Middle East: Economic Response

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2026 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

I remember that, when I was young, I used to enjoy visits to Chislehurst Caves and Eltham Palace, and I hope they will be able to benefit from the changes I have announced today. It is important that we ensure that supermarkets pass on these cost reductions to their customers. We are also making changes to HGV duty, which will reduce costs for supermarkets. It is important that Supermarkets recognise the pressure that their customers are under at the moment. We have provided additional powers to the Competition and Markets Authority to ensure that no business, whatever its size or nature, takes advantage of the conflict in the middle east to hike prices for their customers.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

Youth unemployment is now at 5%. On current form, it will rise to 5.8% by next year, which will mean a very large number of young people without work. What actions can the Chancellor take to ensure that young people get access to jobs and careers, and do not have the deeply depressing experience of being unemployed when they leave school, college or university? A disproportionate number of young people rent in the private rental sector, so will she also do something about bringing in much needed rent regulation in the private rental sector?

[Rachel Reeves]

We have already increased the number of apprenticeships, and changes to the growth and skills levy mean that young people do not always have to have maths and English at grades A to C to get on to an apprenticeship programme. We have also introduced shorter apprenticeships to help young people to get the skills they need. On private rent, the right hon. Gentleman might have seen the changes that we made through the Renters’ Rights Act 2026, which gives renters the greatest rights they have had in a generation, including the right to challenge a rent increase and to have only one rent increase a year. If someone challenges their rent increase and takes their case to a tribunal, they will not have the rent increase during the course of the tribunal, helping to limit rent rises for hard-working families.

Spring Statement

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

My hon. Friend speaks powerfully on behalf of her constituents, ensuring that the people of West Bromwich get a good deal from their public services and value for money when they pay their taxes. There was too much waste under the previous Government. That was exemplified during the pandemic, when so many contracts went to friends and donors. We have appointed a covid corruption commissioner because we want that money back in our public services, not in the hands of Tory friends and donors.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

There are 4.3 million children living in poverty in our society, and 1.2 million people in receipt of PIP are about to lose it following the statement last week. The Chancellor has put a huge amount of money into defence. Could she not think for a moment of reversing the decision last week to take £5 billion out of the welfare budget, and of ending the two-child benefit cap, which has driven so many children and families into really desperate poverty?

[Rachel Reeves]

I will not make any apologies for putting more money in defence. This Labour Government take the defence of our country seriously, and so we should. We are the party that created NATO, and the leadership of the Labour party today will always defend our country.

Charter for Budget Responsibility

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Darren Jones]

The OBR was very clear, as Members will see in its publications in the House of Commons Library, that the spending plans announced by the previous Government were—to quote the chair of the OBR in his evidence to the Treasury Committee—a “fiction.” The OBR forecast provided to the Government made it clear that had the in-year spending pressure been reported transparently, the last forecast under the previous Administration would have been “materially different”. That shows that the lack of transparency on in-year spending was a secret held by only a few Ministers in the last Government, and neither the public, Parliament, we in opposition nor the OBR knew about that problem. That is why this Government have already legislated to bring forward additional strengthened powers for independent checks and balances and transparency, and we have committed to sharing in-year spending pressures with the Office for Budget Responsibility so that we never end up in a situation like the one we inherited.

The Chancellor’s autumn Budget put the public finances back on track, and we will keep them there. Our commitment to sound public finances is non-negotiable. Our new charter for Budget responsibility, underpinned by the new fiscal rules, ensures a more transparent fiscal framework and provides a stable foundation for growth. Today I will outline the changes that we have made to the charter for Budget responsibility, as published in draft at the autumn Budget 2024 and laid before this House last week.

Fiscal rules are a key part of the UK fiscal framework. At the autumn Budget in 2024, the Chancellor confirmed the Government’s fiscal rules as set out in our manifesto, which will play a vital role in unlocking investment. These rules will put the public finances on a sustainable path and prioritise investment to support long-term growth. They consist of two rules: the stability rule and the investment rule.

