Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities
Diane Abbott Excerpts(3 years ago)
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Kemi Badenoch
I thank my right hon. Friend for her question, and I pay tribute to her for setting up the Race Disparity Unit, which has allowed us to carry out so much forensic research.
On the issue of ethnicity pay reporting, the commission pointed to statistical and data issues that affect ethnicity pay reporting, and makes a recommendation as a way for employers to overcome these challenges and report ethnicity pay accurately. As I say, the Government will consider the report in detail, and we will work with colleagues in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to assess the implications of this recommendation for future Government policy and respond in due course. However, I take my right hon. Friend’s comments into account, and will make sure that they are addressed in the Government response.
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab) [V]
The Minister has accused people of criticising the report in bad faith. Is she really saying that Professor Michael Marmot, a world-renowned expert in public health, is acting out of bad faith? Is she really saying that the British Medical Association and other professional associations are speaking in bad faith? It would reflect better on the Minister if she were prepared to engage with genuine criticism by experts.
Nobody denies that there has been progress on racial justice in this country. My parents left school in rural Jamaica aged 14; I am a British Member of Parliament. However, this is widely seen—particularly by people who have been quoted and misquoted—as a shoddy, cynical report that, to quote the UN working group,
“repackages racist tropes and stereotypes into fact, twisting data”.
I say to the Minister that surely black and brown British people who have contributed so much to this country deserve better than this report.
Kemi Badenoch
What black and brown British people like myself deserve is better treatment from the Opposition Members who continue to stoke division. Of course I am not accusing Professor Sir Michael Marmot or the BMA of bad faith. The people I accuse of acting in bad faith are the right hon. Lady and her colleagues who are posting pictures of the KKK, and being advertised, as the shadow equalities Minister was, at an event preparing to denounce the report a week before it was even published.
On Professor Sir Michael Marmot and the British Medical Association, I have had meetings with them and we engage with them. We take criticism from them—they are not there to endorse every single thing the Government say; they are there to provide helpful criticism and suggestions where necessary. Sometimes we agree, and sometimes we disagree. Disagreement is not a problem. What we do not want is misrepresentation, which is what the right hon. Lady and her colleagues continue to do.
Covid-19: Ethnic Minority Disparities
Diane Abbott Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Kemi Badenoch
I can. We must stress that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and as the vaccine roll-out continues, I urge everyone who is offered one to take the opportunity to protect themselves, their family and their community. It is important that we tackle misinformation in particular. Across Government, we are spending tens of millions of pounds on public health communications, and my hon. Friend will have seen a significant increase in public vaccine communications. The NHS website remains the most trusted health website, and the counter-disinformation unit is rebutting false information, especially where the intent is malicious or dangerous to public health. I thank him for raising this issue.
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab) [V]
The Minister is insistent that the wildly disproportionate rate of infection and death among black, Asian and minority ethnic communities has nothing to do with the fact that they are black, Asian or from a minority ethnic group. Has it occurred to her that the fact that they are more likely to be in overcrowded, poor housing conditions and in the types of job that leave them liable to infection is not random, but is to do with race and ethnicity?
Will the Minister do more in the area of data? First, will she speak to colleagues about having ethnicity routinely put on death certificates? Can we have more information on the Haredi and ultra-orthodox Jewish communities, who have had disproportionate levels of deaths from covid in America? Will she speak to Public Health England to make sure that local directors of public health make constituency-level data, particularly on ethnicity, available to constituency stakeholders, including Members of Parliament?
Kemi Badenoch
I thank the right hon. Lady for her question. I wish that she had actually read my reports, because she would have seen that I addressed that not just in the October report, but in the one that came out last week. Recording ethnicity data on death certificates was one of the recommendations in my previous report. It is not something that can be done overnight—it will probably require legislation—but we are on our way to getting it, so that is some good news.
The right hon. Lady also mentioned the orthodox Jewish community—finally someone from the Labour Benches has talked about this community, and I am very pleased that she has. Research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine estimated that 64% of the orthodox Jewish community may have had covid-19 in 2020. The researchers said that the reasons behind this high rate of infection are not yet known.
Strictly orthodox families have significantly larger households than the UK average. They also live in areas of increased population density and, in pre-pandemic times, had regular attendance at communal events and gatherings. I use them as an example because this is why it is wrong for us to mix together lots of different groups. The orthodox Jewish community has been more impacted than many of the ethnic minority groups that get a lot of attention in the press, but we do not say that that is due to structural antisemitism. We look at the underlying factors. Where there are multi-generational households, for instance, that is not due to racism, but is often due to cultural factors. We are not going to take grandparents away from their families because of covid. We are going to provide them with guidance to ensure that they can look after themselves safely; that is this Government’s priority.
