Debate on the Address

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Monday 14th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

This year marks two anniversaries. The first is the 70th anniversary of the Parliament Act 1949, which asserted the primacy of this House over the then hereditary House of Lords. It is worth remembering in our deliberations this week the primacy of the House of Commons over that and over the Executive. The second is the 50th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act 1969, which I remember very well because it extended the vote to everyone over the age of 18. As we meet today, we should commit to strengthening our democracy and the vital role of this democratic House in holding the Executive to account.

By tradition, at the beginning of each parliamentary Session we commemorate the Members of the House we have lost in the past year. Earlier this year we lost our great friend Paul Flynn—a fiercely independent, passionate, very kind and very principled Member of this House. I remember him reading out in this House the names of those who had died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—two wars to which he was opposed. He briefly served in our shadow Cabinet, and I think the whole House was enlivened by his performance. He joked at the first meeting of the shadow Cabinet and when he spoke from the Floor of the House that he was part of a job creation scheme for octogenarians. He was there not only because he was an excellent orator, campaigner and Member of the House, but because he was also an excellent representative of the people of Newport West, the constituency that he served so well and so passionately for 32 years.

Today’s proposer and seconder of the Loyal Address share a route to this place; both were local councillors prior to entering the House. I pay tribute to all those who put themselves forward to represent local communities as councillors, because without them our democracy would be worse off. They work hard and for long hours, and are often not particularly well rewarded or appreciated for the work they do. We should recognise that they are part of our democracy.

I was a little surprised to see that the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) had been asked by the Prime Minister to propose the motion today, because I understand they have not always enjoyed the best of relationships. As we know, the Prime Minister has earned a reputation for enjoying life to the fullest. I understand that during his time as London Mayor he became incandescent with anger and rage on learning that the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire—at that time, a Westminster councillor—intended to introduce a nightlife tax. Thankfully, the hon. Gentleman was able to reassure the now Prime Minister that the nightlife tax would apply only to car parking charges and not to other activities—although, on reflection, he may have missed a great opportunity of earning a great deal of revenue for the people of Westminster.

I suspect it is no coincidence that the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire has shown great independence of thought as a politician, as he grew up in Chesterfield during the 1980s—a cradle of political dissent. Today, the hon. Gentleman is again in danger of finding himself upbraided by the Prime Minister, this time as a member of the “nose-ringed…unco-operative crusties”. Indeed, the hon. Gentleman took his arguments against fracking into the lion’s den of the 2018 Tory party conference, and predicted that his party’s support for fracking would see it lose seats—in North East Derbyshire, I assume. My late, great friend Tony Benn, who was the Member for Chesterfield, gave one of his last diaries the title, “Dare to be a Daniel”. I hope that the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire continues to dare, and that he will also emulate the daredom, the experience and the wit of his constituency neighbour and my great friend, my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner). [Interruption.] He is my great friend.

Researching today’s seconder, the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton), I believe I have uncovered yet another secret Conservative project originating in Merton in the 1980s that led directly to Downing Street three decades later. Chief of the Wimbledon set, as they became known, was the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). By her side stood her loyal lieutenants—the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond), the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), and, of course, the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth. Today, those who were part of the Wimbledon set are described as “competent and professional”, which really begs the question, how did the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) ever sneak into the Wimbledon set? [Interruption.] The most expensive Transport Secretary we have ever had—don’t worry about it.

The House may not know this, but in 2013 the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth and I found ourselves in political agreement. I was happy to support her early-day motion to mark the anniversary of the death of Emily Wilding Davison. It is worth the House hearing some of EDM 164. It said that the House

“commemorates the centenary of the death of Emily Davison…salutes her courage on behalf of the suffragette cause…and pays tribute to her and her fellow campaigners for their brave and ultimately successful efforts to secure votes for women”.

While I may be dubious about the company she keeps, the hon. Lady is deserving of the honour of seconding today’s Loyal Address.

There has never been such a farce as a Government with a majority of minus 45 and a 100% record of defeat in the House of Commons setting out a legislative agenda they know cannot be delivered in this Parliament. [Interruption.] Hon. Members heckle about a general election. I said to the Prime Minister last month, “Get an extension, take us away from the dangers of a no deal, and then we are in a position to do that.”

