Health and Social Care

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

Nuance, care and caution are precisely what we need in this debate; we do not need press statements written by Lynton Crosby which then turn up in the House as Bills. We want responsible government, ensuring that the NHS is not abused. We will support the Government as long as that is their intention, but if they are doing something more sinister and playing politics with these issues, they will not have our support.

We have had no answers on the NHS. Let me finally turn to public health. There was not much on which I agreed with the last Health Secretary, but he had my strong support when he spoke about tackling smoking. He said that he wanted tobacco companies to have “no business” in this country, and that introducing standardised packaging was an essential next step to ensure that young smokers were not recruited by the tobacco industry. [Interruption.] The Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), looks confused, but I think she advanced the same argument on the radio a couple of weeks ago, saying she was an advocate of standardised packaging. Then, we read in advance in our newspapers that the measure had been dropped—one of the “barnacles” on “the boat”, we were told, by the said Mr Crosby. This is the same Mr Crosby who has represented “big tobacco” since the 1980s, who masterminded the campaign against standardised packaging in Australia, and who was federal director of the Liberal party of Australia when it accepted millions of pounds in donations from the tobacco industry.

The Secretary of State said last week that a decision has not been made yet because the consultation has only just finished. It ended nine months ago. He can make a decision. I say to him again today, here is another positive offer from the Opposition: if he brings forward these proposals, they will have our full support and we will get them on the statute book.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend may be interested to learn that the Prime Minister wrote to me about plain packaging before the Queen’s Speech was delivered to both Houses. He said in that letter that there were currently no proposals to introduce plain packaging.

[Andy Burnham]

The former Secretary of State said that it was full steam ahead and that is what they would do. This Secretary of State comes in and says nothing about the issue. Then, a right-wing Australian lobbyist arrives, and all of a sudden no one mentions it at all. Has the Secretary of State ever met Lynton Crosby and discussed this issue with him? I think we have a right to know. [Interruption.] He nods; I should be interested to know the substance—[Interruption.] He has not met him to discuss the issue. He looks very uncomfortable all of a sudden.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

I am pleased to follow my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) and in particular my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), who made a very strong speech about the Government bottling the proposal for plain packaging for cigarettes.

The response to the Queen’s Speech from my constituency of Gateshead, the north-east and the whole country is: what a missed opportunity. Research by Sheffield Hallam university highlighted recently in The Times illuminated the impact of welfare reforms on local areas across the whole of Britain. The impact varies from place to place: the worst affected areas face financial losses that are twice the national average and four times those in the least affected areas, and—surprise, surprise—it is Britain’s regions and older industrial areas that are hit the hardest, whereas much of the south and south-east of England outside London escapes comparatively lightly. As a general rule, the more deprived the local authority, the greater the financial hit. Professor Steve Fothergill, who undertook the study, said that

“the Coalition government is presiding over national welfare reforms that will impact principally on individuals and communities outside its own political heartlands.”

So that is what they mean by, “We’re all in this together.”

What are the Government’s priorities? A local audit Bill, a water Bill, a deregulation Bill and, in terms of health, a chronic outbreak of Europhobia. Those are hardly the country’s priorities. Meanwhile the country and its people in regions such as mine continue to suffer.

New research in a book published this month, “The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills” by the respected political economist David Stuckler and the physician and epidemiologist Sanjay Basu, shows conclusively that austerity policies are

“seriously bad for our health”.

They argue that in Greece, HIV infections have risen by more than 200% since 2011, as prevention budgets have been cut and intravenous drug use has grown amid 50% youth unemployment. Greece has also experienced its first malaria outbreak in decades, after budget cuts to mosquito spraying. David Stuckler has said:

“Austerity is having a devastating effect on health in Europe and North America. The harms we have found include HIV and malaria outbreaks, shortages of essential medicines, lost healthcare access, and an avoidable epidemic of alcohol abuse, depression and suicide, among others. Our politicians need to take into account the serious, and in some cases profound, health consequences of economic choices. But so far, Europe’s leaders have been in denial of the evidence that austerity is costing lives.”

Despite the clear evidence, the coalition is taking no action on minimum pricing of alcohol or on plain packaging of tobacco products. It has capitulated to manufacturers, lobbyists and self-interested advisers. In the face of the clear and unequivocal damage that this coalition’s policies are doing to the health of our nation, it has no appropriate response, despite the fact that we all know that prevention is better than cure. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central highlighted the number of people who annually die prematurely as a result of cigarette smoking. Over the weekend Wembley stadium was almost full for the FA cup final; imagine that number of people dying annually as a result of preventable disease induced by smoking.

A health warning should be printed on this Government: “Warning: this Government’s policies will seriously harm you and others around you, and will detrimentally impact your mental health and that of your family and friends.” We have heard example after example. It was reported this week that, sadly, Stephanie Bottrill killed herself on 4 May. Already struggling financially, Stephanie faced the devastating prospect of the bedroom tax. In a suicide note left for her son, she said that

“the only people to blame are the government”.

Stephanie’s case is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. Since this Government came to power the website Calum’s List has listed 33 cases where a coroner has recorded that an individual has been driven to suicide by welfare cuts.

On the evidence of this Queen’s Speech, the Government clearly do not understand or care about the human cost of what is happening. It is equally clear that they do not understand or care about the economic devastation that their policies have brought to significant sectors of our economy. Do they read the IMF reports on our economy? Do they even know how to contact the IMF to talk about them?

Having read the Queen’s Speech, it appears that the Government have no idea what to do. They seem like rabbits stuck in the headlights of their own rhetoric. The plans are more and more and more of the same: cuts followed by cuts followed by more cuts. With sectors and regions of our economy stuck in a spiral of decline, the country needs leadership, yet we have a vacuum of a Queen’s Speech. We need leadership to get us out of the problem, not dig us further into it, but instead we have a coalition strangled by indecision and political inertia. Where are the plans for growth? Where is the growth Bill, the national recovery Bill, or even the “We understand what the problem is” Bill? The Government seem to have no idea how to move things forward. There is not one substantial proposal in the speech.

It is not just me, my hon. Friends and the IMF who are saying that. Even the Chancellor’s new Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, said only last month that Britain is an economy in crisis. He compared the UK with basket case countries in the eurozone. Speaking on the fringes of the IMF’s spring meeting in Washington, he said:

“The US is breaking out of the pack of crisis countries that includes the euro area, the UK and Japan.”

That pales into insignificance compared with the words of the IMF’s chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, who said last month that Britain was “playing with fire” by pressing ahead with austerity. We need change and we need action. The Queen’s Speech delivered neither.