Financial and Social Emergency Support Package
Diane Abbott Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend share my concern for that particular group of victims who are people with no recourse to public funds? They cannot work in a situation where so much of the economy has been closed down, and they have no legal rights to benefits of any kind—even the paltry level of benefits that the Government are talking about. They are not the only group, but these people face destitution. I raised that with the Home Secretary on Monday. We have still not heard anything about what the Government are going to do to protect people and their children who have no recourse to public funds
Jeremy Corbyn
I thank my right hon. Friend for her intervention and for what she is doing about that. There are people with no recourse to public funds all over the country. Typically, they are people who are seeking asylum, their case is going endlessly through Home Office processes, and they are not getting help or an answer. Many groups are doing their best to help them. I pay tribute to the north London liberal synagogue for its monthly drop-in sessions and the support that it gives those people, and to many others, but it should not be down to charities to do it. We need to ensure that those people and their families are supported throughout this crisis. This is yet another lesson about the dislocation of our society and the way in which we treat people.
Every single person in this country can now see how important public services are, and looking beyond this crisis, they must never again be subjected to the damaging and counterproductive cuts that have taken place over the past 10 years. The hard truth is this: austerity has left us weaker in the face of this pandemic. We should not have gone into it with 94% of our NHS beds already full, with 100,000 NHS job vacancies or with a quarter of the number of ventilators per person that Germany has. Ventilators are our most precious resource in this crisis; we should not have begun with so few. We need more of them urgently, and we need the staff trained to use them urgently as well.
We all have a duty to do what we can for the collective good, to come together and to look out for each other—for our loved ones, our neighbours and our communities. But we also need collective public action to be led by the Government. That is the only power that can protect our people from the devastation that coronavirus could wreak on us.
This crisis demands new economic thinking. We cannot rely on the old ways of doing things. A major crisis we face as a society cannot and will not be solved by the market. Coronavirus, the climate emergency, huge levels of inequality, increasingly insecure patterns of work and the housing crisis can only be solved by people working together, not against each other.
The corporations and giant multinationals that weald so much power in our economy and appear to have the ears of the Prime Minister and presidents worldwide will always put private profit ahead of public good. Just look at the actions of Tim Martin, the chair of Wetherspoon—he told his staff, who are paid very little while he has raked in millions, to go and work in Tesco, instead of standing by them in their hour of need. Look at the attempts of Mike Ashley to keep his shops open, putting his staff at risk. The insatiable greed of those at the top is driving another crisis, one even more dangerous as we look to the future: the climate emergency. Oil companies and fossil fuel extractors continue to damage and destroy our planet, our air and our wildlife, threatening the future of civilisation itself. We need to find the same urgency to deal with that threat as we now see working against coronavirus.
The coronavirus crisis will not be solved by those driven by private profit and share prices. It will be solved by the bravery of national health service workers and those who are on the frontline. It will be solved by communities coming together in all their diversity. It will be solved by the Government and public institutions taking bold action in the interests of the common good. The crisis shows what government can do; it shows what government could have always done. We have found the money to give more support to people in financial hardship. We have found the money to increase investment in our national health service. We have found the money to accommodate the homeless in hotels. If we can do it in a crisis, why could we not have done it in calmer times as well?
We are learning, through this crisis, the extent of the interdependence of each of us with each other. If my neighbour gets sick, I might get sick. If the lowest-paid worker in a company gets sick, it could even make the chief executive sick. If somebody on the other side of the world gets sick, as they did in Wuhan’s province¸ it makes us all sick. Indeed, the virus is now hitting Syria and the besieged Gaza strip. If the healthcare systems of Europe cannot cope, just imagine what it will be like for countries in the global south. Save the Children has warned of the
“perfect storm conditions for a human crisis of unimaginable dimensions.”
This virus knows no national boundaries, and neither should our capacity for compassion and care for our fellow human beings. The internationalism of the doctors from Cuba who have gone to fight the virus in Italy is inspirational, as is the action of the European Union, which has given €20 million to help tackle the crisis in Iran at the present time, despite the sanctions. It is a scandal that sanctions have prevented many Iranians from accessing vital medical supplies, putting each other at risk and, inevitably, putting all of us at risk. The old trade union slogan goes, “An injury to one is an injury to all, united we stand, divided we fall.”
People across our country know that. So many are showing such compassion in the face of adversity, as we see when we look at how people are coming together. Mutual aid groups have been springing up all over the country, with thousands of people organising to protect their communities. It is inspirational to see people who have never spoken to each other before suddenly getting together in this time of crisis and realising that they live in the same street and they need that help and support for each other. It is that spirit which will take us forward. There is no doubt that after this crisis our society and our economy will be, and will have to be, very, very different. We must learn the lessons from the crisis and ensure that our society is defined as a society by solidarity and compassion, rather than insecurity, fear and inequality.
Windrush: 70th Anniversary
Diane Abbott Excerpts(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
I am proud to stand at this Dispatch Box and bear witness to the Windrush generation. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) on her excellent speech, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) and my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) on their good speeches.
