Debate on the Address

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ed Davey]

I hope that the Government will find a way of working with politicians in Northern Ireland to help people who are struggling, but the right hon. Member is absolutely right about the VAT point. The Chancellor is getting £9 billion more in VAT receipts than the Budget prediction of £38 billion, yet the Government say that they cannot afford a VAT cut. That is clearly nonsense.

At the local elections last week, people across the country rose up to say “Enough is enough.” From Stockport to Somerset, Cumbria to Cambridgeshire, Harrogate to Harpenden, voters chose Liberal Democrats to be their local champions and to fight for a fair deal for them and their communities, and for Liberal Democrats, the fair deal must start with real action to tackle soaring energy bills and rising food prices. That does not just mean a VAT cut; we want to increase and extend the warm home discount to help more than 7 million people with their heating bills, and we want to increase the winter fuel payment to help pensioners betrayed by the Conservatives when they broke their election promise on the pensions triple lock.

Liberal Democrats want to help families and pensioners in rural areas who heat their homes with heating oil or liquefied petroleum gas and are not protected by the energy price cap. We would pay for that with a windfall tax on the super-profits of the oil and gas companies. Only last week, we learnt that BP and Shell are now raking in £1 billion in profit between them every single week from the same soaring gas and petrol prices that are making families suffer so much. Surely even this Government can see that, in the present economic crisis, we need to cut taxes for families by asking these corporate giants to pay a bit more.

The Government are failing so many groups. For instance, there is nothing to back British farmers, who are at once some of the hardest-hit victims of the cost of living crisis and crucial to solving the problem of food inflation for the rest of us. Instead of backing our farmers and our rural communities, the Government are adding to their pain. They are selling them down the river with trade deals that allow low-welfare foreign imports to undercut responsible British farmers, and cutting the payments on which they rely, which is costing some of them up to half their entire income. Quite simply, that risks driving many small farmers out of business altogether. In the south-west alone, farmers will lose almost £1 billion by the end of 2027 as a result of these Conservative policies.

This Government’s programme fails not only to help people with the cost of living emergency but to address the crisis in our NHS and care services. Take our ambulance services: many are in crisis, resources have been slashed and the paramedics and handlers are not being given support that they need. In the south-west, if you are a stroke victim, you now have to wait almost two hours for an ambulance. That is a terrifying statistic. The average wait for an ambulance is now almost two hours, and not just for stroke victims. In Devon, an 88-year-old man, Derek Painter, lay in “excruciating pain” after he fell on the stairs. He waited seven hours for an ambulance. That is just horrific. Thousands of people are watching loved ones in agony and distress; some have even watched loved ones die. This is heart-breaking and it cannot go on. Can Ministers—and the Prime Minister—look these families in the eye in such distressing circumstances and tell them that they have got a grip on this health crisis?

It does not stop at the ambulance crisis. Over many years now, this Government have allowed our NHS to spiral out of control. Local health services are at breaking point following the Conservative Government’s broken promise to recruit more GPs. People are struggling to get appointments and GPs are under more pressure than ever. And then there is the ticking timebomb of NHS dentistry—or lack of it—forcing people to shell out hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds for private work because they cannot get to see an NHS dentist. There was nothing in the Queen’s Speech to tackle these health crises and nothing for the social care crisis either. Last year, the Government promised to reform social care but all we got instead was an unfair tax hike. More than 1 million people are missing out on the care they need right now, and still the Government are doing nothing to help.

Nor are the Government doing anything to support the millions of unpaid family carers who are making big sacrifices to look after their families and loved ones. They were already facing serious financial hardship before the cost of living crisis struck; they are now being pushed to breaking point. They were again forgotten in the Queen’s Speech. I have told Ministers, including the Prime Minister, on countless occasions about the everyday struggles that carers face. The amazing Kingston Carers Network in my constituency tells me that its members, like carers across the country, are desperate for a rise in the carers allowance and for respite services to give them a break. Even the Government’s promise of a week of unpaid leave for carers—surely the very least the Government can do—was missing from the Gracious Speech. It is just not good enough. Without these unpaid carers, these family carers, our health and social care systems would crumble. The Government ignore them at their peril.

