Referral of Prime Minister to Committee of Privileges

Debate between Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn

Thursday 21st April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

In our arcane system, the Prime Minister can sit as judge and jury on himself. As other Members have pointed out, this is a ridiculous system. I am willing to bet that the Prime Minister will not find himself guilty, even though the Metropolitan police have found him guilty of at least one breach of the covid rules, and my guess is that there are more crimes to come. This is a breach of rules that his own Government wrote, and that he then took to the airwaves to defend.

The Prime Minister

“sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility. I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else”.

Those are not my words, but those of his former classics master at Eton. It is not hard to draw the conclusion that those words still stand, so it is natural that we have had no proper apology to the British people for his multiple breaches of covid rules. This Prime Minister is both capable of multiple lawbreaking and incapable of genuine contrition. This attitude to the rules has marked his entire career, both in journalism and in this House. For him to say “I am sorry for any offence caused” is not an apology for repeated wrongdoing. For him to say, “I was not aware of my own rules” is the defence of the ignorant, which does not stand in law. And for him to claim, “I have not misled the House”, “All the rules were obeyed” and “No rules were broken” is a serious cover-up. I could use another word, but I will refrain out of respect to you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

For the Prime Minister to say there were no parties at No. 10 when 50 financial penalties have been handed out, when he attended many of those parties and stood barman for at least one of them, insults the intelligence of the people of Britain. The issue with the Prime Minister is that he clearly believes there is one set of rules for him and his cronies, and another set of rules for the rest of us, including the electorate. These were not just rules but orders from the Prime Minister and his cronies, who consider themselves to be better than the ordinary people of this country.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

Is my right hon. Friend aware that, while the Prime Minister was organising parties in No. 10 and showing complete contempt for his own rules, working-class communities and young people in overcrowded flats all over Britain were in lockdown? The mental health crisis that we still have around us was intensified by the very strict operation of those rules, and many young people faced massive £10,000 fines for organising parties. Is it not just one law for Boris Johnson and his mates, and a different one for everybody else?

[Ms Abbott]

My right hon. Friend makes a very important point. We are told that we must rely on the integrity of the Government if the rule of law, the principle that no one is above the law and, even more importantly, people’s respect for the political system are to be upheld in this country. Well, we shall see.

Conservative Members have complained that the Opposition are engaging in politics, and of course there is a political dimension. My email inbox has been deluged with complaints about this matter, and I am sure I am not alone. I am sure many Conservative Members, if they dared admit it, could say the same. The Prime Minister has to accept that this is not just a Westminster row that nobody outside SW1 is concerned about.

The public—Tory voters, Labour voters and those who have never voted at all—have had to endure untold misery during the Prime Minister’s premiership. No fewer than 190,000 people have died from covid, and more than 1 million people have long covid. Because of the rules, as we have heard, so many people were unable to be with their loved ones as they were dying. These are the people the Prime Minister is scorning. These are the people to whom the Prime Minister thinks he can get away with making a manifestly ingenuine and mealy mouthed apology. It did not have to be that way.

The background of this issue is that living standards are plummeting, the NHS is in crisis and the spring statement rubbed salt into the wounds, making tens of millions of people worse off. I do not believe the public are in a mood to forgive and forget. The Prime Minister and his acolytes like to say he was at the party for only nine minutes. Many people would have liked to have been with their loved ones for nine minutes when they were dying.

The country wants the Prime Minister gone and these Benches want the Prime Minister gone. He broke the law. The question for Conservative members is very clear: are you just going to do nothing, today and in the future, while Boris Johnson sacrifices you to save himself, as he has done throughout his life and career?

Financial and Social Emergency Support Package

Debate between Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn

Wednesday 25th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[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.