Nearly everyone in the Chamber this afternoon has seen the evocative newsreel footage of the men and women from the Caribbean who sailed to Britain on the Empire Windrush in 1948. Who were those people? I ask the House for a moment to put themselves in the shoes of those men and women. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham pointed out, they were young. Many of them may have looked a little older than they were, but that was because they were all wearing their Sunday best—the hats, the bonnets, the tailored suits, and the frocks—and they came to Britain so full of hope and enthusiasm. As many Members have said this afternoon, they genuinely thought that they were coming to the mother country.
Nowadays there is a narrative around migrants that claims that they do not understand or appreciate British culture, but I am glad to tell the House that no group of migrants was more enthusiastically British than the Windrush generation. Historically, the people of the Caribbean venerated the British royal family. They saw them as their protection from cruel local colonialists.
Peter Grant
When the right hon. Lady refers to a British culture, would it perhaps be more accurate to recognise that there is not such a thing as a British culture? There are lots and lots of British cultures. All of us are deeply attached to some of them. Nobody can be fully conversant with all of them and it is perhaps time to realise that all of our many cultures deserve equal treatment.
Ms Abbott
At one and the same time, the Windrush generation were both anti-colonialist but deeply respectful of a range of British institutions, including royalty. It may surprise some Government Members, but if someone meets a West Indian who was educated in the West Indies between the war and asks them to recite some poetry, they will promptly and with enthusiasm recite a piece of Keats or Shelley. That was the nature of the education.
Mr John Hayes
I am in an embarrassing position because I am having, for the second time in a week, to wholeheartedly and enthusiastically agree with everything that the right hon. Lady says—it is doing me no favours on these Benches, I can tell you. She is absolutely perfectly right about that combination. What she just described is one of the most profound things I have heard in this debate, leaving aside what my great friend, the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), said. The right hon. Lady and I will perhaps disagree about this, but that is why it is so important to discuss the Windrush issue for its own sake. One of the risks of conflating it with the wider debate about EU migrants and so on is to miss the subtlety of the points that she is making.
Ms Abbott
The Windrush generation were both anti-colonialist and devoted to the royal family. As the years turned into decades of their settlement in the UK, their relatives all over the Caribbean had treasured photographs, in pride of place on their mantelpiece, of that generation together with their children in their Sunday best, posed against a country house background in an inner-city photographic studio. These photographs, treasured wherever people find them, were testimony to the growing prosperity of the Windrush generation.
As the House has heard, over 1,000 passengers arrived that day. They included a group of 66 Poles whose last country of residence was Mexico. The Poles had been granted permission to settle in this country under the terms of the Polish Resettlement Act 1947, which reflected the Polish contribution to the allied war effort. I will return to that point later, but the Polish settlement shows that there was a time when we were very clear, as a political class, who our true friends are, a time when we recognised our obligations of friendship, and a time when we recognised the valuable contribution that people from other countries make to our society and economy.
I stress that “the Windrush generation” refers not only to the 1,000 people who came off the Windrush but to all the people from the Commonwealth who entered this country between 1948 and 1973. However, the original Windrush generation are passing. Every week I hear of the death of a member of that generation who was a pillar of the community in my younger years. My hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood referred to Len Garrison, but there were many others who were so active and offered such leadership in the 1960s and 1970s.
Let us talk briefly about what the Windrush generation did and contributed. As the House has heard, they came to address a labour shortage. Very many came to work in the national health service, and they helped to build our national health service in its earliest years. My own mother was a pupil nurse, recruited in Jamaica. It was hard, back-breaking work. The nurses often found themselves working the night shift, or the early shift. Very occasionally, patients would refuse to be tended by a black person, but many more appreciated their care and nursing skills. Those women were so proud of their service in the NHS.
Many Windrush-era persons, whether from the Caribbean or elsewhere in the Commonwealth, came to work in transport. There was, for instance, Bill Morris, who rose to lead one of our largest trade unions—the Transport and General Workers Union, as it was then—but who had begun as a bus driver. It is no coincidence that Britain now has both a London Mayor and a Home Secretary whose fathers were bus drivers. Many other members of the Windrush generation worked in manufacturing and light engineering. Some of the most well-established Caribbean communities in London are in parts of London where, after the war, there were ample jobs in light engineering and in factories: areas such as Park Royal, Willesden and Brent, and Hackney Marshes, where the Metal Box factory was.
I must touch on the contribution of the Windrush generation to culture and music. Most people know about the Notting Hill carnival, but if there is a kind of music that I associate with my childhood, it is not just my mother’s beloved Harry Belafonte records, but ska, rocksteady, and the output of Trojan Records. I cannot end this section of my speech about the Windrush contribution without reminding the House of the earliest Members of the Houses of Parliament from the Caribbean: Sir Learie Constantine and Lord David Pitt.
