Black Maternal Health Awareness Week 2022

Claudia Webbe Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Claudia Webbe (Leicester East) (Ind)]

You are very kind, Mr Gray, and it is an honour to serve under your chairship. I thank the hon. Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy) for securing this vital debate.

The health of our nation is reflected in the health of our mothers, and the shocking statistics paint a picture of nothing short of gross negligence. I thank Tinuke and Clo for producing the groundbreaking “Black Maternity Experience Report”. Their platform, Five X More, helped to spread information about the survey. I also thank the participants for sharing their powerful testimonies, and the all-party parliamentary group on black maternal health for demanding an urgent solution to the crisis.

It is worth repeating that black mothers are four times more likely to lose their life during childbirth, and they are up to twice as likely to have severe pregnancy complications. Some 42% of women surveyed in the Five X More report felt that the standard of care they received during childbirth was poor or very poor. Successive Governments since at least the 1970s have systematically failed to address the shocking statistics on black maternal health, including on the standard of care they receive during childbirth. The “Black Maternity Experiences” report reveals that, even today, professionals still display racist and white supremacist attitudes and insensitivity towards black mothers without remorse. Black mothers suffer in silence through fear of reprisals, and fear that their care will become worse if they complain.

If ever there was a need for the Government’s long-promised White Paper on health inequalities, it is now. Will the Minister urge for it to be put back on the agenda? Shelving the health disparities White Paper only compounds the suffering and pain of black mothers. Without it, any progress made by the newly appointed maternity disparities taskforce will be slowed.

There is a crisis in midwifery up and down the country. Home birth teams are underfunded, delivery suites are closing, and the maternity workforce have seen management changes that prevent them from doing their jobs effectively. The disproportionate number of deaths of black mothers and their babies cannot simply be reduced to genetic or cultural factors. Equity in access to first-class healthcare is a must, and that means setting targets and specific funding for highly trained healthcare professionals, as outlined in the Five X More report. We know that black women are poorer, live in inadequate housing and suffer disproportionate environmental pollution, and that their educational chances and outcomes are disproportionately lower. Wealth inequalities are rampant.

The fiscal shortfall of £35 billion that was recently announced by the new Chancellor will drive the Government’s tax-and-spend plans; the Government are looking at 101 ways to cut spending. This is the worst news possible for black maternal healthcare. It demonstrates a callous ideology that seeks to cut spending instead of taxing earth-shattering levels of idle wealth—an ideology that risks further harm to black women and other racialised groups by avoiding wholesale investment in healthcare.

As we know, all mothers are superheroes who nurture babies, children and society, but black mothers have to overcome systemic barriers put in place by successive Governments, which result in black women’s wealth, health, education and environmental access not being equal to that of their counterparts. Alongside improving treatment and care, we have to start having frank conversations about the racialised distribution of wealth in the UK and what we need to do to tackle it and eradicate race inequalities in health outcomes. Mr Gray, I am sure you will agree that black mothers cannot wait any longer. The time for action is now.

Arms Trade: Yemen

Claudia Webbe Excerpts

Tuesday 20th April 2021 Westminster Hall

[Claudia Webbe (Leicester East) (Ind) [V]]

The Yemeni conflict is not only the world’s largest humanitarian crisis but one of the worst atrocities of the modern era. The conflict has displaced more than 4 million people, while 24 million people—a staggering 80% of the population—need aid and protection, 16.2 million people face severe food insecurity, and 20 million people lack reliable access to clean water, making disease prevention almost impossible. In November 2020, the United Nations found that more than a quarter of a million Yemeni people have died over the last six years. This is a disaster.

It is therefore shameful that Britain is complicit in this war crimes atrocity, especially as the UK is a penholder on Yemen at the UN Security Council, and should therefore be ensuring the country’s safety, not funding its misery. The UK has licensed at least £6.7 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia since 2015, with Oxfam estimating the true value to be more than £15 billion. In contrast, at the recent UN high-level pledging event for the humanitarian situation in Yemen, the UK Government’s pledge of £87 million was almost half the £164 million pledged at the same funding conference last year, and a reduction of £131 million since 2019.

That is the real-world impact of cuts to the UK’s aid budget, which the UN Secretary-General described as a “death sentence” for Yemen. It comes just weeks after the UK Government announced £1.36 billion in new arms licences to Saudi Arabia. The Government’s duplicity is shameful. With one hand they sign resolutions and speak of their desire to end the conflict, yet with the other they continue to facilitate the suffering of the Yemeni people by providing the weapons that rain down on civilian houses. Now is the time for all of us in the UK to say, “Not in our name will the unimaginable suffering of the Yemeni people continue.”

The Government must accept their complicity in this humanitarian catastrophe. They must follow the lead of countries around the world, ensuring that no weapons made in our country are used in the conflict by doing all that they can on the international stage to bring an end to this horrific war.