The stability rule aims to move the current Budget into balance so that day-to-day spending is met by revenues, meaning that the Government will borrow only for investment. We will meet this rule in 2029-30, until that becomes the third year of the forecast. From that point on, we will balance the current Budget in the third year of every Budget, held annually each autumn. This will provide a tougher constraint on day-to-day spending so that difficult decisions cannot be constantly delayed or deferred, as they were under the last Government.

I am sure the House would recommend that the Government should live within their means. That means that public services have to be able to live within their budgets, and it means that tax revenues have to pay for day-to-day spending. Never again will we end up in the position the country ended up in under the last Government, when every week and every month the country borrowed more and more in order to pay the day-to-day bills. That is why when hon. Members on the Opposition Benches complain about the debt burden this country is having to deal with, they should look in the mirror, because they built up that debt burden. The people responsible for filling up the country’s credit card just to pay the bills every month, even in advance of the pandemic, were Conservative Ministers. That will never happen under a Labour Government because of our clear fiscal rules. It is why for the first time in 17 years we are doing a zero-based review of all public spending, not once done under the last Administration but done in the first spending review of this Labour Government.

Secondly, our investment rule requires the Government to reduce net financial debt, defined as public sector net financial liabilities, as a share of the economy. Public sector net financial liabilities is an accredited official statistic, produced by the Office for National Statistics since 2016; based on international statistical guidance, it has been forecast by the OBR since that time. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has noted that the metric offers a

“more complete picture of the Government’s financial position, while removing some of the perverse incentives associated with a narrow focus on PSND”—

public sector net debt.

This rule keeps debt on a sustainable path while allowing the step change needed in investment by targeting a measure of debt that captures not just the debt that Government owe, but financial assets that are expected to generate future returns. By targeting net financial debt for the investment rule, the Government are prioritising investment to drive long-term growth while getting debt falling as a share of the economy.

The move to net financial debt will be supported by a comprehensive set of guardrails to give confidence that there are rules around the investments the country can make. Like our stability rule, our investment rule will apply in 2029-30 until that year becomes the third year of the forecast, and from that point onwards net financial debt will fall in the third year of every forecast.

The move to net financial debt means that at the autumn Budget the Government were in a position to confirm public investment that will be £100 billion higher over the forecast period compared to the previous Government’s plans. I am pleased to say that in its autumn forecast the OBR confirmed that the Government are on track to meet both fiscal rules two years early, in 2027-28, displaying the Government’s commitment to sound finances.

The Chancellor has asked the OBR to produce a forecast on 26 March, which will assess us against these rules once again. Our commitment to these fiscal rules is iron-clad. The UK has changed its fiscal rules in the past more than any other country, but this Government know that stability matters. That is why the new charter sets out clearer circumstances under which the fiscal rules can temporarily be suspended through a new strengthened escape clause. The new escape clause requires a decision on suspension be supported by the OBR’s analysis so that the rules can be suspended only with sufficient justification.

As well as new fiscal rules, the updated charter for budget responsibility includes a set of wider reforms that ensure a more stable and transparent fiscal framework. Because fiscal responsibility is so central to this Government’s mission, the first piece of legislation passed in this Parliament was the Budget Responsibility act 2024. It delivered our manifesto commitment to introduce a fiscal lock. I do not think Members on either side of the House need reminding of what happens when huge unfunded fiscal commitments are made without proper scrutiny and key economic institutions such as the OBR are sidelined. We will not let that happen again. The fiscal lock therefore guarantees in law that from now on every fiscally significant change to tax and spending will be subject to scrutiny by the independent OBR.

The charter sets out the details of how the fiscal lock will operate. As well as the new guiding fiscal principles to move towards only borrowing for investment and to keep debt on a sustainable path, the OBR will monitor progress against a dashboard of key debt sustainability metrics to ensure the Government are taking a broad view of fiscal sustainability. A broader view will allow the Government to form a full assessment of the sustainability of the public finances and support us in seeking to improve sustainability over time.

We are also enhancing fiscal and economic stability by confirming in the charter today that the Government’s intention to move to one major fiscal event per year will be honoured, giving families and businesses certainty on tax and spending plans, as will the requirement on the Treasury to conduct regular spending reviews every two years and setting spending for at least three years, ensuring public services have certainty on their funding and that spending decisions cannot again be repeatedly delayed. In addition, it guarantees a three-year rolling budget for the OBR, to support its independence. We are further strengthening fiscal transparency and accountability by accepting all the recommendations of the OBR review of the March 2024 forecast for departmental expenditure limits, including to improve the spending information the Treasury shares with the OBR.

