Political Parties, Elections and Referendums
Debate between John McDonnell and Simon Hoare(9 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Simon Hoare
If that were true, it would be a serious matter, but I must say to the hon. Gentleman—for whom I have huge respect, and who chairs the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee with much distinction—that I do not see it that way, and neither do the Government. However, he takes me from my explanation of what the statement is not, to explaining why we are approving it. That is the nub of this issue. We see—I see—the role of this Government and of any party that has the honour to be in government in the United Kingdom as that of a pro tem custodian of our democracy. That is why we have election law, and why I am the elections Minister. Democracy is, as we discussed last week in the Holocaust Memorial Day debate, a fragile flower under huge pressure.
We believe that the statement is timely, not least because of the raft of changes that have flown through and been delivered by statutory instrument from the recent Elections Act 2022. We are also hugely cognisant of the threats to the robustness and resilience of our democracy presented by overseas interference, fake news, deepfakes, and artificial intelligence. The solemn role of pro tem custodian, and holding the flame of democracy while we serve in government, are important.
Simon Hoare
It is important to underpin, rather than undermine, the work of the commission by standing shoulder to shoulder with it in the important work that has been set before it, which I will come to when I have taken the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention.
John McDonnell
I am a member of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, and we warned in our report about the threat to the independence of the commission from the Government’s legislation regarding the strategy statement. I can understand where the Minister is coming from when he says that we are not using the expression “must” because that would be a direction, but the Government are repeatedly using the expression “should”. The question in my mind is: if the commission ignores this “should”, what happens? There is an implied threat around the “should”.
Simon Hoare
The right hon. Gentleman helpfully takes me to the next part of my remarks about “should”, “would” and “must”. Let us just canter through, with some degree of attention and seriousness, the priorities set out in the statement. In all seriousness—I hope the House knows me well enough to know that when I use that phrase it is not just parroting a line; I am serious in what I am about to say, because it is important—I really would question whether any hon. or right hon. Member of this House, of any party, would take exception to anything in the statement.
Simon Hoare
If the right hon. Gentleman will be a little patient, he will have his question answered. He asks his question in his way and, in the words of Frank Sinatra, I shall answer it in mine.
The first paragraph rehearses this key point:
“The Electoral Commission is the independent regulatory body responsible for giving guidance and support to Electoral Registration Officers and Returning Officers in undertaking electoral registration and conducting elections and recall petitions effectively and in accordance with the law.”
Anybody disagree with that? No. Paragraph 2 states:
“The Chair of the Commission has the responsibility in law for acting as the Chief Counting Officer at national referendums in the UK…and the staff of the Commission support the Chair in that role, when it is required, to work through local electoral authorities to deliver such events.”
The delivery of smooth and seamless referenda is not, I would suggest, a revolutionary power grab by His Majesty’s Government.
Paragraph 3 states:
“The government believes the Electoral Commission has an important role to play in maintaining the integrity of our elections and public confidence in that integrity.”
I do not think that point will get the Division bells ringing. In answer to the question from the Chair of the Select Committee, paragraph 3 continues:
“The duty to have regard does not require the Commission to give lesser priority to, or to ignore, any of its other statutory duties. The Electoral Commissioners and the Commission’s executive leadership will remain responsible for determining the Commission’s strategy, priorities, how it should discharge its duties (including day-to-day operations) and the allocation of its resources, as agreed by the relevant parliaments. It will be for the Commission to determine how to factor the Statement into its decision-making processes and corporate documents such as the Five-Year Plan.”
Paragraph 4 states:
“One of the government’s policy priorities is ensuring our democracy is secure, fair, modern and transparent.”
One could easily transpose the word “government” for “Parliament” there. Who will argue with ensuring that our democracy is secure? Who will argue that our democracy should not be fair, modern, or transparent? Paragraph 4 goes on to say that it is a priority to ensure
“that those who are entitled to vote should always be able to exercise that right freely, securely and in an informed way;…that fraud, intimidation and interference have no place in our democracy;…that we are the stewards of our shared democratic heritage which we keep up to date for our age.”
That is my custodian point again.
Paragraph 5 states:
“One of the leading government objectives is tackling electoral fraud”.
Anyone in this House in favour of electoral fraud? I did not think so—and rightly so. Paragraph 5 goes on to state that the commission should
“support continued effective delivery of voter identification by raising public awareness about the requirement to show an approved form of photographic identification before taking part in UK parliamentary elections, local elections in England and elections in Northern Ireland”.
