps he might also be asked by the Tories on the Government Benches why the Liberal Democrats keep sending out press briefings criticising the Government’s tax policies just after the Chancellor has finished announcing them.

Last December, for example, the Liberal Democrats were caught out saying:

“The only tax cuts the Conservatives support are ones for the very rich. At the General Election, their priority was to cut inheritance tax for millionaires. In the Coalition, Liberal Democrats have blocked these plans.”

After all, just this week the Business Secretary has expressed his

“deep disappointment at the lack of capital investment in the economy”

while declaring himself the shop steward of the newly formed “National Union of Ministers”, fighting cuts to his own departmental budget openly in any TV studio and newspaper that would have him. I can see why the Prime Minister might be reluctant to let his deputy fill in for him at the Dispatch Box given that level of loyalty, so perhaps he should just bite the bullet and do it himself.

If our amendment were carried, all it would do is restore a status quo that has been long experienced in this Parliament: the Prime Minister comes to this House regularly to be held accountable during Prime Minister’s questions for the policy and the behaviour of his Government. That is even more vital after major Government announcements, such as Budgets. It cannot be acceptable that we are expected to put up with a month-long gap between the Budget and the next appearance by the Prime Minister to answer questions at that Dispatch Box.

If the Government resist the amendment to the sittings motion, it will become emblematic of their wider disdain for parliamentary accountability and even for democracy. After all, they have had no democratic mandate for the economic policy that they have pursued since June 2010, because the Liberal Democrats fought the election espousing a completely different economic policy from the one that they now support. The Government have had no democratic mandate for their disastrous top-down reorganisation of the national health service. They explicitly ruled it out during the general election, but now they pursue it with the certainty of zealots and the competence of Mr Bean.

[Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

Would the hon. Lady remind me what democratic mandate Tony Blair had to take this country to war in Iraq?

[Sarah Newton]

That was the very same Prime Minister who did not even allow a debate in the House on a votable motion. It is preposterous for the hon. Lady to deny that from the Dispatch Box and say that our Prime Minister does not put himself before the House on a regular basis for it to scrutinise what this Government are doing.

[Ms Eagle]

I know that the hon. Lady was not a Member when there was a vote on Iraq, but there was a vote in this Parliament, and a very large majority for the action that was subsequently taken in Iraq.

[Sarah Newton]

Action, not war.

[Ms Eagle]

There was far more of a mandate. Indeed, the Conservative party, which was then in opposition, supported that.

[Mr Jones]

Is it not also a fact that the motion was carried on the votes of Conservative Members, which they may conveniently have forgotten?

[Ms Eagle]

Yes, that is absolutely true. Perhaps in future the hon. Lady should check the record before she makes points as defective as that.

[Mr Spellar]

The hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) makes a point which I think needs to be on the record. She says that the House voted for action, not war. The hon. Lady, who is fairly new to the House, will not be aware of the fact—I am sure that my hon. Friend the shadow Leader of the House is aware of it—that this country has never formally gone to war since 1939, but we have been involved in a considerable number of military actions. It is quite understandable that the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth, not having been around at the time and not having been here long, would not understand that difference.

[Ms Eagle]

My right hon. Friend is entirely correct.

[Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)]

On the Iraq war, I am sure the hon. Lady knows that there is an application before the Backbench Business Committee for a debate on the 10th anniversary of the war. Will she support that application?

[Ms Eagle]

I wish the hon. Gentleman all good speed with his application to the Backbench Business Committee, but it is not for me from the Front Bench to dictate what the Committee should decide to do.

The Government also had no mandate for the trebling of tuition fees, which they—

[Mark Pritchard]

For clarification, the application is not mine. My application is for a less contentious debate on Romanian and Bulgarian migration to the United Kingdom. The application for the debate on Iraq was made by the leader of the Green party, the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), but I think it is in the national interest. The debate would be in the interests of the Opposition and a cathartic exercise for them, and I hope the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) will support it.

[Ms Eagle]

I hear what the hon. Gentleman says, but we are awaiting the publication of the Chilcot report, which I am sure will occasion us plenty of opportunity to have a debate and consider the way these matters worked out.

We know why the Prime Minister is running scared. He knows that his Chancellor’s economic plan is not working. His Back Benchers know that their Chancellor’s economic plan is not working. Little wonder, then, that our Prime Minister wants to hide away and hope that we will forget about it over a long Easter recess. He keeps organising these long Easter recesses for his, rather than for our, convenience. The only way to stop him getting away with it is to vote for our amendment to stop the Prime Minister evading scrutiny after the Budget for an entire month. I certainly hope that the House will do so.