The OBR is widely recognised as providing independent, credible and high-quality analysis. It is a guarantor of economic stability. Going forward, the Treasury will provide the OBR with information on the in-year position, allowing it to forecast underspending and overspending against departmental expenditure limits where appropriate. This will ensure the unfunded pressures identified at the public spending audit never happen again. We are a Government who will consider the impact of our current spending decisions on future generations, and to show how the long-term health of the public balance sheet is bolstered by sound investments, the charter requires the OBR to report on the long-term impact of capital investment and other policies at fiscal events.

Finally, I turn to the welfare cap, which we are also debating today. The Government are retaining the welfare cap within our fiscal framework to support our ambitions to keep welfare spending sustainable in the medium term. The OBR will assess whether the new cap has been met at the first fiscal event of the next Parliament. The latest OBR forecast judged the previous welfare cap to be breached by £8.6 billion, following a trend of forecast breaches by the previous Government. This is clearly an unsustainable path for welfare spending. This breach underlines the inheritance left by the previous Government: a failure to control welfare spending and to bring forward radical reform, and, crucially, a failure by the last Government to support people to get the treatment or skills they need to return to work.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

In his assessment, what estimate has the Minister made of the increase in poverty and child poverty in our society and the effects of largely uncontrolled rents in the private rented sector, often well above the local housing allowance, which leads people into poverty?

[Darren Jones]

The right hon. Member knows that the Labour party takes child poverty seriously. That is why we launched the child poverty taskforce at the start of this Government, co-chaired by the Work and Pensions Secretary and the Education Secretary, to do a root and branch review of the long-term structural causes of child poverty and the interventions the Government could take to reverse those growing trends that none of us across the House wants to see. The taskforce will report in the coming months, but he is right to point out that housing costs and insecure housing have become ever more important drivers of child poverty in recent years. That is why, through the Renters’ Rights Bill introduced to the House by the Deputy Prime Minister, we are taking action in the private rented sector to provide additional protections and support for families in rental accommodation—for example, banning no-fault evictions and giving more security of tenure for people who are renting.

Like me, the right hon. Member will have had lots of casework where hard-working families, who are just trying to make ends meet and to provide security of income and a roof over their head for them and their families, are failed by a market in which house prices to buy and rent are out of reach and the rate at which we build affordable and social housing is not meeting the demand of the people who need it. That is why we increased funding at the Budget by half a billion pounds to build more affordable and social housing, which we know can be delivered quickly.

On a visit last week to Erewash, I visited social housing developments supported by Homes England and learned from the company building those homes for emh Homes, the east midlands housing association, that it takes only 14 to 16 weeks from laying the foundations through to giving the key to the person moving in. That reminds us why our reform agenda is so important, because the time involved in building—planning, consenting, infrastructure and financing deals—has been significantly holding back the rate of development of social and affordable housing across the country. Those are exactly the sorts of issues where Government have the ability to make a difference, which is why we are committed to accelerating our plans to build 1.5 million homes a year, but, crucially, to tilting that towards more affordable and social housing to support people across the country.

The Government are resetting the welfare cap, given that the previous one was repeatedly breached, and we are doing so based on the latest Office for Budget Responsibility forecast. That will set a new target for 2029-30, alongside our action to control welfare spending and to help people who deserve the assistance. The Government have demonstrated that they will not shy away from doing what is needed to put welfare spending on a more sustainable path—for example, with different decisions such as targeting winter fuel payments to those who need them the most and reclaiming £4.3 billion of public money lost to fraud and error in the welfare system in 2029-30, and £9.2 billion over five years.

