Business of the House

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Commons Chamber

[The First Secretary of State and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr William Hague)]

I should like to make a statement about next week’s business, which will be:

Monday 26 January—Remaining stages of the Infrastructure Bill [Lords].

Tuesday 27 January—Second Reading of the Corporation Tax (Northern Ireland) Bill, followed by debate on a motion relating to accommodation for young people in care. The subject for this debate was determined by the Backbench Business Committee.

Wednesday 28 January—Opposition day (15th allotted day). There will be a debate on an Opposition motion. Subject to be announced.

Thursday 29 January—Debate on a motion relating to the Iraq inquiry, followed by general debate on financial support available for restoration of opencast coal sites. The subjects for both debates were determined by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 30 January—The House will not be sitting.

The provisional business for the week commencing 2 February will include:

Monday 2 February—Second Reading of the Armed Forces (Service Complaints and Financial Assistance) Bill [Lords], followed by consideration of Lords amendments to the Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Bill, followed by motion to approve the draft Scotland Act 1998 (Modification of Schedules 4 and 5 and Transfer of Functions to the Scottish Ministers etc.) Order 2015.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

I thank the Leader of the House for his announcement of next week’s business. I thank him, too, for his announcement earlier that he has asked the Clerk to draft the necessary motion to allow the Bill proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford),which repeals this Government’s catastrophic top-down reorganisation of the NHS, to proceed finally to Committee. Since this Parliament is rapidly running out of time, can he clarify when that is now likely to happen?

The Bill proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) to ban wild animals in circuses is scheduled, yet again, to have its Second Reading debate at this time tomorrow, after Conservative Members have made every effort to talk it out. A ban has widespread support across the country, it was backed by the House in 2011 and no less a person than the Prime Minister promised to introduce it in this Parliament. Will the Leader of the House now allow the Prime Minister’s promise to be delivered by granting the Bill Government time?

On Monday we shall debate the remaining stages of the Infrastructure Bill. Last week I raised the last-minute tabling of 60 pages of badly drafted Government amendments relating to the electronic communications code and asked for more time to debate them, which the Leader of the House refused. Last night the farce continued as the Government dramatically withdrew all the amendments. Can the Leader of the House tell us what on earth is going on with this farrago of a Bill? Is this his definition of competence, or is it, once again, total chaos?

We welcomed yesterday’s top-line figures on jobs, but for millions of families up and down the country, there is a grim reality lurking beneath the headlines. More and more people are unable to obtain the hours they need at work in order to pay the bills. Real wages have fallen by record amounts, and 5 million people are being paid less than the living wage. That shortfall in wages is being made up by hundreds of millions of pounds of extra spending on tax credits. Will the Leader of the House accept that a low-wage economy is not just bad for hard-working people but bad for public finances, and will he arrange for an urgent debate, in Government time, on the low-wage economy that the Government parties have sustained?

As Mr Speaker noted yesterday, we shall be celebrating a number of important anniversaries this year, including, this week, the 750th anniversary of the de Montfort Parliament. Let me take this opportunity to thank the members of the Speakers’ Advisory Committee for the 2015 Anniversaries for all their hard work on Parliament in the Making. I particularly thank the House of Commons Chair of the Committee, the hon. Member for Mid Worcestershire (Sir Peter Luff), and—obviously—Mr Speaker himself.

Mr Speaker was right yesterday when he said that we must remember our history, but, when we look back at the de Montfort Parliament, it seems there are some lessons that the Conservatives have failed to learn even after 750 years. If you destabilise your leader with defections, and if you keep arguing with Europe, you will be in for a bloody end before the year is out. Simon de Montfort was a rebel leader who held the King hostage and governed in his place—no wonder he is an inspiration to the many Conservative MPs who have similar ambitions.

The Prime Minister has been brushing up on his history this week, in order to avoid a repeat of his failure, on prime-time US television. to know what “Magna Carta” actually means, but I am afraid that he bestowed an even worse embarrassment on the nation by insisting that the President calls him “bro”. Yesterday he failed a test on the radio to establish whether he was as cool as President Obama. I think we could all have told him what the outcome of that would be—it was fairly obvious before he began—but he did say that he enjoyed a Nando’s. That is hardly surprising; we all know that the Prime Minister is very partial to chicken.