Nor can the Government afford to ignore the growing public anger about raw sewage being dumped into our rivers and seas. I see it in the Hogsmill river in my constituency—Kingston’s blue jewel and one of only 210 chalk streams in the world. Sewage pollution is killing these rivers and chalk streams. It threatens the habitats of countless wild animals and spoils the beauty of our precious local environment. I know other Members across the country are also seeing sewage being poured into their local rivers and streams, and into the seas along our coasts, whether in Eastbourne or East Devon. Liberal Democrats have proposed tough new laws to end the dumping of raw sewage and a new sewage tax on water companies. Our constituents will not forget the Government’s failure to listen and include such measures in the Queen’s Speech today.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I am pleased that the right hon. Gentleman has raised the issue of sewage pollution in our rivers. Does he not think the solution is to take all our water companies back into public ownership and stop pouring millions of pounds of our water costs into the profits of the private sector, often in overseas locations?

[Ed Davey]

I disagree with the right hon. Gentleman. I want a sewage tax. I want punitive laws and regulations on these companies, which have been getting away with it. That is how we get much quicker progress. We cannot wait any longer; we need clean rivers and seas.

Finally, this Queen’s Speech comes not only at a challenging time for the UK domestically, but at a dark moment for us and our allies as Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine continues. I am proud of how both sides of the House have stood united in our resolve to support President Zelensky and the brave Ukrainians. They are fighting for the same fundamental values that we treasure so deeply: liberty and democracy. But we need to do more and send clear, strong signals. In that regard, one thing was conspicuous by its absence from the Queen’s Speech: the decision to reverse this Government’s cut to our armed forces. The cut of 10,000 troops is a deeply misguided policy at this perilous moment. Our national security must be a priority. I urge the Government to reverse the decision immediately and demonstrate to our NATO allies Britain’s determination to stand up to aggression now and in the future.

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[John Redwood]

I am glad that all three of us agree on this matter, and we can proceed on that basis.

So what do the Government need to do? My first recommendation to my right hon. Friend the Chancellor is that he needs to have a new framework for the conduct of our economic policy. We are still running on Maastricht-lite. We still think that the way in which to control the economy is to control the debt and the deficit. I have news for the Chancellor: if we get growth and inflation right, the debt and the deficit will come closer to taking care of themselves. If we get the growth right, we will have much less of a problem with the debt and the deficit.

In the last year, when the United Kingdom led the growth tables for the advanced world, an unremarkable thing happened. It seemed very remarkable to the Treasury, but it seemed unremarkable to me. The deficit came tumbling down. According to one set of figures—and they still keep changing—it came in at £90 billion below the Office for Budget Responsibility and Treasury forecast, because with more growth comes more activity, more incomes and more spending, so the Treasury can collect more VAT and income tax. It was mainly extra revenues that came in, because we had that faster growth.

In my view, the debt and the deficit matter but should be subsidiary. The two main aims of economic policy should be a 2% inflation target, embedded as a Government target as well as a control mechanism on the Bank of England, and a complementary 2% growth target—not that exacting in the context of 20th-century experience in the United Kingdom, but fairly challenging in the context of the current century’s experience because of the disfiguring effect of the big banking crash and great recession in the middle of its first two decades.

Let me deal first with inflation. Once it gets out of control, it is extremely damaging to everything. It ends up causing shortages on the shelves, lack of supply, businesses crashing, and people being thrown out of jobs. We do not want to get into the accelerating double-figure inflation that some countries have suffered all too much. Anyone who wants to see what happens with the playbook should look at what is happening in Turkey at the moment, and at what has happened, on a grotesque scale, in Venezuela, where the generous state kept printing and kept borrowing and ended up destroying more than half its national income and much of the potential of the oil industry, which used to pay for everything because it was nationalised and incompetently run.