We have also announced steps to tackle inactivity through the “Get Britain Working” White Paper and will set out further proposals in the health and disability Green Paper later in spring. Progress against the cap will be monitored by the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions. That will include a strengthened accountability framework and the DWP publishing an annual report on welfare spending. By strengthening the accountability of the welfare cap, getting more people into work and reforming the welfare system for long-term sustainability, we are taking the necessary steps to keep spending under control. But crucially, we are also serving the people of this country by ensuring that people who for too long have been at home unable to be seen in the NHS or to get access to mental health services, who have been unable to get the training or support they need to take advantage of the jobs available in our country, and who have been unable to find jobs near where they are, see hope in their futures and know they have a Government on their side who will support them to get back into work. That outcome is better for them, their family finances and their futures, but it also supports us in ensuring fiscal stability.

The reforms to the fiscal framework outlined in the new charter for Budget responsibility will ensure a more stable approach to tax and spend, as well as better transparency and accountability for our Government and future Governments. That stability is inseparable from our plans for growth. Alongside that growth, restoring stability means the Government can pay for increased funding to repair, reform and modernise our public services and to invest in the infrastructure needed to rebuild Britain. For those reasons, I commend the motion to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Darren Jones]

The Health Secretary is actively working on this. There are huge opportunities, not just in the NHS but in the Department for Work and Pensions where my right hon. and hon. Friends are working, and throughout Government as a whole. Imagine having a jobcentre in your pocket, on your phone, where you can gain access to the support that you need—as opposed to services that are often out of town or not available when you are available, and where there are difficult processes to go through. That is not great for the people who work in those services. They are there to serve the public, but they are not helped to achieve the right outcomes for people.

This Government are committed to reform but also to investment, because we can achieve better outcomes for people and reduce the cost of running public services in the long run. We are committed to unlocking investment, whether it is through the PSNFL debt definition for infrastructure and businesses or, as a consequence, freeing up public sector grants for public sector investment.

My hon. Friend the Member for Reading Central (Matt Rodda) made a number of excellent points. I am pleased that he is supportive of the commitments made by the Chancellor today to back the Heathrow plans and the enormous opportunity presented by the Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor. He gave the great example of his local technology and telecoms cluster and its development around rail infrastructure, including extra capacity on the Elizabeth line. It is a classic and probably obvious example: if rail and other transport infrastructure is built, people will come and invest in lab spaces, offices and homes. That is why the Chancellor made such a strong commitment today to get infrastructure built and enable private sector investment.

My hon. Friend also made a good point about the role of universities. Our universities sector is one of our great strengths. We have a number of world-leading universities, as well as the brilliant universities that are teaching and carrying out research in every part of our country. These are often the engines of economic growth in their regions, and also the gateway to opportunity for many people.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The Chief Secretary has referred to the great benefit of infrastructure projects. The Elizabeth line is a very good example of that, but it was way over budget and very late, and the same applies to HS2 and most other big infrastructure projects. What plans do the Government have in that regard? Later we will discuss the welfare cap, an attempt to control welfare spending for the next five years. Does the same cap apply to infrastructure projects?

[Darren Jones]

I thank the right hon. Member for his question, because he invites me to talk the House through our infrastructure strategy. For the first time, we are bringing together Government plans on economic infrastructure, housing and social infrastructure in the same place. It means that when we go through the spending review in the Treasury, working with colleagues across Whitehall, we will be much better than the previous Government at taking place-based decisions. In the past, it was a bilateral discussion between a Department and the Treasury, with no dots being connected between different types of infrastructure. That has led to the failure to capture the growth potential in different places.

We will take a different approach and make sure that infrastructure investments relating to public investment are capped by the numbers set out in the Budget. That is the spending envelope that we have, and we have to prioritise those investments, but they will be based on driving growth and opportunity for people in the places in which they live.

My hon. Friend the Member for Reading Central made a great point about the Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor, the role of connecting some of our great universities, and unleashing the opportunity that exists between them. As I said to the House earlier, the living connectivity arrangements between Oxford and Cambridge are basically non-existent. By connecting these two hubs of innovation and investment, the opportunities are endless.

Christmas Adjournment

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I wish a very happy Christmas to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and to all the staff of the House of Commons for the work they do to support all of us. I also thank all the people who work so hard in my constituency in a series of community centres, schools and other places, and all those who help, support and work in the food banks in my constituency. I feel sad that food banks have now become institutionalised within our society. Fifteen years ago, there were almost no food banks; now they are all over the country. We need to look at the problems of inequality and poverty in our society.

