Debate on the Address

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Monday 14th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. We have almost a lost generation. Children are going to understaffed schools with very few teaching assistants, where headteachers are going to parents with a begging bowl to try to match school budgets, and too many young people are growing up in bad housing, with incredible levels of stress and worry about the future. That contributes to the mental health crisis that this country as a whole must address.

Will the Prime Minister match Labour’s commitments to scrap the benefit freeze, end the benefit cap, ditch the bedroom tax, scrap the two-child limit and the disgusting rape clause, and end punitive sanctions in the benefit system? While we welcome the legislation to ensure that employers pass on tips to their workers—something that the Labour and trade union movement has long campaigned for—the Government must go further, and I urge them to listen to the package of measures set out by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Laura Pidcock) in her brilliant speech at the TUC last month. This Queen’s Speech was supposed to herald an end to austerity and a new vision. Instead, it barely begins to unpick the devastating cuts to public services.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the climate and nature emergencies demand so much more than the six words they were accorded in the Queen’s Speech and an Environment Bill that will widely weaken the protections we currently enjoy as members of the EU? Will he join me in calling for a comprehensive green new deal to decarbonise the economy by 2030, so that we can show we are genuinely serious about the climate crisis?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I am coming on to that in a moment, but I absolutely agree: what we need is a green new deal. We need a green industrial revolution, and we have to face up to the reality of the climate emergency. If we do not, the damage to the next generation and the one after it will be even worse.

Our national health service has suffered the longest funding squeeze in its history, while life expectancy is falling and infant mortality rising. Schools have had their budgets cut, class sizes have risen, and headteachers are sending begging letters to parents. Any Government Member who is concerned about that should simply take a walk down the road and speak to any primary school headteacher about the stress that they and their pupils are going through. The police have lost more than 20,000 officers, while violent crime soars.