Global Britain

Claudia Webbe Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Claudia Webbe (Leicester East) (Ind) [V]]

It pains me to say that under this Government, Britain is world-beating for all the wrong reasons. We are facing the highest number of excess deaths in Europe—one of the worst covid-19 death rates in the world—and our worst ever recession. We chose not to implement a zero-covid strategy to save UK lives. It is alarming that this is the global Britain that is promised by the Prime Minister and his allies—a Britain that has alienated itself on the world stage by cosying up to Donald Trump, and which is forming a reputation across the world for rhetoric, incompetence and mismanagement.

This Government act as though someone can only love this country if they wrap themselves in the Union Jack, refuse to recognise the horrors of our colonial past and ignore everything that does not make Britain great, yet I believe that, as a former empire, Britain has a unique responsibility to redefine its role on the global stage. It is vital for us to consider the impact of Britain’s colonial legacy on modern-day global insecurity. For instance, it is crucial that countries in the global south are not denied access to vaccines due to financial constraints. It is also shameful that the Government are cutting development funding at a time of global crisis. Turning our backs on the world’s poorest is a political choice, not an economic necessity. It is especially crucial for the UK Government to be ambitious about changing the unjust dynamics of trade and global debt, forged through centuries of violent extractive colonialism and imperialism. The Jubilee Debt Campaign found that more than 60 countries are spending more on paying their creditors than they are on their population’s health. That is a direct consequence of the uneven power dynamics of empire, and it must end.

Despite what the Government may believe, it is possible to love Britain because of the NHS, because of our proud trade union history and because your parents were able to arrive from Nevis, settle in Leicester and build a life for themselves and their family. I want our country to ensure that none of our citizens goes hungry, that it is a welcoming place for everyone and that we are a force for human rights, climate justice and equality at home and abroad. That is the patriotism that I wish the Government would subscribe to and which must guide Britain towards a new path on the global stage.

Trade Deals and the NHS

Claudia Webbe Excerpts

Monday 16th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Claudia Webbe (Leicester East) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) on having secured this important debate.

This Government have repeatedly asked the public—even today, the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison) asked them again—to blindly trust their promise that the NHS will not be for sale in any future trade deals with the US, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. They have repeatedly been provided with opportunities to put those fears to bed, with amendments tabled to the Government’s post-Brexit trade deal explicitly stating that the NHS would be excluded from any future trade agreements. One amendment was supported by more than 400 doctors and health professionals, yet rather than deliver on their promise, not a single Conservative MP voted for the amendment, which was defeated by 89 votes.

The Government claim farcically that they voted against the amendment because it legitimises the concept of NHS privatisation, which in the realms of hypotheticals and metaphysics they claim to oppose, yet when faced with a concrete opportunity to enshrine in law the safety of our most treasured public institution, the Government sat on their hands. Now our NHS will be at the mercy of US negotiators, who are heavily influenced by the multibillion-dollar private healthcare interest in carving up our health service for corporate gain. That clearly demonstrates the Government’s commitment to ensure that the NHS is on the table during trade negotiations.

However, there is an even clearer reason why we cannot trust them—or the words of the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland—when they say the NHS is not for sale. That is because they have already been selling it off, piece by piece, for the best part of a decade. Since the disastrous Health and Social Care Act 2012, NHS outsourcing and privatisation have been incentivised. Clinical commissioning groups are under pressure to outsource; in 2015, private firms won 40% of all contracts. In the last five years alone, private companies have been handed £15 billion of NHS contracts. Some 18% of healthcare bids go to private providers. It is true that the NHS logo remains and in some cases it is even co-opted by private providers, as happened with the disastrous so-called NHS Test and Trace, which is predominantly run by Serco. Yet the direction of travel under the Government has been towards a fragmented, underfunded and increasingly privatised healthcare system.

The danger of sliding towards a US-style private insurance healthcare system cannot be overstated. Research by the Commonwealth Fund in 2018 found that nearly half of working-age Americans—a staggering 87 million people—were underinsured or had no coverage at all. Rather than spending money on doctors, nurses, mental health professionals, dentists and other professionals who provide services to people and improve their lives, the US wastes hundreds of billions of dollars a year on profiteering, huge executive compensation packages and outrageous administrative costs. Despite widespread myths regarding the efficiency of the free market, the US spends nearly double what we spend on healthcare for generally worse healthcare results. That is the system that recently appointed advisers to the Secretary of State for International Trade believe is superior to our own.

It is common sense that profiteering and corporate greed should be off limits in services essential to human life. That reflects public polling that shows that 84% of Britons believe that the NHS should be in public ownership. The NHS is a gleaming beacon of human achievement—an embodiment of socialist universal principles—from which everyone, no matter what their position in society, benefits equally. It is therefore up to all of us who value healthcare as a human right to protect our most treasured public institution. It is incumbent on the Government to make their rhetoric a reality and legislate to ensure that our NHS is truly off the table and is never put up for sale.