Debate on the Address

Anne Begg Excerpts

Tuesday 25th May 2010 Commons Chamber

[Miss Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to the new hon. Member for Watford (Richard Harrington), who has the great distinction of making the first maiden speech of any of the 2010 intake. That suggests that he has been quick off the blocks, and I hope that his Front Benchers take note that he, among our large 2010 intake, managed to get in first. I was expecting to hear maiden speeches for the next six months or so, so well done to him for getting in so quickly.

From listening to the hon. Gentleman’s contribution this afternoon, I am sure that it will not be long before he plays an important role in the Chamber, and I was delighted to hear him pay tribute to his predecessor, Claire Ward, because she was well liked in the House. She entered Parliament as a very young woman, aged 23, and she was indeed in that famous picture—in which I also featured, because I too entered Parliament in 1997—of Blair’s babes. However, she grew up in this Chamber, getting married and having children, and for her to have survived the life that we Members have to lead, while all that was going on in her personal life, which is the normal life of most young people, is nothing short of miraculous. I worry that we have made it more difficult for young people like Claire to enter Parliament, to lead a normal life as an MP and to have a successful career and home life, too.

I know very little about Watford; I am not even sure whether I have ever been through the town. People from Scotland always used to complain that people from south-east England knew nothing of what was happening north of Watford, so perhaps the hon. Gentleman will at some point explain to me what the Watford gap was; I never did find out.

I pay tribute also to the proposer and seconder of the motion on the Loyal Address. In 2001, I seconded the motion on the Address, and in those days, traditionally, the proposer was most definitely someone who had been a Member for some time but would be standing down at the next election, and the seconder was the up-and-coming new person who would have a meteoric rise and soon be on the Front Bench. Since then, I have languished on the Back Benches, although I remember saying in my maiden speech that one advantage of my using a wheelchair was that I would be on the Front Bench for most of my parliamentary career. Unfortunately, the powers that be have perhaps not quite appreciated my talents.

Thirteen years on, I am absolutely amazed that I am still in this place. When a Member has an ultra-marginal seat, they do not expect to retain it when their party loses an election and to be on the other side of the House. However, I have managed to make it from one side to the other, and the view is much the same; I was expecting things to be somewhat different.

[Mr Tom Harris]

I don’t like it.

[Miss Begg]

My hon. Friend says that he does not like it. We might not like the inability to influence policy in the same way, but the view is very similar.

I suppose that one of the reasons why I am still here is my Liberal Democrat opponent. He put out so much literature, all of which told constituents in my very marginal seat that if they wanted to get rid of Labour, all they had to do was vote Liberal Democrat. My majority was emblazoned across all his leaflets. I had always had a real problem in convincing my constituents that, yes, I did indeed have a marginal seat. They kept saying, “You’ll be fine, Anne, don’t you worry.” I said, “No, I have got only a 1,300 majority and I have a marginal seat,” but they would say, “Oh, it’s all right—you’ll be fine.” So I thank the Lib Dems, who put out a sea of leaflets with my majority on them, all claiming that Labour could be defeated only if people voted Liberal Democrat. Thank goodness, my constituents saw what was best for them and for me and voted Labour after all.

I am proud of the achievements of the Labour Government in the past 13 years. Before history is rewritten too much and our achievements are swept away in the great euphoria of the new coalition Government, I should say something about the Liberal voters who did not realise that by voting Liberal they would end up with a Tory Government; in Aberdeen South, they were very well aware that if they voted Liberal they would get a Tory Government. To those Liberals, I say a Scottish phrase: if ye didnae ken then, ye ken nou!

The Labour Government’s achievements have been many, but the one in which I take most pride is how we tackled the scourge of poverty—both pensioner poverty and child poverty. I do not want anyone to undermine what we did as a Government to bring people, particularly pensioners, out of poverty. We ended absolute poverty with the introduction of the pension credit for all pensioners in this country and we made huge inroads into tackling relative poverty. We did the same with child poverty; we turned the tide. The numbers were going up under the last Conservative Government, but we have turned that around—we turned that around, I should say; I have not yet got my tenses right—and the numbers of children in poverty were coming down.

The Labour Government also transformed the landscape on equality. I am thinking not only of the rights of the lesbian, gay and transsexual community, but of those of us with disabilities and those facing discrimination because of their gender or on any other grounds. I worry that the new Conservative-Liberal alliance will not take equality as seriously as the previous Labour Government took it. There are some warm words in the Queen’s Speech, but warm words do not necessarily add up to a strong commitment to the equality legislation already on the statute book and to building on that to make sure that equality is at the heart of everything that the new Government do.

A Liberal-Tory coalition is not a new thing. We had one elected in Aberdeen in 2003, and it lasted until 2007, when a Lib Dem-Scottish National party coalition was elected. I have to say that it was not a happy experience for the good burghers of Aberdeen. Under the Liberal-Tory coalition elected in 2003, the city council underwent a huge reorganisation, which cost huge amounts of money, took away the existing directors of education and housing, and reorganised local government in Aberdeen into three geographical areas. By 2007, it was clear that the whole restructuring had failed miserably, and it had cost a huge amount. I do not know the exact cost because it is difficult to disaggregate these things, but it was certainly more than £100 million.