I feel sad that over the past five months in this Parliament, since the general election, we have missed opportunities to end the two-child benefit cap and to reduce levels of poverty among many older people. In fact, we have made it worse by ending the winter fuel allowance. We have allowed Royal Mail to be run by yet another private sector operator, which will take profits out of it, rather than bringing it into public ownership to ensure that the people of this country benefit from our oldest public service.

When the House returns in January, the issue of the water industry will have to be addressed. Water companies across the country are paying their chief executive officers the most massive salaries imaginable and taking out huge profits, which are often paid to overseas investors in our industry, and we have catastrophic levels of pollution in our rivers and seas. The water company for my area, Thames Water—the most indebted such company around—expects to put up bills even higher to pay for infrastructure, which it could have paid for itself had it not been paying so much money to private investors all over the world. The case for public ownership of water is absolutely overwhelming.

I want quickly to mention some other issues in the last couple of minutes I have. Our society is precious and valuable, but in the past year we have seen the rise of racism in our society, and a culture of blaming migrants and refugees for the problems people face in housing, education and health. It is nothing to do with them; those problems are the result of a lack of investment in those services. Can we resolve over Christmas to have respect for those people who are trying to make a safe place to live and contribute to our society, rather than this culture of blaming migrants and people who have come from Calais merely because they are trying to survive in a difficult world beset by war and conflict? That would help a great deal.

My constituents are wonderful people, but many have the most appalling housing problems to deal with. There are the street homeless, who are helped by various organisations, including the local authority, and I do not blame them for the problems at all. There are those living in the grotesquely overpriced private rented sector, those living in increasingly undemocratically run housing associations, and those living in leased property where they pay exorbitant charges for ground rent and services and have little control over their own lives. I appreciate what the Government have brought forward in the Renters’ Rights Bill. I welcome it, as far as it goes, but we need to have a further, deeper think about housing as a right and as something that people need, and not the exorbitant costs at present. With that, I wish you a very happy Christmas, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Autumn Statement

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Hunt]

My right hon. Friend is an immensely experienced colleague. She is right to point out that there is always inaccuracy in any forecast, and there is always variation from fiscal event to fiscal event, so we keep all those decisions under review in the round. I think it is still important to have forecasts—that is better than not to have them—but we keep all those decisions under review.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

May I take the Chancellor back to the issues of housing, which other hon. Members have raised? Raising the local housing allowance merely in line with inflation does not necessarily help many people on benefits living in the private rented sector, particularly in constituencies such as mine where, generally speaking, many of those people end up being exported away from the area in which they live. It is more important to give local authorities the power to introduce rent controls in areas of very high private sector rent. Excessive rent levels are the biggest problem that many people, particularly young people, face in their lives.

Yesterday, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities made an interesting and helpful statement on the issues of safety within all housing. His remarks mean that much more inspection will have to be done by local authorities. Will the Chancellor ensure that local authorities are sufficiently funded to increase the levels of public health inspection to provide a safe living environment for people in all housing situations?

[Jeremy Hunt]

These are very important issues. Obviously, the safety of properties in the private rented sector is extremely important. I am not a fan of rent controls, because I am worried that that would reduce the supply of housing to the private rented sector. I point out to the right hon. Gentleman, however, that we lifted the local housing allowance during the pandemic to help people and we are keeping it at that higher level.

Economic Update

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Hunt]

It will. It is not just my responsibility, but that of the whole Government. Good government is about fixing long-term issues as well as dealing with short-term crises, and that is definitely an important long-term issue.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

We live in a deeply divided country and a deeply divided society. There are more poor people than ever, more people accessing food banks than ever before and more children growing up in absolute poverty and, as a result, not achieving their best in life. Twice the Chancellor has refused to answer the question whether he will raise benefits in line with inflation. I ask for the third time: can he please assure people who rely on benefits for their very existence that they will be increased at least in line with inflation, to tackle the appalling poverty so many people face?