The children and grandchildren of the Windrush generation are also part of this issue. In fact, anyone who came here from the former colonies—from the Commonwealth—before 1973 is here legally, and, in effect, part of the Windrush generation. That applies no matter what part of the Commonwealth they came from—the Caribbean, Africa, India, Bangladesh and many more besides—and it also applies to their children and grandchildren. Many of those people, however, are experiencing difficulties because the immigration department is saying that the immigration position of their parents and grandparents was not resolved.
Now, sadly, I turn to what happened to that Windrush generation after a lifetime of working hard, paying their taxes, bringing up their families, and contributing to a strong and stable society. They were treated shamefully. What was worst for many was not just facing material issues, but being flung into uncertainty and treated like liars. I have convened meetings with them, as has my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham, and they have told us that it is being treated like liars about which they feel most bitter. The Home Secretary says that 63 people have been deported, but the final total could be much higher. Our own citizens were deported.
We also still have no information on how many of the Windrush generation have been wrongly detained at immigration detention centres. I know that some have been, because I met them when I visited Yarl’s Wood earlier this year. The Government have provided no answers on how many people have been bullied or threatened into so-called voluntary removals. They admit that some people have been excluded—prevented from returning to their homes and families when they had just been on an overseas trip, perhaps for a wedding, a funeral or a family holiday. The Home Office still cannot tell us how many of those people there are and what it is doing to address their plight.
There are also those who were made unemployed. Perhaps their employer got taken over by a bigger employer and suddenly, after years of working happily, they were asked to produce paperwork that they simply did not have. Others have lost their homes because of the effect on housing benefit, have been refused bank accounts—although I welcome the fact that the Home Secretary has moved to end the closure of bank accounts in that way—or lost their driving licences, and some, most shamefully of all, have had to pay for medical treatment and were refused treatment for conditions such as cancer. The list of outrages goes on, but the actions the Government have taken to correct them have been a little short-term.
Here I want to address an important issue. All too often when we debate the Windrush generation, Conservative Members start talking about illegal migrants, and some of us think it is wrong to talk about the Windrush generation and illegal migrants in the same breath. Let me say this very slowly for Members who refuse to accept it: the Windrush generation was not illegal. The whole problem of the Windrush scandal is that those who were legally here were treated as if they were illegal. There is a reason why they were treated as if they were illegal. It was not an accident or an aberration, and it was not incompetent officials: it flowed directly from Government policy. It is the essence of the hostile environment.
Let me stop here to make a point. Conservative Members have said that Labour Ministers and Labour Governments talked about a hostile environment. I have news for Members opposite: the Labour party is under new management, and they will not hear from the current leadership some of the things they heard in the past about migration.
A whole string of non-expert agents, landlords, employers, NHS staff and others have been asked to identify people they suspect of being illegal immigrants. The person under suspicion then has the burden of proof placed on them: they must prove otherwise, requiring a series of documents stretching back decades—four for every year. Many of us in this Chamber would struggle to provide four documents for every year we have lived in this country.
Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)
I could not understand why the Government or their agencies could not say, “If you’ve been paying tax or national insurance contributions for more than five years, the burden of proof should be totally reversed and it should be assumed that you are fully entitled to have all the rights of residency and citizenship in this country.”
Ms Abbott
That is an excellent point, and many of the Windrush generation people I have met or tried to help have been completely frustrated by the fact that they had a whole ream of paper showing that they had been paying tax for all these years, but still the Home Office rejected their claim that they had been legally here.
I am afraid to say that this is a product of a system put in place by this Government, and if anyone doubts that, they have to answer this question: who was it who said we would deport first and ask questions later? Was that not announcing in advance that people who were entitled to be here may well be deported and treated as if they were here illegally, and then they could appeal? Anyone who has ever dealt with Home Office appeals procedures must know what that means: the chances of the removal decision being overturned are vanishingly small. Of course, it was the Prime Minister who said we would deport first and have appeals later. Why she was speaking in that mode I cannot say, but some say it was all about chasing UK Independence party votes.
In any event, the Windrush scandal was the consequence. My hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central has, I think, written to the Prime Minister asking whether she was warned. She was warned: I warned her here in this Chamber when we debated the Immigration Act 2014 that the consequence of an Act designed to catch illegal immigrants in its net would be that people who just looked like immigrants would be caught up, and that is what we are seeing with the Windrush scandal.
Looking ahead, the new Home Secretary clearly does not want to go the way of his predecessor, and he clearly wants to put the scandal behind him, but it is a product of policy, not accidents, and that policy will continue to generate scandals for the waves of migrants who came after 1948, all the way up to 1973, and it will draw in broader and broader categories of people from the Commonwealth. This policy will continue to do that until it goes.
The Windrush generation came here to see the mother country. Some came to rejoin the RAF. Others just wanted new and more prosperous lives for themselves and their families, and they were what are now sometimes called economic migrants. In coming here, they enriched this country in so many ways: culturally, socially and economically. In our own cafeteria here, one of the most popular dishes, week in and week out, is jerk chicken with rice and peas. I could never have imagined that I would live to see that.
