Angela Eagle
Main Page: Angela Eagle (Labour - Wallasey)Department Debates - View all Angela Eagle's debates with the Leader of the House
(10 years ago)
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Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
Will the Leader of the House give us the business for next week?
The First Secretary of State and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr William Hague)
The business for next week will be as follows:
Monday 15 December—Motion relating to the Firefighters’ Pension Scheme (England) Regulations 2014, followed by consideration in Committee of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill (day 2).
Tuesday 16 December—Conclusion of consideration in Committee of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill, followed by motion to approve a money resolution relating to the Local Government (Religious etc. Observances) Bill.
Wednesday 17 December—Opposition day (11th allotted day). There will be debates on Opposition motions including one entitled “The Immediate Abolition of the Bedroom Tax”.
Thursday 18 December—Statement on the publication of the fourth report from the Communities and Local Government Committee on the operation of the national planning policy framework, followed by matters to be raised before the forthcoming Adjournment as selected by the Backbench Business Committee.
Friday 19 December—The House will not be sitting.
The provisional business for the week commencing 5 January 2015 will include:
Monday 5 January—Second Reading of the Serious Crime Bill [Lords].
I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for 18 December will be:
Thursday 18 December—General debate on business investment in outer-city estates, followed by a general debate on the future of Carnforth station.
Ms Eagle
I thank the Leader of the House for announcing next week’s business and the business for the first day back in 2015. I also thank him for the debate that he has granted for Monday on the firefighters pension scheme.
On Wednesday, we will once more stage a debate on the pernicious and cruel bedroom tax. Will the Leader of the House assure us that if the House votes again to scrap the tax, he will actually act and abolish it?
This week, the Government achieved the dubious distinction of losing its 100th vote in the Lords. They were defeated for the second time on their plans to curtail judicial review, and four former Tory Cabinet Ministers voted against them. This was after the Justice Secretary had to admit that he did not understand his own Bill, and in an humiliating apology correct his assertion in this House that clause 64 maintained judicial discretion when it does not.
Will the Leader of the House tell us whether his Government will now see sense and accept the Lords amendments? After losing yet another judicial review last week, should not the Justice Secretary now accept that instead of trying to abolish judicial challenge, he should just get on top of his brief and stop trying to implement unlawful policies?
A week after the Chancellor’s autumn statement, the mask has slipped and his baleful plan for Britain’s future has become clear. He has failed every test and broken every promise he made on the economy, including his promise to balance the books before the election next year. He hoped we would not notice the choice that he has made to cut public spending to 35% of gross domestic product, which would take us back to levels reminiscent of the 1930s before we had the NHS or a social safety net.
In the week when we were reminded that 4 million people in our country are now at risk of going hungry, it seems that the Tory solution is to blame the victims and tell those who cannot afford to feed their families that they do not know how to cook. We all know that the real problem is low wages and in-work poverty. Instead of their ideological obsession with destroying 60 years of social progress, what we really need is a fair and balanced deficit reduction programme that combines common-sense savings with an effective growth strategy. May we therefore have a debate in Government time on these competing visions for the future of our country?
The Tory Chief Whip has had yet another bad week. It seems that some of his ministerial colleagues took his declaration of a three-day week a little too literally. The Financial Secretary to the Treasury was so amazed that he needed to be here on a Thursday that he very nearly missed his own debate on the Government’s flagship stamp duty policy. However, a generous offer from the Work and Pensions Secretary to lead the debate in his absence was enough to send him sprinting down Whitehall from the Treasury. While Government Back Benchers wasted time with points of order, he eventually arrived, flustered and visibly out of breath. What on earth were the Government Whips doing? Were they playing Candy Crush on their iPads? The Chief Whip is always bunking off; when he is here, he is causing trouble at the back of the class; and he never does his homework. I think the Education Secretary would be very happy to put him in detention.
The autumn statement appears to have had a peculiar effect on the Liberal Democrats. The Business Secretary told the Cabinet that it was “excellent”, with “Lib Dem fingerprints all over it”, before getting others to brief the newspapers that he really thinks that the cuts are simply not achievable. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury happily signed it off as a member of the quad, but then he called it
“a mix of unfunded tax promises, harsh spending plans and pandering to UKIP.”
The Deputy Prime Minister has said that he is proud of the autumn statement, but he was so desperate to distance himself from it that he fled 300 miles to Land’s End. We are all used to celebrities having “show-mances” to make the front page of Hello! magazine, but this must be the first time in history that two partners have attempted a “show-vorce”. They are leaking lurid details of their rows to the papers, and they have moved into separate rooms in No. 10 so that they can spin against each other. They have even resorted to “masosadism”—inflicting pain on each other while inflicting pain on themselves at the same time.
The Liberal Democrats must think that we have all fallen off a Christmas tree. Their cynical choreography has now reached such ridiculous levels that I am told that they are forming a Cabinet within a Cabinet in order to shadow their own Government’s Cabinet, and I bet there are still no women in it. It is less like Candy Crush and more like parliamentary zombie apocalypse.