We may be only just weeks away from the first Queen’s Speech of a Labour Government. In that Queen’s Speech, Labour will put forward the most radical and people-focused programme in modern times—a once-in-a-generation chance to rebuild and transform our country. It will let the people decide on Brexit, build an economy that works for all, rebuild our public services that support everyone, tackle the climate emergency, and reset our global role to one based on peace and human rights.

[Sir Patrick McLoughlin (Derbyshire Dales) (Con)]

The Prime Minister gave the right hon. Gentleman the opportunity of having a general election tomorrow. Had that general election taken place tomorrow and he had been successful, he would have been going to the Council of Ministers this weekend to negotiate. Why did he reject that opportunity when he has been calling for it all the time?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Quite simply because we do not trust the Prime Minister.

This Government have had three and a half years to get Brexit done and they have failed. The only legitimate way to sort Brexit now is to let the people decide with the final say. To pass this House, any deal needs to meet the needs of workers and businesses. That means including a new customs union—a close single market relationship—and guarantees of workers’ rights, consumer standards and environmental protection; and, if I may say so, guarantees that the Good Friday agreement will not be damaged or undermined in any way. A withdrawal agreement was announced, but we do not know yet if the Government have done a deal. What we are sure of is that this House has legislated against crashing out with no deal and that the Prime Minister must comply with the law if a deal does not pass this House.

The Queen’s Speech talked about the opportunities that arise from Brexit, but the Government’s own figures suggest that a free trade agreement approach would cause a near 7% hit to our economy, while a no-deal crash-out would cause a 10% hit. Those seem like opportunities that we could all live without. For many people, the economy of this country is fundamentally weak. Since 2010, there are more workers in poverty, more children in poverty, more pensioners in poverty, more families without a home to call their own and more people—fellow citizens—sleeping rough on our streets. Fewer people can afford their own home, and wages are still lower than they were a decade ago. Productivity is falling, and the economy contracted last month.

At the weekend I was in Hastings on the south coast, where last year food banks staffed by volunteers distributed 87,453 meals, and one in seven people in that town live in fuel poverty. Are those not shocking figures in this country in the 21st century? There was nothing in the Queen’s Speech to address our stagnant economy, nothing to address low pay and insecure work, and nothing to reverse the rising levels of child poverty or pensioner poverty.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the challenges of rising child poverty, compounded by the mental health issues that young people face and rising special educational needs not being met due to our education system lacking the resources it needs, are contributing to the next generation growing up in despair, for which the country will pay the price for generations to come?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. We have almost a lost generation. Children are going to understaffed schools with very few teaching assistants, where headteachers are going to parents with a begging bowl to try to match school budgets, and too many young people are growing up in bad housing, with incredible levels of stress and worry about the future. That contributes to the mental health crisis that this country as a whole must address.

Will the Prime Minister match Labour’s commitments to scrap the benefit freeze, end the benefit cap, ditch the bedroom tax, scrap the two-child limit and the disgusting rape clause, and end punitive sanctions in the benefit system? While we welcome the legislation to ensure that employers pass on tips to their workers—something that the Labour and trade union movement has long campaigned for—the Government must go further, and I urge them to listen to the package of measures set out by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Laura Pidcock) in her brilliant speech at the TUC last month. This Queen’s Speech was supposed to herald an end to austerity and a new vision. Instead, it barely begins to unpick the devastating cuts to public services.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the climate and nature emergencies demand so much more than the six words they were accorded in the Queen’s Speech and an Environment Bill that will widely weaken the protections we currently enjoy as members of the EU? Will he join me in calling for a comprehensive green new deal to decarbonise the economy by 2030, so that we can show we are genuinely serious about the climate crisis?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I am coming on to that in a moment, but I absolutely agree: what we need is a green new deal. We need a green industrial revolution, and we have to face up to the reality of the climate emergency. If we do not, the damage to the next generation and the one after it will be even worse.

Our national health service has suffered the longest funding squeeze in its history, while life expectancy is falling and infant mortality rising. Schools have had their budgets cut, class sizes have risen, and headteachers are sending begging letters to parents. Any Government Member who is concerned about that should simply take a walk down the road and speak to any primary school headteacher about the stress that they and their pupils are going through. The police have lost more than 20,000 officers, while violent crime soars.