It has done that in Northern Ireland for the last 20 years or so. This issue was raised in close questioning from the Lords Constitution Committee just the other month. The important role of the Government, the commission and other agencies in raising the profile and public awareness of voter identification was a matter that we discussed at some length.
Simon Hoare
The hon. Gentleman was obviously so busy trying to find his rebuttal point that he did not listen to my answer to the first question. I set out clearly that the duty to “have regard” does not require the commission to give lesser priority to, or ignore, any of its other statutory duties. The electoral commissioners and the commission’s executive leadership will remain responsible for determining the commission’s strategy and priorities, and how it should discharge its duties. The statement in no way undermines, countermands or double-guesses any work of the commission.
The paper goes on to talk about tackling electoral fraud, which I know we would all wish to do. Crucially, it also talks about the role of the commission in working with returning officers and others to ensure the maximum opportunity for those with disabilities to take part in the ballot on the day and in polling stations. Nobody in this place, or the other place, would think that was not a noble aim.
Simon Hoare
And at the very mention of noble aims, I give way to the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington.
John McDonnell
I come back to the fact that this statement in effect sets priorities for the commission, and that has not only operational consequences but budgetary consequences. What are the consequences for the commission if, like me, it thinks the Government’s statement is daft and completely ignores it?
Simon Hoare
I just do not see that happening, because the commission understands the importance of the statement. It is not a directional document; it is an augmenting document. It says—because there are difficult things facing our democracy, as the right hon. Gentleman knows—that the Government, not a party Government but Government as an entity, are in lockstep with the commission, in full support of the work that it does to preserve, protect and enhance our democracy. We felt that it was timely for the Secretary of State to provide a statement to augment and clarify matters that flow from the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 Act and subsequent statutory instruments.
The hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) is right to say that the commission is, in any case, doing the things set out in the statement, in whole or in part. It will be entirely up to the commission to set its priorities from the list, and to give greater or lesser attention to matters as needed. For example, it could say, “Well, that has already been done, and this is all in hand, but we really need to augment this matter here.” The voter authority certificate is a prime example. There are things that we would all expect the commission to spend a certain amount of time on, in order to raise awareness of them.
Economy and Jobs
Debate between John McDonnell and Simon Hoare(4 years, 10 months ago)
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John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
I beg to move an amendment, at the end of the Question to add:
‘but respectfully regrets that the Gracious Speech fails to put an end to a decade of austerity, to invest in the UK’s underfunded public services, or to scrap universal credit; notes the damaging impact that the four-year freeze in working-age benefits has had on families on low income; and calls on the Government to bring forward a plan to reverse the damaging impact austerity has had on communities in the UK, tackle the climate and environmental emergency, and reshape the economy to work for everyone by clamping down on tax avoidance, tackling insecurity in work by extending full employment rights to all workers, ending in-work poverty, and introducing a real living wage.’.
I appreciate that many new Members will want to speak today, so I will seek to be as brief as possible. [Interruption.] I thought that would be appreciated on both sides. We aim to please.
You, Mr Speaker, have been in the House as long as I have, so you will know that the classic approach to a good Queen’s Speech and its subsequent debate combines an assessment of the position of the country—a state of the nation address—with at least some attempt to address the issues facing our people. On both counts, the latest Queen’s Speech and this process is by any stretch of the imagination crushingly disappointing—I believe that the overriding view that will come to be associated with this Government may well be one of disappointment. They appear to have no appreciation of the lives so many of our fellow citizens live or of the often heartrending problems they face.
The Government’s programme in the Queen’s Speech fails to reverse the decade of austerity. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said, austerity is baked into the Government’s economic policies, which fail to tackle insecure work, to end in-work poverty and to introduce a real living wage. Worst of all, the Queen’s Speech fails to address the brutal hardship caused by universal credit, introduced by this Government. We face twin emergencies: first, a climate emergency, an existential threat to our planet that, as we have seen only too well in Australia and Indonesia, is rapidly spiralling beyond control; and, secondly, in this country, a social emergency resulting from a decade of harsh austerity and decline. Last year, the House resolved that we faced a climate emergency. We should also resolve that we face a social emergency.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
If what the right hon. Gentleman says is true—and I very much doubt it—and if his Eeyore approach to what the country thinks is correct, to what does he ascribe the best result for the Conservative party since 1987 just last month?
