Business of the House

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Will the Leader of the House give us the business for next week?

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Chris Grayling)]

The business for next week is as follows:

Monday 20 July—Second Reading of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill.

Tuesday 21 July—Second Reading of the Finance Bill.

The business for the week commencing 7 September will be:

Monday 7 September—Remaining stages of the European Union Referendum Bill.

Tuesday 8 September—Consideration in Committee of the Finance Bill.

Wednesday 9 September—Opposition day (6th allotted day). There will be a debate on a motion in the name of the Scottish National party. Subject to be announced.

Thursday 10 September—Business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 11 September—Private Members’ Bills.



I want to inform the House of two other matters. First, it might be helpful to right hon. and hon. Members, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone), to know that you, Mr Speaker, have authorised a trial during the September sittings in which the alphabetical groupings in the Division Lobbies will be changed. We will not be consigning the Mc’s to the outer darkness, but the letter G will move to the A to F desk. That is to try to address the issue, raised by several Members, of long queues at the current G to M desk. The trial will run for two weeks to establish whether the new arrangements improve the situation.

Finally, as is customary, I want to thank all the staff of the House for their hard work, particularly in supporting Members at the start of this Parliament following the general election. I hope that they enjoy a well-deserved break. I hope that all right hon. and hon. Members will also have a well-deserved break as well as spending a lot of time on constituency work—it is not all holidays, of course—before the House returns in September.

[Ms Eagle]

Let me begin by seconding the Leader of the House’s thanks to all the staff and employees of the House for the support they have given us since the general election. As he is trialling the moving of the letter G from one desk in the Division Lobbies to another, perhaps he will explain why we cannot trial his plans for English votes for English laws, because they seem more important.

Yesterday’s general debate on the Government’s rushed and partisan proposals to introduce an English veto into our Standing Orders demonstrated that there is no support for it outside the Government. The Leader of the House has not announced when in September he intends to force votes to introduce his reckless plan. Will he tell us now on what date he is thinking of bringing the matter back to the House? Will he confirm that, despite the huge doubts expressed yesterday, he intends to force it through with no further concessions?

This week we learned that the Government’s plan to pack the House of Lords with 100 extra, mainly Tory, peers has been blocked by the Cabinet Secretary—at least for now. Does the Leader of the House agree that the upper House is already bursting at the seams and that, even without these extra peers, it now has the dubious distinction of being the second largest legislature in the world, beaten only by the Chinese People’s Congress? Given that every peer costs £117,000 a year, can we have a debate about how on earth these plans fulfil the Prime Minister’s pledge to cut the cost of politics? Why does this Prime Minister think it is acceptable to slash the number of elected Members in this House while allowing the unelected House to expand seemingly indefinitely in his own party’s interests?

The summer recess is nearly upon us, and I bet nobody will be more relieved than the Leader of the House. He is just two months into his new job and the Government’s business has already descended into chaos. We have had the Prime Minister’s doomed attempt to enforce collective Cabinet responsibility over his own EU referendum, which he hurriedly abandoned at the first whiff of grapeshot. In the last week we have learned of the Government’s new “dodgems” strategy to pilot their business through the House. Their headlong rush to impose a shoddy and partisan “English votes for English laws” fix was replaced with yesterday’s general debate without a vote to manage unease on their own Back Benches. Then we had the absolute farce of their botched attempt to wreck the Hunting Act 2004. The first vote was meant to be today, then it was moved to yesterday to be rushed through in 90 minutes, and then, as most of us learned on Twitter well before the Leader of the House came to the House to announce the change using a point of order, the Government pulled the vote because they knew they would lose. Will the Leader of the House tell us what other chaos he is planning for September?