Meanwhile, the Deputy Prime Minister proposed his own constitutional change this week. He has decided that he would like to scrap Prime Minister’s Questions. Apparently, they are just “not a good use of his time”, and he would rather be

“out of the Westminster bubble”.

The Deputy Prime Minister keeps fleeing Westminster, so I thought that I had better look at what he has been up to in his own constituency, and in doing so I came across a leaflet. Alongside the obligatory dodgy Liberal Democrat bar chart, this leaflet contains—strangely—two photographs of the leader of the Labour Party, and absolutely none of the local MP, who happens to be the Deputy Prime Minister. In fact, I cannot see any mention of him at all. Moreover—this is the oddest part yet—it claims that the leader of Labour Party

“wants you to vote Conservative”.

It should be pretty obvious by now that the person who has been voting Conservative for five years is actually the Deputy Prime Minister.

[Mr Hague]

As usual, I thank the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) for her questions. She asked about several Bills. As I made clear earlier, during Question Time, we will table a motion to allow the appointment of members of a Committee to consider the private Member’s Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford). Of course, a Committee of Selection will need to meet in order to make those appointments, but the Committee will then be able to do its work.

On the Wild Animals in Circuses Bill, I certainly support that Bill and the Government do too, but it would be wrong for the Government to pick Bills out of the private Members’ Bill process and give them Government time. It would be an entirely different process if Governments did that, so the Bill will have to take its normal chances.

Last week the hon. Lady complained that amendments had been submitted on the communications code amendments, but now she is not happy that they are not going to be proceeded with. I think there is no pleasing her on this subject. Opposition Members asked me to provide additional time for the Infrastructure Bill so these amendments could be discussed, but it is a good job I did not provide the additional time because the Government do not now propose to add the amendments to the Bill. The Minister responsible in Committee, the Minister of State, Department for Transport, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), mentioned earlier that the Department had listened to some of the objections, so the Government need to consult further.

The hon. Lady mentioned the commemoration of anniversaries, which Mr Speaker informed us about yesterday. I was proud that one of the anniversaries he referred to was the 20th anniversary of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, which I took through Parliament and which I regard as my main achievement in 26 years in Parliament—some may say it is my only achievement, but that is not how I see it. I am proud that that Act was mentioned and I join in thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Worcestershire (Sir Peter Luff) and Mr Speaker for the work they have done on the commemorations this year.

The hon. Lady talked about the lesson of 750 years of history being not to destabilise the leader. It might be awkward for Labour Members to embark on that subject, although in their case it is not so much destabilising the leader as that the leader has not stabilised himself in the first place or at any point in his time in office as Leader of the Opposition. The issue is not that the Prime Minister insists that President Obama calls him “bro”; it is that that the word the US Administration use most for the Leader of the Opposition is “who?” The hon. Lady might like to reflect on that instead.

The hon. Lady asked about an interview the Prime Minister gave in the United States, but I have noticed that the Opposition have had a disastrous week in terms of giving interviews. When interviewed by Andrew Neil on Sunday, Labour’s deputy leader was unable to answer questions on where £30 billion of savings were to be found by the Labour party, and the shadow Business Secretary walked out of the Sky News studio when asked questions by the interviewer on subjects he had not been briefed on. I can only say that if we all walked out of interviews when we were asked about things we did not know about in advance, there would not be much politics on television. The hon. Gentleman really needs to get a bit less sensitive. Most of us did not know we were allowed to walk out and have spent several decades valiantly trying to answer the questions, but the shadow Business Secretary has an entirely different approach.

We cannot be lectured on competence by a party that has had those experiences this week and that has now dropped 21 policies since new year’s day. It is now the 22nd day of the month, so that is one policy per day. The Labour party has still been unable to explain about “weaponising” the national health service, and the former Labour mayor of Doncaster has said of the Leader of the Opposition, whom he knows well:

“He is ignorant of the real values of ordinary working-class voters and holds his nose at their lifestyle.”

Also, the Labour party has still had “Freeze that bill” on its website for most of this week, so Labour headquarters is apparently unaware that the nation has moved on—that energy prices are falling, and that a “Freeze that bill” policy is precisely what people do not want when their energy prices are being reduced. Once again, we will not be taking lessons on competence from the Opposition.

The hon. Lady quoted President Obama, so I will finish by quoting him too. Last week he said:

“I would note that Great Britain and the United States are two economies that are standing out at a time when a lot of other countries are having problems, so we must be doing something right.”