[Jeremy Hunt]

I respect the right hon. Gentleman for pressing me on that issue, because I understand how important it is. The reason I am not able to give him the answer he seeks is that I am not giving that answer on any area of spending or tax policy. The situation we face is extremely grave, and we must look at those issues in the round. We will come to the House with those decisions just as soon as they have been made and then independently audited by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

The Growth Plan

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Friday 23rd September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

That is absolutely right. The whole premise and basis of the investment zone conversation is mutual consent. There has to be mutual consent—they will not be imposed in any area. Absolutely, local residents and councils will have a huge say in how the investment zone develops.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

Will the Chancellor of the Exchequer explain where the morality is in giving a huge increase in income to the very richest in our society and threatening the benefits of the very poorest in our society, who are trying to get by on universal credit? What estimate does he have of the levels of inequality that will exist in this country in one year’s time and in five years’ time as a result of his statement today?

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

It is always our duty to help the most vulnerable in society. That is why we have had the energy intervention and the covid-19 pandemic intervention. It is also incumbent on the Government to seek to enable growth. That is what we are focused on, too, in this plan.

Covid-19: Government Support for Business

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[John Glen]

I thank my right hon. Friend and neighbour for his question. As I think he will appreciate from his time in government, some of those decisions come from those above me. It is critical that we are clear about what we are doing and why we are doing it, and the basis for the decisions that we are making.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

It is pretty obvious that during this crisis many workers have lost a lot of income, wages have gone down and living standards have gone down. For those who have to self-isolate or are sick and have to rely on statutory sick pay, SSP is wholly inadequate. Will he, in his consideration of business support, include an immediate substantial increase in SSP so that living standards can at least be maintained?

[John Glen]

The Government will always look at such matters. We have maintained the self-isolation £500 payment, means-tested through local authorities, but we will obviously keep all matters under review.

Spending Review 2020 and OBR Forecast

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Wednesday 25th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

My hon. Friend articulates well an example of local pinch points being a blight on communities, stopping people improving the quality of their life and driving growth. It seems like a very good example of the type of project that our new levelling-up fund would be interested in, and I look forward to discussing it with him further.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind) [V]]

Throughout the corona crisis, public sector workers in all areas have delivered brilliantly and helped to save lives and look after all our communities. Civil servants have lost 19% in wages over the past 10 years due to austerity, and there is a 12% gender pay gap that affects civil servants. So will the Chancellor recognise the importance of their work and their participation and give an increase of 10% to begin to make up the ground that they have lost over the past 10 years? Instead of saying to them that, as thanks for all their work, they will get a maximum of £5 a week for the lowest paid, will he return to proper national pay bargaining for all civil servants, so that those people who deliver for us are seen to be treated properly and fairly as we come out of the corona crisis?

[Rishi Sunak]

I am glad the right hon. Gentleman gives me an opportunity to thank my fantastic team of civil servants in the Treasury, who have been extraordinary in their hard work and creativity throughout this crisis, and have remained so over the past few weeks in concluding the spending review. I put on record my thanks to them.

Unsurprisingly, my numbers are slightly different to those of the right hon. Gentleman. According to the ONS, before this crisis even started in 2019, there existed at least a 7% pay premium between the public and private sectors after accounting for characteristics and pensions. That gap no doubt has been exacerbated and widened over the past six to 12 months as a result of widening pay inequality between public and private sector pay. That is why I believe it is fair to take the approach we have, but I share with him a desire to protect those on lower incomes, which is why those 2.1 million people who earn less than £24,000 will receive a pay rise of £250.

Black History Month

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Like others, I will to be brief, so that everyone who has applied to speak in the debate is called. It is brilliant that the debate is oversubscribed, because that shows how the debate has developed around the country, as well as the pressure on MPs.

We are in this debate at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has become big and strong in the United States and around the world. After George Floyd was killed, demonstrations took place, as we know, across the USA and, indeed, across the world. Many people—indigenous people in different parts of the world and minorities all over the world—saw themselves in the treatment of George Floyd at the hands of American police. We would do well to remember that this movement is not going to disappear—it empowers and unites people around the world.

We should approach the debate with a sense of reality. The House of Commons Library has produced an excellent briefing paper, as all its briefing papers are, entitled “Race and Ethnic Disparities”. I urge Members to read it carefully, because it shows the situation in health, education, housing, stop and search, poverty, the criminal justice system and so much else in our society. If someone is young and black, they are more likely to be poor, to be stopped and searched and to underachieve in school; less likely to go to college and even less likely to go to university; and more likely to have a lower life expectancy and lower income in future.