Those extreme versions need to be ruled out, and of course the amount of money created needs to be controlled; you need to keep an eye on when you can afford to borrow in the public sector and how much. However, that is a second-order issue in comparison with promoting growth and inflation targets as the main aims. The inflation target cannot simply be delivered by a central bank. Unfortunately, the Bank of England made a policy error, to which I drew attention beforehand last year. I think that it went on printing money for longer than it should have, and that its policy was too loose for too long. I was fully behind its huge injection of money and ultra-low interest rates in the previous year because of the huge shock administered to the economy, but it now looks as though it made a mistake, which it has subsequently corrected. It should not overdo it, though. It is no longer printing any money in excess, it has put up interest rates on three separate occasions, and money growth is now much more constrained in our country; but the Government must also put their shoulder to the wheel to curb various types of inflation.

At present one of the inflationary factors hitting, in particular, the budgets of those in the lower income areas is the huge price inflation in energy and food. That is caused by supply shortages. We were already pretty short of energy in western Europe because of the policies being pursued and because of the lack of natural resources on the continent, where there is not any, or much, oil and gas outside the Netherlands. We were already very short of basic energy. Then, of course, the dreadful invasion of Ukraine came along and caused so much damage—most directly to the people there who have such dreadful shocks from it, but there has been a wider economic shock for the rest of us. As a result of policy, Russian oil and gas are being gradually withdrawn from our supply systems, so we have exacerbated the shortage, for understandable and good political reasons, to try to help Ukraine in its battle against the Russian invasion.

As for food, we see a shortage arising as markets are heralding the sad likelihood that there will not be a lot of crop coming out of Ukraine this year and that a big source of edible oils and of grains will not be producing and exporting in the way that the world market needs, so we see great price pressures there.

So there is a need to engage Government, and I am pleased to see that the Government are working towards energy self-sufficiency and more food production. Those are crucial as a response to what has just happened and as security for the future. If we want to keep inflation down in the future, the one thing we can rely on is producing more of our own energy and growing more of our own food, which will give us more control over the pricing, particularly with something like gas, which of course is traded on the world market only to the extent that there is either pipeline capacity or liquefied natural gas capacity, so a lot of the gas cannot be traded internationally. American gas cannot be sent to Europe in huge quantities because there is no pipeline, and there is a limited amount of LNG capacity. America has much lower gas prices—and nothing like the cost of living problem that we have with energy—as a result of producing a lot of its own gas and therefore having a domestic market that clears at a lower price than the current very spiked world gas prices. I trust that the Government will pursue greater national self-sufficiency in key areas, including not only basic energy and food—we can grow a lot more of our temperate food—but crucial technologies, which the Government are becoming increasingly sensitive about.

I trust that when the Government turn their mind to the detail of their energy legislation, they will use it to facilitate the production of more domestic oil and gas. I think there is more general agreement today, after the debates of recent months, on the proposition that we ought to re-enter the North sea and that, instead of overseeing a pretty rapid rundown in its output, we should go through a transitional period, maybe this decade, and get more oil and gas out of the North sea. That surely makes more sense. It makes green sense because the CO₂ output created by burning our own gas is considerably less than that of the elaborate process of carrying it halfway round the world and having it compressed and decompressed so that it can travel as LNG. It is about half the CO₂ generated.

More importantly from the point of view of levelling up and growth in our public finances, we would be paying the tax to ourselves. All gas and oil attracts massive taxation from the countries that have the good fortune to produce it. If we buy gas from Qatar—or when we were buying oil from Russia—we pay them a huge amount of tax, which is revenue that we could pay to ourselves if we developed more of our own production. Our own Treasury could then either spend it or give it back to us in some other form, such as a rebate or grant.

There is a more sensitive issue about onshore gas, and people are often rather opposed to that idea. I suggest that no landowner or council should be made to have onshore gas production if they do not want to. That would be a democratic decision over permissions and it would be a decision of those who have the land or property nearby as a result. I think that some areas would have it—suitably protected and environmentally tailored, as it could be. We already have some onshore oil and gas. Wych Farm, for example, is in a very beautiful part of the world and it produces oil quite happily onshore. The Government need to put into law a framework where landowners and communities that agree to participate in onshore oil and gas development should receive a participation in the royalty of some sorts, or free gas to consumers, or whatever.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I am interested in what the right hon. Gentleman is saying. I assume he is talking about fracking when he talks about onshore gas production, and suggesting that we leave it to individual landowners and local authorities, but the polluting effects of fracking do not stop at the borders of somebody’s land or at a local authority border. Fracking pollutes the aquifers and it can and does create earth tremors that go well beyond all that. It is surely a matter of national policy that we do not pursue this short-sighted avenue of trying to get gas, and that we look at better methods of conservation and more sustainable methods of generating our energy.