This week the Government’s farcical attempt to reincarnate themselves as some kind of workers’ party has been exposed as a sham. Before the election, the Tories had vowed to “transform policy and practice” to help more disabled people into work. After the election, they scrapped the independent living fund, and we now hear that the Prime Minister is considering forcing workers to save up for their own sick pay. The Chancellor’s so-called national living wage has been exposed as just a rebrand of the minimum wage, and with his huge cuts to tax credits, millions will be thousands of pounds a year worse off. The Mayor of London has let the cat out of the bag, acknowledging that these changes will not deliver “enough to live on”.

Yesterday the Government revealed their real nature with the most vindictive attack on trade unions for 30 years. Despite the Government’s spin, this is an attack on the basic freedom to organise in the workplace that any Latin American dictator would have been proud of. If they really were the workers’ party, they would be supporting trade unions, not attacking them.

Today we will hear the result of the Liberal Democrats’ leadership election. I would like to send my commiserations to whichever candidate is unfortunate enough to win. Since the Prime Minister’s pre-resignation, there have been interesting developments in the Conservative party leadership election. Yesterday the Home Secretary poured cold water on the Mayor of London’s plans for water cannon. He has sprayed around public money, buying second-hand German cannons that it transpires he cannot even use. The Home Secretary rejected his business case because it was not watertight. I just hope he bought them on a sale-or-return basis. The Chancellor has also been on manoeuvres. The Treasury sent out an email to lobby journalists that mysteriously read, “Blah, blah, blah.” That is the most sensible thing the Chancellor has said in five years.

We have all been entranced this week by the news that a NASA space probe has made it to Pluto: a cold, desolate, lifeless place, light years away from civilisation. It sounds just like the Tory Back Benches. No doubt we are about to discover that it is a plutocracy run by old Plutonians—a bit like this place.

[Chris Grayling]

I have a high regard for the hon. Lady as a parliamentarian, but as a stand-up comedian, I would not go there. [Interruption.] I think hon. Members laughed in exasperation at how bad, not how good, the jokes were.

The hon. Lady asked about English votes for English laws and, indeed, the trial of the new Division Lobby arrangements. I assure her that the English votes for English laws procedure will last longer than two weeks when we put it into place. It is not customary to announce business further in advance than is normal in the business statement. When we return in September, I will as normal set out the business for the coming weeks.

The hon. Lady made a point about the House of Lords. May I once again suggest that it really is not a good idea to believe everything she reads in the papers? That story was simply not true, and it has rightly been described by Downing Street as “nonsense”. [Interruption.] I take it that the Labour party will therefore not nominate any peers in future. I take it that the hon. Lady is giving a self-denying ordinance that there will be no more Labour nominations to the House of Lords.

The hon. Lady talked about reducing the size of this House. I simply remind her, as I keep doing on English votes for English laws, that we believe in keeping to our manifesto commitments.

There was, however, one point on which we agreed—offering our good wishes to the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, who will be announced this afternoon. As the hon. Lady rightly says, he faces a very big and uphill task. We now have a collection of fine Members of Parliament on the Government Benches who will be excellent representatives of their constituencies and will I am afraid freeze out the Liberal Democrats for the foreseeable future.

The hon. Lady talked about chaos. Let me give a simple explanation of chaos. Chaos is a party that claims to represent working people, but votes against a national living wage. Chaos is a party that claims to represent working people and not support benefit-dependency, but increasingly opposes our reform of welfare, as we see in Labour Members’ mounting rebellion at their leadership’s attempt to claim that they support our reforms. Chaos is a party that claims to support an extra voice for the English, but says it will vote against a sensible package of reforms that will do the right thing for the English. Chaos is a party that ends up with its leadership candidates fighting over whether it is good idea for a party leader to be a parent. Chaos is a party that cannot even condemn the strikes that left millions of people unable to make their normal journeys to work last week.

The hon. Lady talks about supporting trade unions. May I ask her, as one of two preferred deputy leadership candidates backed by a militant boss who says it is okay to break the law, whether that is really what she means by supporting the trade unions? She talks about places that are light years away from civilisation. There is one place close to here where that is definitely the case—in the Labour party.