Health and Social Care

Anne Main Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Leigh]

That is an interesting argument. I have appended my name to the important amendment to the Queen’s Speech, and we should have a serious debate on the issue. This is not Conservative Members of Parliament obsessing about Europe; this is a real issue for people. It is no longer a dry as dust issue.

In Boston, a seat with a 12,000 Conservative majority, UKIP won nearly every council seat two weeks ago. Unlike my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash), the people there are not particularly worried about all the details of European legislation, but they are worried about immigration. I echo what my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) said in his very measured speech: people in Lincolnshire are not closet racists. They welcome Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian people, but they want their public services to be supported, when, on the coast of Lincolnshire, public services are overwhelmed. Since 2004, 1.1 million have arrived in this country from eastern Europe, and we have to address that issue.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Leigh]

I am sorry; I have only a short time left.

Speaking personally as a comfortable, middle-class person living in the hinterland of the beautiful Lincolnshire wolds—where, incidentally, we held all the seats we were defending—and in a comfortable part of London, I have no angst about Poles. They are hard working, and I think that most of them will go back. Their religion is estimable, and I have no complaint whatever against them. But we should listen to the people who are worried about public services, and this is therefore a European issue.

I personally believe that we should listen to those people and that we should have a referendum. I would also say to my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames) that I believe that the Prime Minister is absolutely a man of honour and a gentleman, and there is no doubt in my mind that if he is still Prime Minister in 2017 we will have that referendum. The trouble is that ordinary people—if I may use that expression—do not think like us. They do not think in terms of four-year Parliaments; they think about now. The question they ask is, “If this is such an important issue, why can’t we have a referendum in the next two years?”

There should at least be a mandate referendum that we can put to the British people, asking whether we should have a new relationship with Europe based on political co-operation and economic free trade. If we fail to listen to the people, we will create a sense of alienation and, despite all our success in driving through the Government’s central economic policies and tackling the deficit—the reason that the coalition was created and what we are really about—that would eat away at the support for the coalition. A sense of alienation is created when people are worried about their public services.

People are worried about other issues as well. In the middle of my constituency, the Government are erecting wind turbines more than 150 metres high—taller than the highest point in the Lincolnshire wolds—that are being paid for by ordinary people living in terraced houses in Gainsborough. They are paying £100 a year, and the money is going straight into the pockets of rich farmers, all in the name of dealing with global warming—if indeed there is global warming, if indeed carbon emissions are causing it and if indeed wind farms will make any difference. That all adds to people’s sense of alienation.

People also worry about the budget for international development. I am personally in favour of spending money on international development, but we have a commitment to spend 0.7% of our gross national product, for which there is no scientific basis. As we reduce the number of staff in the Department for International Development, we are loading more burdens on the remaining staff to hand out more money. That is simply not good economics. It is not a good way to run a Department.

I do not believe we should ring-fence the budget of any Department. We should spend wisely and carefully on the right things at the right time. Whether we are talking about same-sex marriage, about the EU referendum or about the DFID budget, we must recognise that people are feeling a sense of alienation, and that good, strong Conservative voters do not feel that their Government are representing them all the time. Let us also put the focus on the Labour party, but let us concentrate on the core issue of getting rid of the deficit. Let us make that the successful mission of this Parliament.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Kevin Barron (Rother Valley) (Lab)]

I have to say to the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries): welcome back to the Conservative party. I heard what she has been saying today from the Conservatives about 20 years ago. It led to their spending 13 years in opposition, and I hope it has the same result in a couple of years’ time. I look forward to that.

This debate seems to be more about what is not in the Queen’s Speech than what is, but immigration and access to the national health service are addressed, and the tone of this debate has been quite distasteful. We know that, from time to time, some of our constituents go to work in other European economic area countries; they pay their taxes and social insurance contributions there, and as a consequence they are allowed to obtain health care in those countries. Immigrants are not coming to this country to use our national health service, and they do not use it for free: they pay, as they should.

We need be very careful when we talk about people moving around Europe. Tens of thousands of our fellow citizens have gone to live in Spain, Portugal and France, not to work but to retire. If they return to this country en bloc, consider the impact on the health service, social care and care for the elderly. We need to have a rational debate on this issue.

