Debate on the Address

Baroness Harman Excerpts

Tuesday 25th May 2010 Commons Chamber

[Ms Harriet Harman (Camberwell and Peckham) (Lab)]

I am sure that the whole House will join me in paying tribute, as I know the Prime Minister will do shortly, to those members of our armed forces who have lost their lives in Afghanistan since the House last met: from 1st Battalion the Royal Welsh, Fusilier Jonathan Burgess; from 1st Battalion the Mercian Regiment, Corporal Harvey Holmes; from 21 Engineer Regiment, Sapper Daryn Roy; from 21 Engineer Regiment, Lance Corporal Barry Buxton; from 40 Commando Royal Marines, Corporal Christopher Harrison; and from 40 Commando Royal Marines, Corporal Stephen Walker. We salute their bravery, we honour their sacrifice and we remain steadfast in support of our troops. There are some things on which the country expects us to work together, whoever is in government and whoever is in opposition. We will genuinely work with the Government in support of our troops, their wives and families and in support of peace in Northern Ireland, as we did when we were in opposition before.

We also remember today David Taylor and Ashok Kumar, the two Members of this House who died towards the end of the last Parliament. We pay tribute to the contribution that they made.

I want to congratulate warmly the mover and seconder of the Loyal Address; they made two fine speeches. To assist new Members, I should remind them that, as the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) said, the seconder is by tradition a rising star and someone who is on their way up, while the mover is someone of great distinction whose career is not ahead of them, but behind them. But having heard a typically spry speech from the right hon. Gentleman, I want to agree with him that it is time that we challenged that notion. I invite him to join my campaign “You’re not past it when you’re past 60”.

I suspect that the right hon. Gentleman will always be best known for his musical interventions in Tory party conferences—his trademark Gilbert and Sullivan routine. I thank him for not inflicting a song on us today and I hope that his little list will not be the blueprint for the new Government. However, I do pay tribute to his work on international development, which contributed to this Government’s promising today to keep development aid a high priority. I think there will be support across the House for that.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Bath (Mr Foster) on seconding the Loyal Address. He was first elected in 1992, when he snatched his seat from Chris Patten, then chair of the Tory party. No one then would have predicted that the hon. Gentleman would stand before us to speak in support of a Tory Prime Minister’s Queen’s Speech, but he performed the task well.

This is not known to many people, but the hon. Gentleman is also a musical performer. At last year’s Lib Dem conference, and with eerie foresight, he played the Johnny Cash classic “Walk the Line”. I suggest that this time he goes to the Tory conference to play another Cash classic—“Ring of Fire”. The hon. Gentleman has also had a long-standing interest in science. Again, with a self-knowledge that we can only envy, he wrote a noted scientific publication “Science with Gas”. [Interruption.] You couldn’t make it up.

I congratulate the new Prime Minister and his Government. On the steps of Downing street, he acknowledged that we had left Britain more open at home and more compassionate abroad, and I thank him for the generosity of his words. Those are achievements of the last Government that I hope Members from both sides of the House can recognise, and which I hope the new Prime Minister will protect. From the first ever national minimum wage to the creation of civil partnerships, from the Sure Start children’s centres in every community, to the shortest waiting times in the NHS since records began—those are achievements of which Labour Members are rightly proud. In particular, I want to pay tribute to the former Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown).

We will be an effective Opposition. We will not oppose for the sake of it—that is not what the public want—but we will not pull our punches. Though we are in opposition, we will be powerful in the public interest. We will be determined to prevent unfairness. We will speak up for the public services that matter. We will be vigilant in protecting jobs and businesses. As the Government today acknowledge, their most important domestic task is the economy. The new Government take over an economy in which recovery is already under way and where Government action has blunted the impact of the recession. Economic growth has returned. There are too many people out of work, but unemployment is still half the level seen in the 1990s recession, and repossessions have been at half the rate that people suffered then. But the recovery cannot be taken for granted. The challenge now for the Government is to embed and secure the economic recovery with new manufacturing and an even greater role for the low-carbon sector.

Where the Government take steps to do that, we will back them. But taking support away from businesses risks slower growth for the future. As the new Business Secretary consistently argued before taking up his new post, now is not the time to leave firms to sink or swim. We all agree with cutting waste, but cancelling 10,000 university places is not cutting waste—it is cutting our capacity for future economic growth. Cancelling 40,000 jobs for young people under the future jobs fund is not cutting waste—it is blighting their prospects. The country faces a very serious challenge to reduce our deficit. What the country needs to know is that the Government will do so in a fair way, without damaging front-line services and without putting future growth at risk. People will want to see that they are not left bearing the cost of holding the coalition together.

Before the election, the leader of the Tory party, now the Prime Minister, was telling us all that the Lib Dem promises were simply unaffordable. At the very same time, the Lib Dem leader, who is now his deputy, warned that the Tories’ tax and spending promises could be paid for only by increasing VAT or cutting front-line services. It is the combination of the two that worries me. While the happy couple are enjoying the thrill of the rose garden, the in-laws are saying that they are just not right for each other. We keep telling them that they cannot pay couples to stay together, and it is clear that it will take more than a three-quid-a-week tax break to keep this marriage together.