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. Does he support this Government’s policy to rapidly increase school funding?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

If only they were, it would be a good thing. All the off-the-cuff announcements made by the Prime Minister since July do not add up to addressing the austerity created by the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrats during their period in coalition.

NHS England has made clear that core treatment targets cannot be met within the funding settlement offered by the Government. They cannot be trusted with the national health service. Waiting lists are going up, waiting times are going up, and the shortage of GPs continues to create problems at every doctors’ surgery. The Government’s refusal to guarantee key standards lets down the 4.4 million patients on the waiting lists, all those waiting longer and longer in accident and emergency departments, and the nearly 34,000 patients who waited more than 62 days for cancer treatment last year.

With 40,000 nurse vacancies, there is an urgent need to restore the nursing bursary for the nurses of tomorrow. If the Prime Minister really wants to defend the NHS, he needs to end privatisation so that our NHS is focused on making people better, not on people on the make—a universal service free at the point of use. We do not want just tinkering around the edges. We want to bin the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and truly end all privatisation in our national health service.

[Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)]

I trained in the bursary system and lived on a pittance each month. It is this Government who have introduced degree nurse apprenticeships whereby student nurses earn while they learn.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I have news for the hon. Lady: it is her Government who ended the nurse bursary system—simple.

Will the Prime Minister support Labour’s plans to provide free prescriptions to people in England, as has been done in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland? Will he also back Labour’s commitment to legislate for safe staffing levels in all our hospitals?

The previous Queen’s Speech, in 2017, stated:

“My Government will reform mental health legislation and ensure that mental health is prioritised in the National Health Service in England.”

Two years on, all we have are the same warm words. The mental health crisis continues to get worse and worse, as many people in great stress are told that there is no therapy available for several months. As a result, terrible things can happen.

It is a similar story on social care. The 2017 Queen’s Speech promised:

“My Ministers will work to improve social care and will bring forward proposals”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 21 June 2017; Vol. 783, c. 6.]

Today we have the same promise after two years of inaction and failure, with 87 people dying every day while waiting for social care that is not provided.

This Queen’s Speech is shockingly weak on education, with no commitment on early years, on colleges or on universities. The money announced for our schools does not restore the funding lost since 2010. It is all very well promising extra police, but the reason why we do not have enough police is that the Government cut 21,000 police jobs and nearly 7,000 police community support officers. If the Conservative party—the party in government—wants to talk about providing police with protections, perhaps it can tell the police why it subjected them and millions of other public sector workers to cuts in their pay and pensions, damaging their terms and conditions of employment.

I know that this Government do not have a great record of listening to judges, but they are surely aware that judges already have the powers to ensure that the most serious offenders serve more than half their sentences in jail. Our prisons are severely overcrowded. There are 2,500 fewer prison officers in our prisons today than in 2010—hence many of the problems throughout our prison service. The privatisation of the probation service was a shambolic and costly failure. I hope that lessons have been learned, and we will examine closely any proposals on rehabilitating offenders. I hope that, alongside the tougher sentencing, the Government will also recognise that too many people are in prison on very short sentences for non-violent and non-sexual offences. Our society, I believe, could be better served by their being subject to community sentencing and restorative justice.

What will the Prime Minister do to address the appallingly low conviction rate for rape and other serious sexual offences? The dog-whistle rhetoric around foreign offenders is a rather ugly mask for the fact that, by crashing out of the EU, the Government risk losing some of the most effective measures in tackling cross-border crime: the European arrest warrant, participation in Eurojust and access to numerous databases.

We will, of course, closely study the detail of the Government’s proposals on rail reform, but it is no good simply changing the way in which train operating companies carry on extracting profit from our fragmented railway system. Only a Labour Government will cap fares and ensure that the railway is run for the passengers, not for profit. There is nothing in this Queen’s Speech to reverse the devastating cuts to bus services all over the country. A Labour Government will restore rail and bus services, and the integration of those services.