In general, a more diverse society is a more interesting one, a more challenging one and a more prosperous one. There is, however, an unfortunate aspect to this history, as some of my hon. Friends have mentioned. Despite being invited here—my own mother was recruited in the Caribbean—the Windrush generation did not always receive a warm welcome. There is an unfortunate history in this country of sometimes defaulting to seeing categories of good immigrants and bad immigrants. For a long time, anyone from the Caribbean tended to be treated as a bad immigrant, with all the stereotypes that were ascribed to black Britons. I have lived long enough to see things move on, however, and we now sometimes hear people who are happy to say the most vile things about Muslims and eastern Europeans exempting black people from their vitriol. History takes some surprising turns.
The Windrush generation—including people from the Caribbean as well as people from Poland by way of Mexico, and all the people from other countries who got off that ship in 1948—came here for a better life for themselves and their families, and they all made a contribution to our society and our prosperity. We were literally better off because of them, and that is what their modern-day counterparts are also doing.
Before moving to a close, I want to mention someone who has not received enough public tributes. Patrick Vernon is a social historian and grassroots campaigner, and he has led the campaign for a Windrush Day. I also want to add to what my hon. Friends have said about the importance of establishing a hardship fund. I have met members of the Windrush generation who have had to live off the charity of friends and family and who have run up debts because of all the uncertainty about their immigration situation. We really need a hardship fund to be put in place now. Those people cannot wait for the conclusion of the consultation on compensation. We also need to look at the workings of the Windrush taskforce, to see whether it is meeting the targets that it set itself to resolve cases. Some of the cases that I and my hon. Friends are dealing with seem to suggest that that it is not. Again, I join other hon. Friends in calling for an official Windrush Day.
Everyone in this House thinks fondly of their parents, but I can speak with confidence on behalf of myself, my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham when I say that if it were not for the courage, the hard work and the vision of our parents, none of us would be in this Chamber this afternoon as Members of Parliament. The Windrush generation has had a number of important effects, but none has been more important than forcing people to look at migrants as people—people with families, people with histories and people just like other people. If we could only extend the humanisation of the debate on migration from the Windrush generation to migrants of all generations and all times, we would achieve what I am committed to seeing—namely, a very different type of conversation on migration. We could achieve a change in the debate on migration. It should not have to take 60 years for people to recognise the contribution of a group of migrants to this country. I stand here bearing witness, and hoping for a better future when we come to discuss issues around migration.
Nigel Adams
My right hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point, and the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) made it, too. Conflating the two issues is deeply damaging to this debate, and we all have to be mindful of that.
Nevertheless, the enduring spirit of the Windrush generation to overcome this struggle, hardship and adversity must not be understated or dismissed. This is part of our history, and we should all be proud of the patriotic, courageous men and women who, in spite of adversity, helped to rebuild this country after the war and have therefore enriched us not just economically but culturally and socially.
Several hon. and right hon. Members have rightly mentioned the Grenfell tragedy, which is particularly important today. The Grenfell fire was a terrible tragedy that should never have happened, and today is a time for reflection. My focus, and I am sure the focus of everyone in this House, is firmly on the community who were affected. Today we all remember those who lost their lives and the families and friends who lost loved ones on that terrible day. It is incredibly important that we respect the privacy of the community at this time.
The hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood, in her brilliant speech, asked whether we would be announcing an annual Windrush Day, which the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington also mentioned. The United Kingdom has long been a country of inward and outward migration. Post-war immigration, including of people on the Empire Windrush who were at the forefront of that migration, means we are now a richly diverse society. Members of our minority communities have made an enormous contribution to our social, economic and cultural life, and this should be celebrated.
To make sure that we commemorate the Windrush anniversary in the appropriate way, my colleague Lord Bourne has met key figures from community groups over the past few months to decide how best to celebrate it. We thank all those stakeholders for the excellent meetings and for the work they have done together. We are keen to continue these engagements to ensure that our work on the Windrush celebrations extends beyond the 70th anniversary and to ensure a lasting legacy of this celebration of British history.
It is important that we celebrate the contributions of the Windrush generation and their descendants each year, as they are part of what makes us the wonderfully diverse country we are today. Further information will be announced very shortly.
The hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood went on to mention the Black Cultural Archives and the funding difficulties it has had. She asked whether we will work with colleagues in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on tackling this fantastic facility’s problems. The financial difficulties of the Black Cultural Archives are well known to us, and we agree that more should be done to protect these vital archives. I am pleased to confirm that my colleague Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth has been speaking to colleagues at DCMS on this very issue.
My neighbour the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), who is no longer in her place, asked about her Select Committee’s interim report on the hardship fund for the Windrush generation. We recognise the hardship that some of that generation have suffered, through no fault of their own. Sadly, that Select Committee does not scrutinise my Department, but I assure her that the relevant Department will respond in due course.