Tough decisions will be needed, and the British public will need to see that those decisions are taken fairly and transparently. Despite what we have heard about accountability in the new politics, the Government’s decision to announce £6 billion-worth of cuts in a press conference rather than to this House was a poor start. When I was at Highshore school in my constituency on Friday, people were asking me whether they will be able to go ahead with their new rebuild. They, and people all around the country, want answers, not press conferences.

On education, today in the Queen’s Speech the Government pledged to help the education of children in poor families with a pupil premium, but they must not cut the programme that provides laptops for children in poor families. We will look at the detail of the Bill to ensure that it will help, not hinder, the development of strong schools in all areas that benefit the whole community.

It is in this country’s interest that we have strong relations with Europe. It appears that Europhobe Tories and Europhile Lib Dems have cancelled each other out. The Prime Minister, though, must be relieved that his coalition partners have given him cover to renege on the pledge that he made to repatriate powers over social policy, employment and justice from the EU by the end of this Parliament. However, having promised that following ratification of the Lisbon treaty he would “not let matters rest” there, will he confirm that that is now precisely what he intends to do?

The Government intend to legislate to establish a referendum lock for future treaty changes that represent transfers of power, but what would the question be? The Conservative manifesto wanted a yes or no answer to treaty changes, but the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto said that the question should be whether we should be in or out of the EU. The problem is not that they want different questions; it is that they want different answers.

The Queen’s Speech states that the Government will take forward political reform. Having devolved power to Scotland and Wales and enacted the Freedom of Information Act and the Human Rights Act 1998, our Labour Government can rightly claim to have been a reforming Administration, but there should be further change. Where the new Government strengthen our democracy, we will support them. Where they give the House more power to hold Government to account, we will support them enthusiastically. We support a referendum on the voting system that would promise to increase democratic participation and choice, and I congratulate the Deputy Prime Minister on the ease with which he has persuaded the Tories to have a Bill on electoral reform—well done. We agree with a right for voters to recall Members guilty of serious wrongdoing and that the House of Lords should be elected. We support the idea of fixed-term Parliaments, although they should be for four years, not five. However, we will insist that if the Government lose the confidence of Parliament, even by one vote, they will have lost their mandate and there must be an opportunity for fresh elections. The coalition partners, lacking confidence in each other, are already preparing for the day when they shrink back from their loveless embrace—it is like a political pre-nup. We will not support a 55 per cent. rule that would allow the Government to cling on to office having lost the support of the House, and they have no mandate for that change. It would be morally unacceptable for the number of seats to be cut and boundaries redrawn on the basis of an electoral register from which 3.5 million people are missing, or for individual voter registration to be brought in without the essential safeguards to maximise voter enrolment.

We object to the Liberal Democrats’ request that they should keep the public funding that goes to Opposition parties. Some say that they like to be all things to all people, but even they cannot be both in government and in opposition. They cannot fudge this one—they are in government and cannot claim Short money. People are familiar with the notion of clinging on to the trappings of power, but the Lib Dems are the first party to seek to cling to the trappings of opposition.

We will support the completion of the reforms proposed by the Wright Committee, but we deplore the Government’s decision to demote the Leader of the Commons from being a member of the Cabinet, especially in the case of the right hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Sir George Young), who played a significant part in bringing forward the Wright Committee reforms.

The Deputy Prime Minister has proclaimed a progressive agenda on political reform, but it is not progressive to politicise the police by putting them under the control of an elected police commissioner. It is not progressive to scrap the Human Rights Act, pack the Lords and rig the Commons—it is not new politics, and if that is what the Government try to do, we will oppose them.

The Queen’s Speech includes Bills on crime, civil liberties and security. The new Government take over with crime falling. The safety of the public must be the highest priority, and we will judge each proposal on its merits. When, as is so often the case, there is a balance to be struck, we urge the Government to take no risks and to give the benefit of the doubt to the victim.

On keeping DNA records, why do not the Government retain the records that they have and review the evidence in 2012 to ascertain whether it is safe to dispose of them earlier? If the evidence shows that there is no need to retain DNA for longer than three years, we would not object, but if it shows that six years are necessary, the victims should be given the benefit of the doubt.

We ask the Government to reconsider their plans to change the rules for prosecuting rape and their proposal for anonymity for rape defendants. It is often only after many rapes that a defendant is finally brought before the court, and it is often only when previous victims see the name and details of the defendant that they find the courage to come forward. Police and prosecutors say that that is essential in helping get a conviction. To make only rape defendants anonymous sends a message to the jury that, uniquely, a rape victim is not to be believed, and it sends a message to the woman who has been raped that, “We don’t believe you.” We have made progress on bringing rapists to justice; I urge the Government not to turn the clock back.

Government benefits from strong opposition. Our new team in opposition—our Front Benchers and our Back Benchers—have wisdom and experience, and youth and diversity, with more Labour women and black and Asian Members than the rest of the House put together. The new Government have a great privilege and a heavy duty. They have said that they stand for freedom, fairness and responsibility. The whole country would agree with those principles, and we will make sure that they live up to them.