Two years ago, the horror of Grenfell happened. We all remember it very well and we remember the response of the public and in this House. But I have to say that nine out of 10 private blocks of flats with Grenfell-style cladding have still not had it replaced. Not a single private block has been made safe under this Prime Minister. Will he confirm today that he will set a hard deadline for all landlords to replace dangerous cladding, that he will toughen sanctions against block owners that will not do that work, and that he will fund the retrofitting of sprinklers in all high-rise social housing blocks? Will he restore the budget cuts to our fire service, who acted so heroically on that dreadful night of the Grenfell fire?

Perhaps the Prime Minister can set out what measures there are to address the Government’s abject failure on housing. That has led to more people sleeping on our streets, more families in hostels and temporary accommodation, and fewer people able to buy their own homes. Labour will end no-fault evictions. We will tackle the leasehold scandal and kick-start the largest council house building programme for a generation. It will be Labour that will fix the housing crisis in this country.

The introduction of pension dashboards is welcome, as is the legislation for CDC—collective defined contribution—pension schemes, which I hope will help to resolve the Royal Mail dispute. Sadly, the proposals do nothing to address the injustice done to women born in the 1950s. That injustice must be put right. Additionally, this Queen’s Speech does nothing to guarantee the free TV licence for the over-75s.

The Government handed our armed forces a pay cut for seven years. Cuts to council budgets in England have made it far harder to deliver the armed forces covenant, leaving our veterans and our personnel and all of their families worse off.

We will not allow the Government to stifle democracy by making it harder for people to vote. There was only one instance of voter personation at the last election. Some 11 million people in this country do not have—[Interruption.] This is serious. It is about elections and it is about democracy. Some 11 million people in this country do not have a passport or a driving licence. There are huge risks in the legislation being proposed which will disproportionately affect working class, ethnic minority and young voters.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way on that point. Does he agree with me that the decision to require voters to have photo ID at the ballot box is clearly an attempt by the Conservative party to suppress voting, and is designed deliberately to hit the poorest hardest?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

There is no question. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This legislation is designed to hit the poorest the hardest: those who do not have passports or access to other forms of identity, and who will thus lose their right to vote and decide who governs in the future. [Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The right hon. Gentleman will give way when he chooses. He does not need to be told what to do by people gesticulating at him. Stop it. It is low grade, downmarket and out of keeping with the code.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Freedom of movement has given opportunities to millions of British people to live, work and retire across Europe. It has benefited our economy immensely, with European Union workers playing a key role in sustaining many of our industries and public services. No responsible Member would vote to rip that up, unless there is a proper plan in place. In the shadow of the Windrush scandal, the settled status scheme for European Union citizens risks another round of wrongful denial of rights and shameful deportations. I look forward to the Prime Minister assuring those European Union citizens, who have made such an enormous contribution to our lives and our society, that they will have a secure future in this country.

The Government say that they will be at the forefront of solving the most complex international security issues and global challenges, yet they are playing precisely no role in stopping the horrors unfolding in the Kurdish areas of northern Syria, ending the war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen, or standing up for the rights of the Rohingya, the Uyghurs, or the people of Palestine, Ecuador or Hong Kong. They are continuing to cosy up to Donald Trump, and sitting idly by as he wrecks the world’s efforts to tackle climate change and nuclear proliferation.

As the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) said in an intervention, the crisis of our age is the climate emergency as declared by this House in May, but there is no action announced in the Queen’s Speech. I pay tribute to the climate school strikers and to Extinction Rebellion. Sadly, the Government have not listened. The Prime Minister derided them as “nose-ringed…crusties”, although I note that their number included a Conservative former Member of the European Parliament, who I believe is related to the Prime Minister. So many people are concerned about bad air quality, the failure to invest in renewable energy, the pollution of our rivers and seas, and the loss of biodiversity. Only this Government have the power and resource to tackle the climate emergency if they wanted to, but they are missing with inaction. It is Labour that will bring forward a green new deal to tackle the climate emergency.

The legislative programme is a propaganda exercise that the Government cannot disguise. This Government have failed on Brexit for over three years. They are barely beginning to undo the damage of a decade of cuts to our public services. It does nothing for people struggling to make ends meet. It does nothing to make our world a safer place or tackle the climate emergency. The Prime Minister promised that this Queen’s Speech would dazzle us. On closer inspection, it is nothing more than fool’s gold.