The right hon. Member for Tottenham gave a typically passionate and eloquent speech, in which he touched on the shameful practice of slavery. The transatlantic slave trade caused extreme suffering to millions of people, who lost their liberty and were forced to work as slaves. We have expressed our deep sorrow for what happened and fully recognise the strong sense of injustice that remains. We firmly believe that we should always remember history, no matter how difficult that history can be. He also went on to mention the hardship fund for the Windrush generation. He is absolutely right to say that we should design a compensation scheme that effectively addresses the issues faced by the Windrush generation, and to do that we have to listen. The Home Office has completed the call for evidence, which has given individuals and community groups the opportunity to share their stories and experiences.
The hon. Member for Glenrothes had the tricky job of following the right hon. Member for Tottenham, but he made a terrific speech.
Greece
Diane Abbott Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Osborne
As I have already said, it is for the Greek people to make this decision, but my hon. Friend’s broader observations about the constraints of being in the euro are one of the reasons why he and I agree that Britain was right not to join and should not join in the future.
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
It is tempting to score domestic political points about the current plight of the Greek people, but does the Chancellor accept that the coming days will be very frightening and distressing for them and also for British people with friends and family in Greece? Will he assure the House that whatever the outcome of the referendum, Greece remains part of the family of nations and we will do what we can to mitigate the plight of the Greek people?
Mr Osborne
I said precisely that a few moments ago. We respect the decisions that the Greek people have to take. We also understand the real economic hardship that has been experienced by the Greek people because of the mistakes that previous Greek Governments have made, and the Greek people have borne the brunt of that. Whatever the outcome of the referendum and whatever the next few months hold for Greece, it is a very important part of the European family of nations. Greece has been an important ally of the United Kingdom for very many years and we will continue to stand alongside the Greek people during this difficult time.
Money Creation and Society
Diane Abbott Excerpts(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Meacher
One at a time, please. I was going to say a little bit more than that I had sympathy with what the hon. Member for Clacton (Douglas Carswell) said.
I will argue that the capacity to regulate an increasingly and exceedingly complex financial sector is not the proper way, and I will propose an alternative solution. I am strongly in favour of structural changes that enable people to achieve greater control over the money that they have contributed.
Mr Meacher
The protection of deposits is up to £85,000 and is underwritten by the state.
Mr Meacher
I am neither for nor against. I am making the point that the arrangement encourages the banks to increase their risk taking. If they are caught out, for each depositor £85,000 is guaranteed by the state. I agree with the hon. Member for Wycombe that we need much wider structural change. It is not a question of tweaking one thing here or there.
The question at the heart of the debate is who should create the money? Would Parliament ever have voted to delegate power to create money to those same banks that caused the horrendous financial crisis that the world is still suffering? I think the answer is unambiguously no. The question that needs to be put is how we should achieve the switch from unbridled consumerism to a framework of productive investment capable of generating a successful and sustainable manufacturing and industrial base that can securely underpin UK living standards.
Two models have hitherto been used to operate such a system. One was the centralised direction of finance, which was used extremely successfully by several Asian countries, especially the south-east Asian so-called tiger economies, after the second world war, to achieve take-off. I am not suggesting that that method is appropriate for us today. It is not suited to advanced industrial democracies. The other method was to bring about through official “guidance” the rationing of bank credit in accordance with national targets and, where necessary, through quantitative direct controls. In the post-war period, that policy worked well in the UK for a quarter of a century, until the 1970s when it was steadily replaced by the purely market system of competition and credit control based exclusively on interest rates. In our experience of the past 30 or 40 years, that has proved deeply unstable, dysfunctional and profoundly costly.
Since then there have been sporadic attempts to create a safer banking system, but these have been deeply flawed. Regulation under the dictates of the neo-liberal ideology has been so light-touch—by new Labour just as much as by the other Government—that it has been entirely ineffective. Regulation has been too detailed. I remind the House that Basel III has more than 400 pages, and the US Dodd-Frank Bill has a staggering 8,000 pages or more. It is impossibly bureaucratic and almost certainly full of loopholes. Other regulation has been so cautious—for example, the Vickers commission proposal for Chinese walls between the investment and retail arms of a bank—that it missed the main point. Whatever regulatory safeguards the authorities put in place faced regulatory arbitrage from the phalanx of lawyers and accountants in the City earning their ill-gotten bonuses by unpicking or circumventing them.
Charter for Budget Responsibility
Diane Abbott Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
Any member of the public watching this debate this afternoon and listening to people jeer, laugh, smirk and joke might imagine that some Members of this House were playing a game. Well, I am rising to say to the House that this is not a game; this is about people’s lives. Whether they be elderly people who are dependent on some of the age-related benefits that will fall under the cap, the disabled or people in low-paid work who depend on the system of tax credits, this is not a game; this is people’s lives. If it is really the position of Government Members that poor people should be made to live on even less, they should at least have the grace to be dignified about it, and not turn it into a game. I put it to Government Members and to those on my own Front Bench that social security and people’s lives should not be made a matter of short-term political positioning.