[John Redwood]

I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman has a gas boiler, but I expect that most people in this House have gas boilers at home, as I and most of my constituents do. That gas needs to come from somewhere. I will not go into the details of the techniques needed for reservoir management, because that obviously depends on the structure, the flow rates and the nature of the stratum in which you find the gas, but a range of techniques can be used if gas or oil is shy in coming out of a reservoir that has been developed over many years.

Of course, like the right hon. Gentleman, I want this to be regulated. There must be no pollution of watercourses. Fortunately gas strata and water are often well divided in the United Kingdom—rather more so than in the US, where there has been a gas revolution onshore without polluting the water supplies or causing great environmental health problems. Of course that needs to be properly regulated—it is strictly regulated at the moment—and we need to review those regulations to ensure that the No. 1 priority of public safety is guaranteed and that the No. 2 priority, the desired effect of getting some gas out, assuming public safety is guaranteed, is also taken care of. I would have thought that the right hon. Gentleman would like the idea of a big new source of oil or gas tax revenue that stayed in the United Kingdom rather than being paid to Qatar or Saudi Arabia.

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[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I will try to keep within the 10-minute limit that you have requested, Madam Deputy Speaker.

The day of the state opening of Parliament is quite surreal. We have all the pomp, the gold coaches and the ancient Rolls-Royces out on the streets, and a Prime Minister who comes into the Chamber and tells us that he has got right all the big calls on covid and all the big calls on finance and then disappears. The reality is that we as a country have 4.2 million children living in poverty. Some 1.3 million babies—very, very small children— are being brought up in households in desperate poverty, often with not enough to eat and a heavy reliance on food banks and food co-ops merely to survive.

Dealing with poverty and related issues requires wage rises, and, as the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) pointed out, a rapid increase in universal credit. It requires recognising the desperate state of poverty within Britain. It became very obvious during the covid pandemic that there is a whole generation of people who came together in mutual aid groups that now recognise that poverty and food hunger are unacceptable in our society and that the work that has been done on the right to food and so much else must be acknowledged and taken up. There is nothing in the speech that says anything that gives hope to those people living in desperate poverty at the present time.

Many Members have spoken about the problems of energy costs. Some 6.3 million people in this country are living in fuel poverty, which is a nice sociological term, but what it really means is that those people cannot afford to put on the electricity, cannot afford to buy the gas, and cannot afford to heat their homes. If they are lucky, they can heat one room of that home, or they just go cold.

I would have thought that quite a few Members who campaigned in the local elections last week came across houses with no lights on, even when it was getting dark. There was a reason for that: people in those houses could not afford to charge the key meter or to put the lights on in their homes. That is the reality of poverty in this country. That poverty, again, leads not just to unpleasant living, but to hypothermia and really serious problems for people just trying to survive. Why have this Government not done what the French have done and introduced an energy price cap? Why have they not taken the hit of the increased energy prices as a public good in order to protect people? Why are they not promoting public ownership of energy, rather than having the energy companies making massive profits during this period of crisis? We must look at all of those issues.

Some 83% of adults say that they are noticing, or suffering from, a considerable increase in the cost of living, which means not just food poverty, but an inability to buy clothes and so much else as well. Those issues were not addressed in the speech.

I was interested in the very thoughtful speech made by the right hon. Member for Newark just now, which addressed many of the housing issues we face in this country. The homeless people who were very obviously on the streets of this country when the covid pandemic started were housed, because there was Government intervention and sufficient funding given to local authorities to ensure that they were housed.