Aberdeen has had a foretaste of what may now happen under this coalition Government with regard to public spending cuts. In the first year, there were supposed to be £25 million-worth of cuts, which miraculously rose to £50 million, and in the second year there were proposals for another £30 million-worth of cuts. This happened in one small city as a result of the financial mismanagement of, essentially, a Liberal-dominated council. Perhaps some of the Members sitting on the Government Benches should worry that the Liberals may talk a good game, but when they get into power there is quite a different outcome. What we found in Aberdeen, before the effects of the global crisis kicked in, and before any of the proposals made by the Government in the Queen’s Speech or in the days leading up to it, was one of the richest cities in the United Kingdom on the verge of bankruptcy. It has been a sorry tale.

We often think of public servants as faceless bureaucrats and paper-pushers, but we must remember that it is these very same public servants who work for our local councils in providing the care for our elderly and disabled, and who will find that their jobs have been lost as a result of the actions taken by this new coalition Government. It is frightening to think of what might happen when we have the new cuts on top of the existing cuts. We have already seen it in Aberdeen. Schools have closed. Day centres for people with severe disabilities have closed without alternative provision being made, and those people have been left to find activities for themselves because they are no longer provided by the council. All the warm words—“Oh yes, we’ll provide something better”—have never materialised into action.

Perhaps that helps to explain why I am sitting here on the Labour Benches having survived the Liberal bounce, the Clegg bounce, or whatever it was it called. It is because people in Aberdeen know the reality of what it is to live under a council run by the Liberal Democrats.

[Sir Alan Beith]

The hon. Lady seems to be overlooking the fact that this coalition Government are confronting a gap of £156 billion to £160 billion between what the country is spending and what it is taking in. Should she not take that into account?

[Miss Begg]

Part of the reason for my illustrative lecture is that in 2003 the Liberal council in Aberdeen took on a budget that was £27 million in surplus and turned that surplus into a £50 million deficit, without any kind of economic crisis. That did not happen to the Labour local authorities elsewhere in Scotland; it happened only, surprisingly, in Aberdeen, where we had a Liberal-Tory coalition that later became a Liberal-Scottish National party coalition. That council took a rich city that did not have any financial problems and, by its sheer incompetence in reorganising itself, managed to bring it quite close to bankruptcy.

One would think that the council would have started to listen to the people, but it has not. We have our own 55% question in Aberdeen, because there was a proposal to put a lovely new arts centre in Union Terrace gardens, a lovely Victorian park right in the centre of the city. It had the backing of the Scottish Arts Council and had most of its funding in place. Everything was ready and the lease was about to be signed with the council, which owned the land in the gardens, when one of our local businessmen came along with an offer of £50 million to cover over Union Terrace gardens and create a civic square. He said that he would do that only if the people of Aberdeen wanted it, and £300,000 of public money later, spent on a consultation on which the council had said no public money would be used, 55% of those who took part said that they did not want the civic square, and 44% said that they did. Last week, how did the Liberal Democrats and the SNP on Aberdeen city council vote? Did they vote with the majority of people in the consultation? No, of course they did not. They voted to allow the civic square to go on to its next phase.

Some £50 million from a philanthropist and local businessman sounds like a lot of money. Who would dare to turn it down? It might seem churlish to suggest it. The problem is that the proposed civic square is not going to cost £50 million, or even £100 million. It was costed, very quickly, at £140 million. There was not supposed to be any taxpayers’ money involved, but another £90 million will have to be found from somewhere. That is the position in Aberdeen—we have a bankrupt council, an economic crisis given the potential funding problems coming to us down the line, and a council that has decided to go on to the second stage of a grandiose scheme to raze a public park to street level when the majority of the population do not want it to happen. That is not democracy, and the people of Aberdeen are feeling angry and disfranchised because they have not had a say. I heard in the Queen’s Speech that local communities are to be given power over planning, although I appreciate that that will not apply in Scotland. If that power for people in England means that local councils then ignore their views, the promise will have been hollow.

I have talked for longer than I meant to, but I wish to mention one more concern before I close. Although it is popular and may seem right to suggest that people should have access to cancer drugs that have not yet been properly registered, I worry that that proposal overrides the mechanism that the Labour Government put in place, which is the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. I ask the Government to be clearer about whether that is in fact what the Conservative-Liberal coalition wants to do. Does it want to dismantle the whole apparatus of NICE? It was through NICE that we stopped the postcode lottery in drug funding, and it is through NICE that we ensure that drugs are safe and good value for money before they are made available to the population. I worry that if a drug company has a very expensive drug that it wants to sell, it will now be in a position to be more generous in its description of the efficacy of that drug. That would put pressure on patients, who would then put pressure on doctors to prescribe it, whereas it might not have got through the NICE appraisal scheme. We have the NICE appraisal for a good reason, and I worry that the new Government could undermine the whole basis of an organisation, which the Labour Government quite properly set up.

Perhaps it does not sound like it, but I am delighted to welcome the Queen’s Speech today. It is interesting to be back and on the other side of the Chamber. The 1997 election and coming to Parliament was exciting, and returning to Parliament this time has been equally exciting. Perhaps, because there was no change of Government in 2001 and 2005, it was a bit of an anti-climax when we all arrived back—we simply had to get on with the work. This time, it has been fascinating, if only to watch the body language of Members opposite.