Everyone in the House wants to bring down welfare spending, because welfare spending is the price of Government and social failure. The Chancellor talked as if he were some brave warrior wreaking vengeance on an army of “Benefits Street” layabouts. The reality for British people is very different. Just this week, we saw 1,500 people queuing for three hours for a low-paid job at Aldi. The picture Government Members like to paint of the British people and what is happening in the benefit system is false, misleading and derogatory, yet it is feeding through to public attitudes. The public thinks that 41% of the benefits bill goes to the unemployed. In fact, it is only 3% of the benefits bill. The public thinks that 27% of benefits are claimed fraudulently. In fact, only 0.7% is so claimed. The truth is that 80% of the people who claim jobseeker’s allowance—those so-called “Benefits Street” layabouts—only claim it for less than a year. There is no credit to MPs if they constantly talk in a derogatory way about people who claim benefits when, at any given point in our lives, we may be dependent on social security—be it child benefit, benefits for the elderly or in-work benefits.
This benefits cap is arbitrary and bears no relationship to need, as our benefits system should. It does not allow for changing circumstances—rents going up and population rising—and will make inequality harder to tackle. There are ways to cut welfare. We could put people back to work, introduce a national living wage, build affordable homes and have our compulsory jobs guarantee. An arbitrary cap is the wrong way in which to go and sends out the wrong message. The Chancellor does not say many things that I think are correct, but he is correct to say that voting for this cap locks us into the coalition’s cuts. I say to the House that the issue of social security should not be about political positioning. As the months turn into years, people will be coming to our advice surgeries wanting explanations for totally arbitrary and counter-productive cuts. Will we say that it was a game we were playing with the Chancellor one afternoon in March? Our welfare system should be based on the facts and on need. Whatever short-term political advantage people think is gained by voting for this cap, it is far outweighed by what is problematic, so, no, I will not be voting for this cap in the Lobby tonight.
Air Passenger Duty
Diane Abbott Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Sammy Wilson
That is one of the reasons why the Northern Ireland Executive sought the devolution of long-haul APD. We pay the price for that, as the lost revenue has to come out of the block grant for Northern Ireland, but despite that, it was important because of the freedom that it gave us to look for new long-haul routes, which would be good for the economy. I have heard time and again from regions in England and Scotland that industry leaders believe it is important to try to get new long-haul routes for connectivity in terms of selling exports, getting inward investment and making business connections, but that is being held back because of the high level of APD for long-haul flights.
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
I have listened with great interest to what the hon. Gentleman is saying about the effects of APD on Northern Ireland and the complexities of the issue. Is he aware that it is also a tremendous issue in the Caribbean? Because of the arbitrary way in which it has been zoned, people pay more APD to go to the Caribbean than to go to north America. Does not all this point to the need for a holistic look at APD and its effects on not only the economy of Northern Ireland, but traditional allies of Britain in the Caribbean?
Sammy Wilson
I do not want to get into the complexities of how APD is calculated, but anyone with just a basic knowledge of geography knows that the Caribbean is closer than California, yet California is regarded as closer in terms of calculating APD. Even here there are anomalies that have regional impacts.
Nicky Morgan
I am afraid that I cannot give the hon. Gentleman a specific date. All I can say is that Ministers are continuing to evaluate all this and ask for his patience for a little longer. I do appreciate that this matter is part of those discussions.
Despite these challenges, the Government have frozen APD in real terms since 2010, and since then APD rates have risen by only £1 for the vast majority of flights. Given the fiscal challenges we face, no responsible Government would simply relinquish nearly £3 billion of revenue.
Ms Abbott
The whole House understands the fiscal challenges, but given the particular problems that APD zoning is causing in the Caribbean, why are Treasury Ministers not prepared even to consider a change in the arrangements that would maintain their total tax take, as I appreciate they want to do, but be fairer to millions of people in the Caribbean and millions of people who live here, who are British voters, and who are having to pay this tax to go backwards and forwards?
Nicky Morgan
First, I am not sure that all hon. Members do understand the fiscal challenges facing the Government, but I will assume that the hon. Lady does, very much so. I listened carefully to what she said about the Caribbean. I know that Ministers, including my predecessor, have engaged with representatives. I could be wrong, although I do not think the hon. Lady will be surprised if I said that I know more about air passenger duty today than I did this time last week, but I think that zoning for the Caribbean was introduced by the previous Government. All Ministers keep all taxes under review. However, I heard what she said, and we will listen to the representations that are made.
Infrastructure (Financial Assistance) Bill
Diane Abbott Excerpts(11 years, 6 months ago)
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Chris Leslie
Amendment 7, which stands in my name and those of my hon. Friends, seeks to ensure that the Bill provides a safeguard for taxpayers’ money. After all, £50 billion of guarantees could be underwritten for the private sector on pretty much any kind of scheme, and we heard fuzzy logic from the Minister earlier, when he said that infrastructure is not quite as defined as it appears in the Bill, and that some projects could be national and some foreign.