[Mrs Main]

In the last Parliament, I was privileged to serve on the Communities and Local Government Committee. We produced a report on community cohesion and integration under the right hon. Gentleman’s Government. It said that the pace of change, the resources and facilities were all wrong, and many of the communities we visited said that. He needs to show a little humility when talking about immigration and numbers, because his own Government condemned the situation in that report.

[Mr Barron]

It was not a Government report but a Select Committee report, and I do not remember it, quite frankly.

Community cohesion is important and has been important in this country for centuries—not just since we joined the European economic area or the EU expanded to 27 countries, with people having the right to come and work here, as indeed we have the right to go out and work in other EEA countries. A lot of this debate is distasteful and is not the truth. In a recent by-election, a political party that is not represented here and I hope will not be was saying that, as of January next year, probably nearly half the population of Bulgaria will come and work in this country. That is nonsense, and neither Back Benchers nor Front Benchers should have a knee-jerk reaction to that type of debate. We should have sensible debates about what immigration does or does not do in this country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I was going to tell the right hon. Gentleman that some 1% of the Romanian population of working age, which is 150,000 people, have indicated that they wish to come to this country, as have 4% of the 4.9 million Bulgarians of working age, which is another 200,000 people. That is another 350,000 people. We cannot go on building houses and cities. As MigrationWatch has said, we will need eight cities the size of Birmingham if we are going to accommodate all the people who wish to come to this country.

I welcome the fact that the Opposition have at long last recognised that this is a serious issue. They have not a snowball’s chance in hell of being re-elected unless they are prepared to recognise the concerns of the British people. Under Labour’s stewardship, there was a deliberate act of policy: Andrew Neather, a speech writer at No. 10, said immigration was being positively encouraged by the Labour Government in order to

“rub the Right’s nose in diversity.”

They knowingly inflicted this on the country—it was not done by accident—and they left this Government with the most awful backlog of cases to deal with, which is unfair to those who ought to be allowed to stay in the UK and to those in our country whose lives are affected by the presence here of people who should have been deported.

[Mrs Main]

The Select Committee report “Community Cohesion and Migration”, which Labour Members seem to have forgotten about, stressed that second and third-generation immigrants were as resentful as the native British population, because the necessary resources were never provided by the Government, who encouraged so much immigration so fast and without preparation.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Immigration is imposing burdens on our services, such as the health service and social services. I am seeing that in my own constituency. We now have some 10,000 Nepalese, mostly elderly, who have come to the United Kingdom as a result of the politicians’ caving in to the campaign run by an actress called Joanna Lumley. That has resulted in a fundamental change to the nature of Aldershot that has deeply upset my constituents, who are entitled to express a view without being told that they are racist. They do not like seeing their locality changed—[Interruption] I wish the right hon. Member for Rother Valley would shut up—because of something on which they were not asked for their opinion. When they do express an opinion, they are dismissed as being racist.

The projection that the United Kingdom’s population is likely to reach 70 million in the next 15 years means, as I said, that we will need to build eight large cities outside the capital during that time—in other words, one home every seven minutes, day and night, just to house new immigrants unless the Government are able to continue their progress in tackling immigration. The 2011 census revealed a mass exodus of white British from the city of London—a fall of 600,000 between 2001 and 2011. Almost half the population of Ealing and Hammersmith were born outside the United Kingdom. These are fundamental changes to the nature of our country. The people of Britain are entitled to express a view on the composition of their country. Last week there was a story in the Evening Standard about Harris Primary Academy Philip Lane in Haringey, where 59% of the 463 children are on free school meals, 79% have English as a second language, and Somali and Turkish are the most prevalent languages. What are we doing to our country? We have to take sterner action, and I recommend that to the Government.

Let me turn briefly to Europe, which the right hon. Member for Leigh dismissed as irrelevant and not a great issue that should be addressed, although he had no answer to the challenge by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough. This issue is not going to go away, and it is of great concern to people in this country. Our European partners are determined to create a united states of Europe, which is not what the people of Britain want. The Prime Minister is entirely right to seek to renegotiate. He is also right to have a referendum. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames), I profoundly believe that he will deliver that referendum after the next election. The trouble is that people are uncertain about whether we are committed to that. The way to deliver it is a new Act of Parliament during this Parliament to determine that there will be a referendum during the next Parliament.