Those are devastating statistics—here, in 2020, all those years after we introduced the first race relations legislation under a Labour Government in the 1960s. We should not be complacent, and this debate—I hope that it will become an annual event—should provide a review of the progress, or not, that has been made in these matters. I urge Members to look carefully at that document.

I have heard the speeches from Government Members, who talk quite reasonably about the huge achievements of individuals who have broken out of the cycle of poverty. For Opposition Members, it is not individuals we want to break out; we want a collective response to develop a system that provides decent education, housing and health opportunities for all, recognising that we have to provide services that deal with the inequalities that people face.

As a councillor in Haringey in the 1970s, it was my honour to chair the community development committee. The successor chair of that committee was my great friend Bernie Grant. We saw in that the way in which we could put public resources into the most disadvantaged communities to empower and strengthen them and help their young people get the same chances as others all across the borough. Our approach on the Labour Benches is essentially a collective one. That is why we founded the national health service. That is why we developed council housing. That is why we developed so many other of our collective services in this country.

This debate takes place not that long after the scandal of the Windrush business hit the headlines and hit this House. It was a deliberately created hostile environment that led to the injustice of the Windrush generation—a generation that came to this country and gave so much in health, in education, in engineering and in so much other work, and helped to improve the living standards of all of us. Ministers should not be unaware of the hurt that is felt among that generation about the way they were treated by that hostile environment.

We should look at the way in which we treat migrants to our society. Why do we have so many people in immigration detention with no charge against them, held effectively in prison with an indeterminate sentence until the Home Office gets round to dealing with their case? We should not be so proud or so complacent about what we do. When we have a Home Secretary who talks about using the Navy to repel desperate asylum seekers and refugees who have risked all to cross the world’s busiest shipping lanes to try to get to a place of safety, can we replace that rhetoric with the principle of humanity and an open heart to people all around this world?

In my constituency, like many others, I do not have to walk very far from my house to find asylum seekers whose process is endlessly lost somewhere in the miasma of the Home Office filing system, with no recourse to public funds, sleeping on the streets, begging and looking for a meal from a church, a synagogue or a mosque in order just to get by. Let us have a sense of reality about what modern Britain is like, and the degree of racism that is still there, sadly, in our society—and the way in which the far right is organising to try to make the situation worse.

We should be full of admiration for those in the black community who have organised themselves, and those in the former colonies who organised to defeat the occupations by Britain, France, Italy, Spain and so many other European colonial powers, and bring about independence. I would like our children in our schools to understand, and see as a central part of the curriculum, the significance of the Pan-African Congress held in 1945 at Chorlton-cum-Hardy town hall in Manchester. It was largely ignored at the time, but the future leaders of many African countries were there at that conference. Indeed, less than 12 years later, Ghana achieved its independence as the first African colony to do so. The generation that came and organised the black community in Britain in the 1950s and ’60s included John La Rose and other great poets from the Caribbean who founded New Beacon Books in my area of London. They did so much to empower and used the work of Claudia Jones and many others in order to give cultural strength and cultural value, through carnival and so much else, to what the Caribbean community were achieving here.

The black self-organisation that was opposed, and then eventually accepted, in the Labour party meant that we had black sections and that my right hon. Friend—my great friend—the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) was elected to Parliament in 1987, along with Keith Vaz, Paul Boateng and of course Bernie Grant, so sadly no longer with us. Those people did so much. Others paved the way by going into Parliament, including Dadabhai Naoroji in Finsbury at the turn of the century and, of course, the great Saklatvala in Battersea later on.

We should look at the history that our children learn, and not just in one month of the year. I beg to differ with some of the Members who have spoken already: I do want to see the decolonisation of our history. I want our children to understand how black communities came together—how people stood up against the abuse that colonialism was and is against their lives and brought about independence.