In some circumstances, underwriting can be beneficial and welcome—it can make schemes viable that were not viable previously and unlock infrastructure developments that might not otherwise take place, but in other circumstances there are disadvantages to underwriting. Underwriting means that gains from a private endeavour are privatised, but that any losses are socialised. The entrepreneur, the shareholder and the owner of a private company or project that benefits from the safety net provided by the taxpayer could profit well for many years if a scheme bears fruit, but if the scheme goes wrong and if there are failures in it, the losses fall on you, Mr Gale, on me, on hon. Members and, most importantly, on our constituents.
I make no apologies for standing up for the taxpayer’s best interests. It is important that we ensure that Ministers consider introducing clawback provisions that safeguard best value for taxpayers. The amendment is so unobjectionable that I cannot understand why the Government would object to it. The Opposition are simply saying that, in any agreement to give financial assistance, the Chancellor or Secretary of State
“shall give reasonable consideration to clawback provisions which safeguard the taxpayer.”
What do I mean by “clawback provisions”? Hon. Members who have served on the Public Accounts Committee will know that from time to time Governments have entered into contracts and sold privatised parts of the public sector. The purchasers have then gone on to make millions of pounds when they have sold on some of those assets. In this case, the guarantor has ended up facilitating a project, but the beneficiary of the guarantee went on to make significant sums.
We are simply saying that the Treasury needs to make sure that there are clauses in the underwriting contracts—the offers—that ensure that if significant gains are made in the long term, the taxpayer can have a share in some of the future profits. It is a basic principle—if the taxpayer helps to create profitability for a person and bears the risk of loss, that person can reasonably be expected to share some of the excess profits with the taxpayer. It is a basic principle of prudent stewardship of taxpayers’ money. It would also ensure that we deal with the question of moral hazard. We know that in some circumstances underwriting can cause difficulties if a scheme that might be shaky goes ahead as a result, which is of course a distortion of the market environment.
If schemes go ahead and make significant gains and provide future returns that are in excess of what might be expected, the taxpayer could have some rights to those. For example, in a prime executive housing site in central London developed thanks in part to the Government underwriting property market risks, the units may sell at multiples of expected initial prices, with vast profits for the developer. In the current situation, what would the taxpayer get? Foreign-owned energy companies want a pipeline stretching from our shores across the continent, which could well be underwritten by the provisions in the Bill. If we fund part of that as taxpayers, but the company makes significant long-term returns on the oil and gas, what should be the taxpayers’ share in that?
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
Do not the Government appear to be privatising the profits, but socialising the losses? How can that be fair?
Chris Leslie
That is indeed the approach taken in some of the underwriting provisions. Of course there can be circumstances in which that makes sense, perhaps to tip a project that is viable and in the national interest from something that might not happen to something that moves ahead in a way that benefits everyone.
The amendment does not even say that every contract should have a clawback provision: we are simply saying that the Treasury should be under a statutory obligation to give reasonable consideration to the insertion of clawback clauses in the contracts. That is the be all and end all of amendment 7 and I hope that the arguments are fairly straightforward. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s view.
Financial Services Bill
Diane Abbott Excerpts(12 years ago)
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John McDonnell
I wholeheartedly agree, but sometimes in relationships with the Government a line is drawn in the sand, which makes the right of veto sometimes crucial, particularly if there is a bloody-mindedness in the direction of policy making by the Chancellor when it comes to appointments to key posts. Although I take the gist of the hon. Gentleman’s argument and can see how the Treasury Committee could create a climate of opinion or produce a report that influences the appointment in a way that makes it impossible for a person to take it up because of the lack of credibility, I think there needs to be an even stronger role for the Treasury Committee and therefore Parliament in all these matters.
This is a crucial opportunity missed in respect of the Treasury Committee’s ability to influence the Government; in respect of the Government’s ability to demonstrate to this House a greater openness when it comes to the transparency of the operation of the Bank of England and of the new regulatory authorities; and in respect of the Government themselves in how they make appointments to these crucial positions.
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that this is not just a matter of the relationship between the Government and this House, as it also relates to the relationship between the Government and the public? As we move into a period of austerity, if there is not sufficient accountability for the sorts of measures the Government view as necessary, it creates political instability. People do not see where the accountability lies for some of the austerity measures that are coming—not just in this country, but across Europe.
John McDonnell
That is exactly the point I am seeking to make. This post will have wide responsibilities and the decisions taken will have immense ramifications for the country as a whole and for all our constituents. Because of the unique role of the Governor of the Bank of England, the individual will be subject to public scrutiny in a way that a Bank of England Governor has never been under scrutiny before. I think he will become an individual in whom people must have confidence. I have to say that I have some anxieties about some of the names being bandied about at the moment, such as the appointment of a former member of Goldman Sachs, a company that does not have a particularly distinguished record in relation to the operation of economies throughout the world before and after the financial crisis.