Department for Communities and Local Government

George Galloway Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[George Galloway (Bradford West) (Respect)]

The world is still divided, as we know. The plight of poor children in that divided world preoccupies tens of thousands of the finest of our citizens. The proximate cause of my applying to speak in this debate, for which I am grateful, was a visit that I had from campaigners from religious organisations and others from Bradford university. The campaign is based around the organisation Enough Food For Everyone If, which will have lobbied most hon. Members in the run-up to the Budget, seeking an important relief for poor children in poor countries. Sadly, the Government, on that occasion at least, failed to rise to that challenge. It is my hope that that campaign can continue and that the Government will take on board its demand to introduce some requirement on British companies operating in poor countries.

In parenthesis, every 45 seconds—the length of time I have been speaking—a child in Africa dies of malaria, let alone all the other ailments that kill so many children in poor countries. In the world as a whole, 110 million children under 10 go to work instead of school. For those children, there is no Easter, Christmas or holiday. There are none of the basic comforts that we wish for our own children. Yet in the midst of that, we discover, contemporaneously, that many British corporations and companies, some of them well known, are not only operating in those poor countries to take advantage of the very low wages that workers labour for, but doing their best in those poor countries to avoid, even evade, the minimal rates of taxation that those countries require from them. Therefore, that campaign is asking for something like the disclosure of tax-avoidance scheme that will be applied to British companies under the Finance Bill to force them to disclose the tax-avoidance schemes in which they are involved in poor countries.

Of course, child poverty is on the march in our own country, too. Yesterday, I had a brief moment with you, Mr Deputy Speaker, to allude to some of the child poverty in my constituency, which has the second highest child poverty and the second highest child mortality in the entire country. I know that I will not melt the hearts of the Government on that point, so I want to raise a practical point with them that, even in their own terms, is an anomaly. More than 10,000 children in Bradford are not receiving free school meals but are officially under the poverty line. The reason is that their parents are working and receiving working families tax credit. They are officially poor, officially below the poverty line, but cannot get free school meals. However, if their parents gave up their jobs, they would immediately be eligible for free school meals.

How can that conceivably fit with the Government’s oft-claimed intention to try to encourage the unemployed into work and to help the working poor? According to the Children’s Society, in one city alone—Bradford—more than 10,000 children are living under the poverty line but are not receiving free school meals. Therefore, they are likely to go an entire day without proper nutrition.

I would like the Deputy Leader of the House to explain to me, in writing, at least, how this anomaly can be tolerated. Why not give the working poor at least the same break that we give the unemployed, by giving their poor children something to eat at lunchtime?