Immigration
Debate between Caroline Johnson and Angela Eagle(1 week, 6 days ago)
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Dame Angela Eagle
Collective responsibility apparently never used to matter to the Conservative party, but if we remember some of the history we will know that that was actually true.
I want Members to cast their minds back to the summer of 2022, and the 20-week period from Chris Pincher having his night at the Carlton Club all the way through to when the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt) had to write an emergency Budget. The Conservative Government descended into utter chaos, with three different Prime Ministers and four different Home Secretaries taking turns in office. What was happening with small boats in the channel during those particular 20 weeks? We had not 12,000 or 13,000 arrivals, but 30,000 arrivals.
Dame Angela Eagle
No.
There were 30,000 arrivals in the space of 20 weeks— not 220 or even 500 boats, but 670 boats. How did that happen? The Conservatives were all too busy fighting among themselves and crashing the economy to bother about protecting our borders.
Let us not forget the role that the shadow Home Secretary played in that little bit of Conservative party history. In the space of 20 weeks, he went from tech Minister to no ministerial role, to Chief Secretary to the Treasury, to Paymaster General, to police Minister, but none of that was his most important role. We should remember—
Dame Angela Eagle
No; I am going to make some of these points. We should all remember that the shadow Home Secretary was once credited as being the economic guru behind Liz Truss’s premiership. This is the man who helped Liz Truss to write her catastrophic mini-Budget, drive the country off a cliff and scupper her own premiership.
Dr Caroline Johnson
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The history lesson of who was which Minister in which Government when is obviously all available on the internet, if people want to look. How does it relate to the matter we are discussing today, which is what the current Government are doing to tackle migration?
Dame Angela Eagle
No, I have given way enough. I will carry on and make my points, because we do not have much time.
Since the general election, we have established the Border Security Command to draw together the work of all relevant agencies, supported by at least an extra £150 million this financial year. We have backed UK law enforcement to play a leading role in major international operations to take out the gangs and their supply chains further up the smuggling route. We have deepened co-operation with key allies, including France. We have struck new agreements with Germany, Iraq, Italy, the Calais Group and the G7. We have hosted a major international summit on border security—the first of its kind, with over 40 countries in attendance.
We have also transferred the staff and resources from the failed Rwanda scheme and used them to return more than 24,000 individuals with no right to be in the UK. We increased asylum decision making by 52% in the last three months of 2024, and we have ramped up illegal working enforcement visits and arrests by 40%.
Dame Angela Eagle
No. As this Government have made clear consistently, this is just the start. We need to go further, and we will.
Asylum Hotels and Illegal Channel Crossings
Debate between Caroline Johnson and Angela Eagle(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Dame Angela Eagle
That certainly should not be happening. If my hon. Friend wants to talk to me about it, I will try to see what happened in that instance.
Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
A directive from the Treasury reported in The Times appears to suggest that house building by the Government will help with the backlog of asylum seekers staying in hotels. Does the Minister believe that individuals who have arrived in the UK illegally should be given access to social housing ahead of British citizens?
NHS: Long-term Strategy
Debate between Caroline Johnson and Angela Eagle(2 years, 4 months ago)
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Dame Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
Through neglect, ideological hostility and incompetence, the Tory Government are presiding over the worst crisis the NHS has ever seen. Some 7.3 million people are on the waiting list; there has been a virtual collapse of emergency response; and people cannot see a GP or get follow-up treatment without unacceptably long waits. Today, there have been reports of more than 1,000 excess deaths a week—the highest total, excluding the pandemic, since 1951. There have been many, many preventable deaths on the Government’s watch, and each and every one is a tragedy.
Our NHS is in crisis from top to bottom. There are patients in hospital beds who cannot be discharged because there is no domiciliary care and nowhere for them to safely go. Ambulances are queuing for hours, unable to admit critically ill patients. There are inhumane waits in A&E before anyone can be admitted to beds they desperately need. Staff, who are already burnt out from the stresses of the pandemic, are unable to care properly for patients and are barely able to get through a shift because of the emotional exhaustion of having to deal with those failures.
A nurse at Arrowe Park in the Wirral, which serves my constituency, wrote to me recently. After 21 years of service to our NHS, she says she has
“never worked in such an unsafe environment”.
She says:
“Staff are literally on their knees, leaving shifts late in tears, and leaving in their droves”.
My constituent went on to detail a case in another local hospital in which a patient had a cardiac arrest in a hospital corridor. Frankly, a hospital should be the best place to have a cardiac arrest if somebody is going to have one, but it is now not so in Tory Britain. The individual collapsed and died.
With 132,000 NHS vacancies in England—over 17,800 in the north-west alone—our NHS is dangerously understaffed, under-resourced and under-respected. That is why NHS staff at the end of their tether have taken the desperate decision to go on strike. That is why any Government worth their salt would have decided to negotiate properly with them, to listen to them and to try to deal with and recognise that, in the last 13 years, a real-terms cut of 20% in nurses’ remuneration is simply not acceptable, but what did they do? They chose to have a divide-and-rule strategy, and they chose to try to scapegoat and blame NHS staff for the terrible conditions I have been talking about.
Perhaps the Government should consider legislating for a minimum service outside of strike days, because we are going to be in the absurd position of having, by law, guarantees on strike days—they could be negotiated anyway and always have been—that do not apply on non-strike days. It is an insult when the Secretary of State meets the health unions and says they have to increase their productivity. They are working beyond any amount of time that any human being should be asked to work.
Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
I confess to being a bit confused by the Labour party’s position on minimum service levels. We all want to ensure that our constituents are as safe as possible. The ambulance workers want to ensure that people are as safe as possible. The hon. Lady has said herself that these things would be negotiated anyway. But the challenge people face on the ground is not knowing who is going to come in, the fact that people do not have a say on whether they are going to come in and the fact that a negotiated settlement might be different in different areas of the country, which makes messaging and public health messaging very difficult and puts people at risk. So why is Labour so against minimum service guarantees?
Dame Angela Eagle
I think the hon. Lady, and I know that she is a doctor, needs to recognise that these agreements have always been made when there have been strike days in the NHS—always. I think she also needs to recognise that any Government who were being responsible would have negotiated to put an end to these strikes, recognised the fantastic service that nurses have given and dealt with the issue, instead of going for confrontation.
Dame Angela Eagle
I am not giving way again.
I am going to leave the last parts of my speech to another constituent of mine, an 83-year-old who fell alone in his home and was left. The ambulance was called at 4.15 in the afternoon—it was thought he had a fractured hip—and he was warned of a potential 14-hour wait. My constituent said he
“naively thought this must be the worst case scenario and thought it was very unlikely to be that long”.
He could not move, he could not sleep and he could not go to the toilet. Eighteen hours later, the ambulance arrived—18 hours later—at 10.15 the following morning. At the hospital, things got no better. There were patients on trolleys lining the corridors. For nearly another 24 hours, this 83-year-old man immobilised with pain was to lie on a trolley in a hospital corridor after 18 hours of waiting for an ambulance.
This is in no way acceptable. This should not be accepted by any Government worth their salt. They should hang their head in shame at what they have done to our NHS. We need to have a Government finally, which we will after the next election, who will solve these problems, instead of seeking to blame everybody else—the weather, the pandemic, the staff and any number of other things. It is about time we had a Government who have the guts to take responsibility for the decisions they have made and put it right. We are going to have such a Government soon. Shamefully, we have not now.