John McDonnell
I suppose we will have a longer debate at some stage about the outcome of the last general election. I will be straight with the hon. Gentleman: I think the overriding issue was Brexit and that the overriding message was the one the Conservative party put out of “Get Brexit Done”. I ascribe the victory of the Conservative party to that. I cannot be straighter with him than that.
In the last three months in this Chamber, we have had debates on the spending review and the last Queen’s Speech in which hon. Members have highlighted report after report from independent agencies exposing the impact of a decade of austerity. I want to seize on one group as an example—a group dear to all our hearts. If we are to lay any claim to being a compassionate or even a civilised society, surely the most effective test is how we care for our children, and on that count the Government fail appallingly. Surely no Government could ignore organisations such as the Children’s Society and the Child Poverty Action Group, which have reported that more than 4 million of our children are still living in poverty. That means that one child in three is living in poverty in our country in the 21st century. Some 125,000 of those children are homeless and living in temporary accommodation.
The effects on our children of living in poverty are well documented by the Children’s Society. Those children are more likely to be in poor health, to experience mental health problems, and to have a low sense of wellbeing. They underachieve at school, and experience stigma and bullying. The shocking statistic, though, is that 70% of children living in poverty are in households in which someone is in work. The Children’s Society describes that experience as being hit by a perfect storm of low wages, insecure jobs and benefit cuts. The result is remarkable: this Government have achieved the historic distinction of being the first modern Government to break the link between securing work and being lifted out of poverty.
The Chancellor boasted recently that wage rises were at record levels compared with those of the last 10 years. That is a bizarre boast. Wage rises are at a 10-year record high because his Government have kept wage growth so low for the last decade. Average real wages are still lower than they were before the financial crisis. [Interruption.] The Chancellor, from a sedentary position, has again used the slogan “Labour’s crisis”. Let me try to find a quotation for him. George Osborne said:
“did Gordon Brown cause the sub-prime crisis in America? No.”
He went on to say that “broadly speaking”, the Labour Government
“did what was necessary in a very difficult situation.”
The Chancellor, again from a sedentary position, refers to the deficit. Let me quote again. In 2007, George Osborne said:
“Today, I can confirm for the first time that a Conservative Government will adopt these spending totals.”
He was referring to the spending totals of a Labour Government, by implication. Let me caution the Chancellor, because we might want to examine his role at Deutsche Bank, where he was selling collateralised debt obligations, described by others as the weapon of mass destruction that caused the crisis.
As I was saying, average real wages are still lower than they were before the financial crisis. The Resolution Foundation has described the last decade as the worst for wage growth since Napoleonic times. The recent increase in the minimum wage. announced with such a fanfare by the Government, reneges on their minimal commitment that it would be £9 an hour by this year. It certainly is not. The UK is the only major developed country in which wages fell at the same time as the economy grew after the financial crisis.
The Government seem to believe that the answer to low pay is raising national insurance and tax thresholds. When tax thresholds are raised, the highest gainers are largely the highest earners, and raising them and national insurance contributions is the least effective way of tackling poverty. According to the IFS, only 3% of the gains from raising the national insurance threshold would go to the poorest 20% in our society. A £3 billion cut in the national insurance contributions of employees and self-employed people—which, at one stage, was promised by the Prime Minister—would raise the incomes of that group by 0.1%, which pales into insignificance in comparison with the losses endured from benefit and tax credit cuts since 2010. It is also worth bearing it in mind that, while the heaviest burden of austerity has been forced on the poorest in our society, this Government have given away £70 billion of tax cuts to the corporations and the rich.
We have also heard Ministers refer to the so-called jobs miracle. Of course we all welcome increased employment, but when we look behind the global figures we find nearly 4 million people in insecure work with no guaranteed hours and 900,000 people on zero-hours contracts. Britain has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world. A FTSE 100 chief executive will be paid more in three days than the average worker’s annual wage. Surely no Member of this House can think that that is right, can they? The gender pay gap is 17.3% and there is now an inter-generational pay gap of over 20%. There is an 8% pay gap for black workers, and if you are disabled the pay gap is 15%. There is nothing in the Queen’s Speech that will address any of this. There is nothing that will address the grotesque levels of inequality in our society and at work, certainly on the scale that is needed.