[Christine Jardine]

On that very point, we have talked before about how in so many communities in this country there are statues, streets and so on that are named after slave owners and colonialists. People like me who come from Glasgow are immensely proud that Nelson Mandela Place is named after Nelson Mandela, but we are completely unaware of the history of the names of the other streets around it. That is the sort of thing we need to attack when we look at education and black history.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Indeed, I love Nelson Mandela Place in Glasgow—it is fantastic. If I may, I would like to convey through the hon. Member my congratulations to the University of Glasgow for recognising that it should repay the compensation money that it was given at the end of the slave trade. The issue of colonial brutality should be taught to our children, as should the way in which the slave trade enriched the already rich in Britain and how some of our biggest companies relied on the slave trade to provide profits from banking and sugar.

[Kemi Badenoch]

Does the right hon. Gentleman not feel that turning the curriculum into a list of all the things that Britain has done wrong to people of a certain race would distort the history of our nation and not give a true picture of the activities not only of this country but of people who share my skin colour, which were not always as wholesome as people on his side want to make out?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

It is not about distorting history; it is about the reality of history that should be taught. That means understanding what the slave trade was about, what the brutality of colonialism is and the way in which people were treated.

There are many in this House who say that William Wilberforce was wonderful in his presentation of the abolition legislation in this very Chamber—excellent—and that Thomas Clarkson risked all to tour the whole country explaining to people just how evil the slave trade was, showing them the accoutrements of torture that he took with him throughout the country, but the reality is that the slave trade was abolished and slavery was abolished by the selfless bravery of slaves who rejected it in the plantations in the Caribbean, the Americas and elsewhere. I want children in our schools to understand what those people—such as Paul Bogle, who led the Morant Bay uprising and, of course, Sam Sharpe, who led the rebellion in western Jamaica in 1832, as brilliantly chronicled by my late, great friend Richard Hart in his book “Slaves Who Abolished Slavery”—went through.

When Sam Sharpe was taken to the gallows, before he was executed he said that he accepted the laws under which he was going to be executed and went on to say:

“I depend for salvation upon the Redeemer, who shed his blood upon Calvary for sinners.”

He was then executed because of his part in leading the rebellion against the slave owners and the sugar plantations of western Jamaica. But at that point the sugar industry was in dire straits: people were losing money in London because the sugar was not coming because of the uprising. That speeded up the process of abolition. To its eternal shame, this House then voted to pay what would now be billions in compensation to slave owners, but not to the slaves themselves.

There are many other books that I want our children to read. My great friend Remi Kapo wrote the “Reap the Forgotten Harvest” trilogy of novels about the slave trade. These are the books that I want our children to learn.

In conclusion, history is divisive at one level. It is endlessly controversial and, to me, endlessly fascinating. History educates, history empowers, but history also forms attitudes and opinions, so our children should be brought up understanding that maths and science comes, yes, from Europe, but also from Africa and from the civilisations of what is now called Latin America, and that it comes from China and it comes from so many parts of the world. Our standard of living comes from those people who used their brains to invent so much all over the world, but too often it is taught in the process of some kind of European supremacy over the rest of the world. It does not have to be taught that way; it should be taught in the way of the thirst for knowledge that empowers us all.

We should also teach and recognise that the great writers and poets who have come from the Caribbean and south Asia have enriched our lives massively. I love the work of Andrea Levy. She lived in my constituency before she died. We unveiled a plaque in her memory and her family all came to a little reception we held afterwards, where I met one of her nieces who did not realise quite how famous she was. She was in school and the teacher read out a part of one of Andrea Levy’s books to the class and said, “What do you think of that?” There were a load of blank faces, and the teacher said, “That was written by Andrea Levy.” This girl’s hand went up and she said, “Yeah, that was my auntie.” She did not realise she had been the great writer at that time. We need to popularise the literature by so many writers who have come to this country. My hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (John Cryer) mentioned CLR James, and I would mention also Derek Walcott and the great Asian poets such as Tagore and so many others.

Let us give our children the space and the opportunity to learn the history of this country, and to learn the popular history of this country—of ordinary people’s demands to get fair legislation such as trade union rights, factory Acts and so on—but also to understand what colonialism did and what colonialism did to its victims. That way they will have a better understanding of why the world is as it is at the present time.

That, to me, is what Black History Month should be about, but I would like us not to have Black History Month but to have black history as a central part of our history curriculum all year round for all our children.

[Several hon. Members rose—]