Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Jack Dromey Excerpts

Wednesday 18th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)]

“No more top-down reorganisations”; “no plans to raise VAT”; “We back Sure Start”—these are all broken pledges from a Government and a Chancellor who cannot be trusted. Had I shaken the Chancellor’s hand last Sunday, I would have counted my fingers afterwards.

The pledge on no cuts to front-line services rings particularly hollow in the Home Office. Some 17,000 police officers have gone, 8,500 of them from the front line; 4,000 police and community support officers and 15,000 members of police staff have gone, too. These are the biggest cuts in Europe, and there is worse to come, with the Association of Chief Police Officers predicting 30,000 more losses in the next Parliament.

All of this is happening at the worst possible time. The threat from terrorism has been elevated to “severe”, yet we are seeing the systematic undermining of a vital tool in combating terrorism—neighbourhood policing, described by Peter Clarke, the former head of the counter-terrorism command, as the “golden thread” that runs through the police effort in combating it. The number of rapes is up by 31% and violent crime by 16%. As more cases of child sex exploitation and abuse come to light, so, too, are the pressures growing on police time and resources. We have heard of revelations in the midlands today of 500 vulnerable individuals, 70 separate investigations and a police service now devoting 10% and rising of its resources to combating child abuse.

As for the claim that crime is falling, crime is changing. It is true that traditional forms of volume crimes such as burglary and car theft are down, but other forms of crime—fraud, cybercrime, online crime—are increasing at a massive rate. The Office for National Statistics has said that if these were fully reflected in the annual crime survey for England and Wales, we would see an increase in crime of 50%. Many police forces are on the brink. In the words of Neil Rhodes, the chief constable of Lincolnshire, forces are

“on the edge of viability.”

On top of all that, our police forces are stretched to breaking point, and are taking up to 30% longer to respond to 999 calls. Nearly 14,000 more crimes have been unsolved since the Government came to power. The victims of crime are being let down as too many criminals get away scot free. Under this Government, 7,000 fewer crimes of violence have been solved, and, although domestic violence is on the rise, the number of cases passed for prosecution has fallen by 13%. The first duty of any Government is to provide for the safety and security of their citizens, and it will fall to us, as the party of neighbourhood policing, to rebuild it when we are in government. Neighbourhood policing is the bedrock of policing: it means local policing, local roots and a local say.

A more general choice now confronts the people of our country. Labour is, and always has been, the party of working people. The contrast with the Tories could not be more stark. They are the party of low wages and insecurity. One in five people in my constituency earns less than the living wage, and hundreds are on zero-hours contracts. The Tories are the party of high rents and high house prices, of high energy bills and high child care costs. They are pushing up the benefits bill with one hand, and borrowing £200 billion more than planned with the other.

The Tories are failing their own test, but they are also failing the big tests that my constituents apply to their own lives: “Am I better off? No, I am not”, I am told time and again on the doorstep. “What planet does the Chancellor live on?” asked someone in Kingstanding last week. The average family is £1,600 a year worse off. The other test is “Do my kids have real prospects for the future?” The answer to that question is that this is the first generation since the war who are growing up with less good prospects than their mums and dads and grandmums and granddads.

Labour, in contrast, is the party that believes in making work pay. Labour believes that it is wrong for people to go to work and live in poverty. It is the party of the much higher minimum wage—the £8 minimum wage. It is the party of the living wage. It is the party of security at work, which will tackle the exploitation of workers through zero-hours contracts. It is the party that will build the homes that Birmingham, and Britain, need, and will act to ensure security at home for those who live in the private rented sector. It is the party that will tackle the energy giants and bring down energy bills. It is the party that will provide affordable child care—25 hours free of charge—for all families. It is the party of equal pay and opportunity. It is the party that will tackle the abuse of power, and the abuse of workers by the rich or those who seek to take advantage.

There is but one alternative to this Government, and that is a Labour Government. UKIP? UKIP is not so much the party of the flat cap as the party of the flat-rate tax. It would privatise the national health service, drive women back into the home and gays back into the closet, and divide our country once again. My dad described to me the humiliation that he experienced when he came from County Cork to dig roads in London and saw signs reading “No dogs, no Irish.” As for Nigel Farage, boasting, vainglorious, saloon bar Nigel—a man of the people? In the immortal words of Ricky Tomlinson, my arse, or if that is not parliamentary language, Mr Speaker, my posterior.

What kind of society do we live in? This is a Government who are strong with the weak and weak with the strong. In the words of one former Tory voter in my constituency, an ex-policeman, they are a Government of the rich, for the rich, making the rich richer. What says it all is that they introduced the bedroom tax on the very day that they gave 13,000 millionaires a £100,000 tax cut—a grotesque combination. There are heartbreaking cases in my constituency of people who have been hit hard by the bedroom tax.

This is a Government whose days are numbered. Their end cannot come soon enough.