General Election

Dawn Butler Excerpts

Monday 6th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Well, actually, the Liberal party seems to have done very well from this system by focusing its attacks on Conservative constituencies. It seems to have many more seats than the Reform party, for instance, and less votes, but I will leave that aside.

[Dawn Butler (Brent East) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Member give way?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

No, I do not want to get involved in all this. I have given way once; I will conclude my remarks within the time limit.

I think it would be quite foolish for the Government to ignore this petition. If I may give some fatherly advice, it is always good to compromise when bringing in reforms. For instance, if the Government were worried about winter fuel payments going to everybody, perhaps they should have cancelled them for higher taxpayers. There would have been very little controversy about that, but taking the winter fuel allowance from somebody whose total income is only £13,000 a year is bound to cause great hardship. If they were worried about large estates escaping any inheritance tax, perhaps they should have focused their tax on the very largest estates of more than 1,000 acres, rather than picking on family farms of 250 acres. Or if they wanted to rake in more money from national insurance, perhaps they should have absolved, for instance, hospices from those proposals.

I just give that advice to the Government. Of course they will not take it, but it is always useful when bringing in reforms to think of the general public, and how those reforms will impact on people and relate to their sense of alienation. That is what I want to talk about now, because there is undoubtedly a sense of alienation in the country. It is partly due to the issues that I have been talking about, but also to do with general issues. I sit on the Council of Europe, and I see how other countries—France, Germany and Italy—are coping with political unrest. Unless the two major parties actually listen to the public and respond to their concerns, this country will simply see the rise of more and more populism of far-right and far-left parties.

There is a particular issue where people feel alienated. They cannot understand how in the last year, in a country like ours, something like 35,000 people jumped the queue, crossed the channel, and were put in hotels to stay here forever and break the rules. They cannot understand why no Government—either the previous Conservative Government or apparently this one—are actually solving the problem. I know that this Government are not going to follow our Rwanda policy, but they simply cannot talk in easy terms about smashing the gangs when we all know that unless we have an offshoring policy, we will never stop people crossing the channel and making us a laughing stock in the world.

Another issue I want to talk about, on which people feel very frustrated, is the sheer level of legal migration. I want to put this particular point to the Labour party. This is not a right-wing point of view. This is Mattias Tesfaye—a Danish Immigration Minister and the son of Ethiopian refugees. He said:

“If you look at the historical background, it is completely normal that left-wing politicians like me are not against migration, but want it to be under control. If it isn’t—and it wasn’t since the 1980s—low-income and low-educated people pay the highest price for poor integration. It is not the wealthy neighbourhoods that have to integrate most of the children. On the contrary, the areas where the traditional social democratic voters and trade unionists live face the greatest problems.”

Both parties have to solve the problem of the sheer level of legal and illegal migration.

I will make one other point. We all believe that we must solve climate change, but we must do it in a moderate and sensible way. Many people in rural areas, such as the area I represent, are worried not only about the farmers tax but that, if they live in Gainsborough, they will see the 10,000 acres around their small town covered with solar farms. Let us have more solar farms on rooftops or on industrial warehouses, but when people see good agricultural land being taken away from them, with solar panels made by dodgy Chinese companies benefiting large landowners, that again leads to a sense of alienation. Both parties have to listen to the people; they cannot go full-steam ahead with their own policies, ignoring what many are frustrated about.

I have one last point to make. We have just had a statement in the main Chamber about the NHS and social care. Frankly, we have to have some sort of cross-party consensus on how we will pay for our increasingly elderly population. We cannot just throw brickbats at each side, saying, “It’s the fault of the Labour Government” or “It’s the fault of the Conservative Government.” We are all living longer. We are all going to be more frail in our old age, and to need more and more help. There has to be some sort of political consensus on how we will pay for it, and my own view is that we will have to pay for it through some form of social insurance.

My advice to the Government is: you can ignore this petition—of course, you will ignore this petition, in the sense that there will not be a general election—but do not ignore the sense of alienation and frustration that lies behind it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nigel Farage (Clacton) (Reform)]

I generally find that the best ideas in life come from pubs, so it is no particular surprise that Michael Westwood is a publican. I represent Clacton, which has the third highest number of people who signed the petition. I do not think that the 8,000 people in Clacton who signed it did so just to get a fresh general election. They knew that that would not happen; what they were actually expressing was a sense of utter disenchantment with the entire political system.

The debate this afternoon can be used as a game of ping-pong between the two political parties that have dominated British politics since the end of the first world war, but actually something bigger is going on out there. Have a look at the turnout, which was the second lowest ever at a general election, despite the introduction of mass postal voting. Have a think about the fact that the Labour party got a third of the vote and two thirds of the seats. For every Labour MP there are 34,000 votes; for every Reform MP there are 820,000 votes. When we think about that and give it some context, perhaps it is not surprising that confidence in the whole system is breaking down.

Having studied politics for a long time—not as long as the Father of the House, the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), obviously, but over 50 years—I cannot think of a Government who have seen a collapse in confidence as quickly as this one. There are 26,000 pensioners in the constituency of Clacton alone who are losing their winter fuel allowance; they had no idea on the day of the general election that that was going to happen. There are 100 family farms in the Clacton constituency; many of the farmers I have met are frankly in tears, because they cannot see how their husbandry of that land, which in some cases has gone on for hundreds of years, will be able to survive inheritance tax.

The national insurance increases are yet another hammer blow for the men and women running small businesses in this country. They had not expected it; they were promised in the run-up to the general election that it would not happen. We now find that even GP surgeries in the constituency and hospices close to it are affected, so perhaps we can see why people are upset: they feel that things are being done to them that they did not have realistic expectations of.

The broader problem, I think, is the economy as a whole. The economy works on confidence: people borrow money and lend money according to confidence in each other. In the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, we have two people who look as if they are going to a family funeral every day. There is an air of miserabilism. Even a speech from the Prime Minister is the complete opposite of one from Tony Blair: not “Things can only get better”, but “Things can only get worse”.

[Dawn Butler]

If the hon. Member came into a new job and discovered a £22 billion black hole, I think he would look a bit miserable as well.

[Nigel Farage]

The idea of a £22 billion black hole is nonsense. It is £2.7 trillion. The national debt is massive. It exploded over the course of the last 14 years—it increased two and a half times—and it is set to go higher still, so we are in much deeper difficulties economically. Even to talk about a £22 billion black hole is not to understand the problems that we have. We have zero growth in this country. As for foreign investment into Britain, yes, there is money coming in, but it is not coming in at anywhere near the rate we need. We have major, major problems. I actually believe that this Government have talked us into a recession, because confidence is falling to that degree.

Members might note that the more rapidly legal migration rises—the more rapidly the population expands —the poorer we get as individuals. In the last two years, we have seen record levels of net migration into Britain, and in six of the last eight quarters, GDP per capita has fallen. Ultimately, the issue that led 3 million people to ask for another general election is perhaps the breach of trust between Westminster and the country on immigration. I am not even discussing the boats; I am talking about the impact of the population rising by more than 10 million in the past 20 years on primary school availability, housing and people’s wages. That is the ultimate breach of trust. Labour Members have not promised anything at all on legal immigration, but they need to be aware that if the net migration figures are anywhere near what they have been in the past few years, confidence in their party will fall further.

I think the whole system is in need of absolute, fundamental change, and I suspect that this petition is just a symptom of a much bigger cry for a different kind of politics in the United Kingdom. Members can con themselves as much as they like, but the old two-party system is breaking up before our eyes. The next general election is going to see a very, very different Parliament.