Some local authorities leased hotels, some bought new places and a large number—I do not think all, but a large number—of rough-sleeping homeless people were housed during the pandemic. If we can do it during a pandemic, we can do it at any time. We can carry on doing it. It is simply immoral that anyone should be forced to sleep on the streets of this country at any time. However, that means addressing the issues of housing costs and housing stress.

I represent an inner-city constituency with a large number of council properties, a considerable number of housing association places, a small and declining number of owner-occupiers and a fast-growing private rented sector. By and large, the council properties are well managed and well run and have reasonable rents, and to live in a council property gives people a considerable sense of security.

I do not think housing associations are particularly well managed. I do not think by and large that they are good at doing repairs or good at management, and they are profoundly undemocratic in their behaviour and their frequent refusals to listen to tenants or allow what tenants want to have any bearing. We must hardwire into any housing legislation a sense of democracy in how housing associations manage their properties, and force them to listen to their tenants.

It is in the private rented sector, however, that the worst problems occur. About 30% to 33% of my constituents live in the private rented sector, and the rent levels are horrendous. They are more than three times the level of council rents, and the local housing allowance is insufficient to help people who are mostly moving into the private rented sector. Those on universal credit moving into the private rented sector because of the insufficiency of council housing must either supplement the rent themselves or move away from their community, their schools, their families, their support networks and all the rest.

We must understand that if we are going to have such a huge proportion of our population living in the private rented sector, they need certainty of an affordable rent, certainty of long-term tenancies, certainty that they will not be peremptorily evicted from that property and certainty that repairs will be done when they need them. Many local authorities, my own included, are innovative and creative in building some degree of protection and regulation in their communities, but it is this House that should build those protections and regulations within the private rented sector.

There are a whole lot of things that ought to be in the Queen’s Speech. If the Government are proposing deregulation of the economy at the very time when we need an investment in the economy, if they are not doing anything about job protection, fire and rehire or the insufficiency of wages for many people, the gaping chasm of inequality in Britain will get worse. There is regional inequality, there is national inequality, there is social inequality and there is class inequality, and it is getting worse. This Parliament must address those issues.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) said, social inequality is dealt with either by raising wages, raising public expenditure and so on, or by repressing the protests and the anger and trying to control people who want to demonstrate against it. The whole agenda of a law and order society, rather than dealing with the social divisions in society, is not an appealing prospect.

The world is in an environmental crisis. COP25 said so, COP26 said so—although there was a lot of greenwash surrounding it—and there is a massive environmental disaster around the corner. The global refugee crisis of 70 million people around the world comes from wars, human rights abuses and oppressive societies, but it also comes from the environmental disaster we face. We cannot just close our doors on refugees.

I absolutely and totally condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I hold out my heart and my hand to the Ukrainian refugees who have come to this country, albeit with great difficulty and no thanks to Home Office processes and procedures. We should hold out the same hand and the same welcome to refugees from other conflicts and wars in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Palestine, Ethiopia, Eritrea and other places, and recognise that if we want good human rights for ourselves, those human rights should apply to others.

That should also apply to people’s human right to express dissent around the world. The number of real journalists, very brave people, who have stood up against oligarchs and dictators and have paid the ultimate price as a result by being murdered should be recognised. Our Home Secretary should think carefully of the responsibility on her shoulders to decide whether somebody who has bravely reported on human rights abuses and military activities around the world, Julian Assange, should be removed from this country. I think he is a whistleblower and journalist who should be protected, not removed.

My last point is that we should be building a world fit for the next generation. We are bringing up a generation of children in this country who are overstressed and over-tested in school; who are streamed almost out of sight in secondary school and are victims of the competitive culture between secondary schools; who are charged in college and heavily indebted in university; and who then, because their wage levels are so low, cannot afford any decent or permanent place to live.

What message are we giving to the next generation? They will not have it as good as the current generation; they will have to pay the debts for the future. We should be investing, nurturing, cultivating and including all those young people. We should joy in their creativity, their art, their music, their science, their learning. They are the future. But what are we doing? Consigning them to stress and, in many cases, so much poverty. We can do things differently and very much better than we are. Sadly, the speech given today offers no hope whatsoever for any of the issues I have drawn attention to.