Jack Dromey
Main Page: Jack Dromey (Labour - Birmingham, Erdington)
Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)
The Budget is bad news for Birmingham, a proud city, which suffered grievously in the 1980s and now faces unprecedented cuts in public investment. Why? The Con-Dem alliance says that it is Labour’s legacy, but it is nothing of the kind. The Greek defence that it prays in aid is but an excuse for the modern Tory party—modern-day Leninists—to cut back the role of the state nationally and locally. As for the Liberal Democrats—a hollow shell of the once great, progressive party of Lloyd George, Beveridge and Keynes—never have so few let down so many for so little: a handful of ministerial cars and Red Boxes.
Birmingham was the birthplace of municipal government and municipal enterprise. It is Europe’s biggest council, which employs more than 40,000 and funds thousands of community projects and voluntary initiatives. It is a key purchaser of goods and services from the midlands economy. It is also, historically, a champion of the people of Birmingham. In the best traditions of Chamberlain on the one hand and Dick Knowles on the other, next Tuesday, Sir Albert Bore and the Labour group on Birmingham city council will table a motion for debate that calls on all councillors to stand up and be counted in opposition to what the Tories said they would not do and the Liberals said they should not do: put up VAT. The motion calls on councillors to speak out against a broken promise—an unfair tax that will hit pensioners, the unemployed and the poor hardest, and a jobs tax, which will hit the economy of the midlands, from house building to retail.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
My hon. Friend’s comments about the motion that the Labour group in Birmingham will table remind me of what happened at a Sefton council meeting last week. The Labour group there tabled a similar motion, and I hope that the same result does not occur in Birmingham, because the Liberal Democrat and Conservative councillors in Sefton decided not to turn up to debate how to deal with the Budget crisis and the Government’s national cuts.
Jack Dromey
It would appear that, in your local authority, they have found Lord Lucan, and they are now looking for the Liberal Democrat and Tory councillors. In Birmingham, they are going to have to stand up and be counted.
There is a grotesque contrast between the £2 billion levy on the banks—not on the bankers, by the way—on the one hand, and £11 billion off welfare and £12 billion on VAT on the other. I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the leadership shown last night by the truly honourable Members for Colchester (Bob Russell) and for Portsmouth South (Mr Hancock) when they voted against their own Government in opposition to the VAT increase.
The shadow Secretary of State was absolutely right to point out earlier that the areas with the greatest needs should not bear the brunt of the cuts. Birmingham has great problems of multiple deprivation and high unemployment, yet, as a consequence of the Budget, it will see the biggest cash reduction—more than £12 million. It will have the largest cut in area-based grant in any local authority in Britain, at £8 million, and the seventh largest cut to the school development fund, at £633,000. That money was designed to help struggling schools to succeed.
Birmingham will have the second largest cut to Connexions, at £2.7 million. This will harm the ability of our city to help the young into work and to get apprenticeships. It will also have the largest cut to the children’s fund, at £1.14 million. That will damage the capacity of our city to reach out to disabled, disadvantaged, troubled and sometimes abandoned children. It will also see the largest cut to the working neighbourhoods fund—a highly successful programme of concentrated, co-ordinated, community-led action to get Birmingham’s citizens off benefit and into work.
I have seen these programmes at first hand, in the form of the remarkable Employment Needs Training Agency in my constituency, and three excellent employment Connexions contracts focusing on the long-term unemployed, lone parents, ex-offenders, those who have engaged in alcohol abuse, and those who lost their jobs under Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s and never worked again. Those programmes have an outstanding track record of reaching out to those people, giving them hope, and helping them to rebuild their lives and get back into work.
Nadhim Zahawi (Stratford-on-Avon) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman speaks eloquently about the problems in Birmingham without telling us how we got there in the first place. Does he think that borrowing £500 million, not every month or every week but every day, represents responsible behaviour towards the people of Birmingham?
Jack Dromey
There are more bankers on the Government green Benches than there are in the square mile of the City of London.
Those admirable community projects’ money will run out in March 2011, and they are now facing a cut of up to one third. The impact of that on those projects and those communities will be absolutely devastating.
Sajid Javid
I am a former banker. I can see that the hon. Gentleman is probably still a trade unionist, rather than a former trade unionist. Does he realise that his party lost the election because it brought our country to the brink of bankruptcy? We are having to impose these cuts because of everything that you did or failed to do. They are your cuts, and there is no point in complaining about them now.
Jack Dromey
Thank you for owning up to your former occupation. I wonder whether you wish us to take any other offences into consideration—
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. Members must show a little more respect. There must be less of the “you”, and they must go through the Chair.
Jack Dromey
I was fascinated by the earlier contribution of the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), in which he demanded equal treatment for Bromsgrove and Birmingham. Forgive me for saying this: if you cannot tell the difference between Eton, Esher and Erdington, I can.
The cuts falling on my city are in grotesque contrast to what is happening in West Oxfordshire district council area, where not 1p is coming off the working neighbourhoods fund. Whose constituency falls into that area? It is that of the Prime Minister.
It is vital that we have an intelligent approach to the role of government. We have the example in the west midlands of Advantage West Midlands, a hugely successful organisation responsible for creating and safeguarding tens of thousands of jobs, but now facing abolition. It is no wonder that leading voices in the private sector are speaking out in opposition to that decision, which would be folly if we believe in the importance of a renaissance of our manufacturing base. However, the issue is not only the work that AWM does in promoting our manufacturing economy. It is also the work that it does in terms of the big society. I was at the opening of the Perry Common community hall the Friday before last. That was an excellent community initiative, with inspiring leadership from a local community that has been through very tough times. That community hall could never have been opened without half the money being made available by AWM. Can we therefore stop posing big government against big society? What we see in Perry Common is an ideal combination of big government and big society working together.
Ms Bagshawe
The right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) has so far failed to explain exactly where Labour would have found savings in the unlikely event that it had been returned to power. As the hon. Gentleman is in love with every single expensive programme, can he indicate where we might be able to cut to save some money?
Jack Dromey
Our approach was fundamentally different. We think that it is folly to cut savagely and quickly. It risks threatening the economy with a double-dip recession, and it is cities like Birmingham that would suffer grievously as a consequence.
We are already seeing the consequences of what the Con-Dem alliance is doing, not only in government but locally in the council chamber. The parties have been in power for six years. Earlier this year, 2,000 job cuts were announced, hitting hard nurseries, youth services, park rangers and the most vulnerable in our community—those in local old people’s homes. I was in an old people’s home in Kingstanding and I met excellent men and women. After our discussion, an 80-year-old woman took me to one side and told me the story of how she had had a double mastectomy and her wounds opened up at 3 o’clock one morning. She could not get help, because there were no longer wardens on site. She had to ring a call centre 150 miles away. She was eventually told to ring 999, but mercifully her son was 3 miles down the road and he came out to take her to hospital.
My view is simple: the good men and women of Birmingham who built that city and this country, and who are now in the twilight of their years, deserve better than to be abandoned by this Con-Dem alliance. You will; we never will.