Defending Public Services

John Redwood Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

The hon. Lady shakes her head, but let us consider what the King’s Fund said in the run-up to the election:

“Labour’s funding commitment falls short of the £8 billion a year called for in the NHS five year forward view.”

It was there in black and white: Labour was committing to a £2.5 billion increase in the NHS budget, not the £8 billion that this Government committed to. The hon. Lady cannot have it both ways. If this figure was £5.5 billion, the efficiency savings needed would be not £22 billion, but £27.5 billion, which is a 25% increase. That would be the equivalent of laying off 56,000 doctors, losing 129,000 nurses or closing down about 15 entire hospitals.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

I welcome the Secretary of State’s policy that foreign visitors should be asked to pay for non-urgent treatment that they get when they are here and that European visitors should have to recoup this through their national systems. Why do we need extra legislation, and how much money does he think we can get from that?

[Mr Hunt]

We need extra legislation to expedite the process. I point out to my right hon. Friend that that is another policy which has been opposed by the Labour party. All the time it says we should be doing more to get a grip on NHS finances and yet it opposes every policy we put forward in order to do precisely that. The answer to his question is that the issue with the NHS is primarily that we are not very good at collecting the money to which we are entitled from other European countries, because we are not very good at measuring when European citizens are using the NHS. This legislation will help us to put those measurement systems in place so that we can get back what we hope will be about half a billion pounds a year by the end of this Parliament.

We will no doubt hear later this afternoon the charge that the Government have lost control of NHS finances, but we strongly reject that charge. The House may want to ask about the credibility of that accusation from a party that is at the same time proposing a funding cut for the NHS and criticising the difficult decisions we need to take to sort out NHS finances.

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[Heidi Alexander]

I am not going to be drawn into giving figures here at the Dispatch Box today. Yesterday the Life Sciences Minister was tweeting that we need a big public debate about funding of the NHS.

Three days ago, the scale of this crisis was laid bare. NHS Improvement, the body responsible for overseeing hospitals, published figures showing that NHS trusts ended 2015-16 with a record £2.45 billion deficit—I repeat, £2.45 billion. To give hon. Members some context, that is treble the deficit from last year. What is the key cause? It is the spiralling agency spend because of staff shortages. When this Government talk about more money going in, let us remember that, before that money gets to the frontline, the bulk of it will be spent on paying off the bills from last year.

[John Redwood]

Will the hon. Lady give us an idea of how much extra money and how many more personnel she thinks we need to deal with current levels of migration?

[Heidi Alexander]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I actually think that the health service benefits more from migrants than the amount migrants cost it.

I want to tell all Conservative Members that Labour Members are not going to take any lessons about NHS spending from the party that has created the biggest black hole in NHS finances in history. It has got so bad that the Health Secretary cannot even guarantee his Department will not blow its budget. It is chaos: Ministers blame hospital bosses, hospital bosses blame Ministers and all the while patients are paying the price.

Faced with this crisis, we might have thought that the NHS would get more than a passing reference in the Queen’s Speech, but that was not the case. What is the Government’s answer when it comes to the NHS? Fear not: they will introduce a Bill to crack down on health tourism. With all the problems the NHS is facing, this Government want to focus Parliament’s time on debating a Bill that risks turning NHS staff into border guards.

Let me be clear: if such measures are about getting the taxpayer a better deal and ensuring fairness in the system, we will not oppose them. However, I must ask, given everything that is happening in the NHS right now, whether Ministers’ No. 1 priority is really to introduce legislation to charge migrants and their children for going to A&E. If so, my fear is that we will see the kind of dog-whistle politics that was so rejected by the people of London earlier this month, and which I hope will be rejected again on 23 June. The truth is that the cash crisis in the NHS is not the fault of migrants; it is the fault of Ministers.

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[Ian Blackford]

I am saddened at the depths to which the hon. Gentleman stoops. I am delighted to have friends and colleagues representing my party here and in government in Edinburgh, and they will continue to have our full support.

The Queen’s Speech demonstrates that the Tories are a threat to high-quality, well-funded public services. Having listened to the Leader of the Opposition last week on the Queen’s Speech, we are none the wiser as to what the Labour party is offering. We could have asked him, of course, had he been taking interventions, rather than forcing us to sit and listen to a monologue that lost the attention of his own party, never mind that of the House.

Some measures are to be welcomed, such as the likely delivery of the universal service obligation on broadband, as mentioned by the right hon. Member for Basingstoke, but the Queen’s Speech delivers nothing on pension reform for the WASPI women, on tax simplification or on social security, and no major action on the economy to boost exports and productivity.

The Conservatives have orchestrated some truly devastating cuts that have destroyed the safety net that social security should provide. We see through their rhetoric on life chances. The scrapping of legal commitments to tackle child poverty, the four-year freeze on working-age benefits, including child tax credit, working tax credit and jobseeker’s allowance, will see families losing up to 12% of the real value of their benefits and tax credits by 2020. We have seen the butchering of the very aspect of universal credit that might have created work incentives and the hammering of low-paid workers, to name just a few of the regressive cuts that will decrease the life chances of children across these islands.

[John Redwood]

Why do the SNP Government not put up taxes in Scotland if they feel that they need to spend more money?

[Ian Blackford]

One of the things we want to do in Scotland is to deliver economic prosperity and a fairer society. We want to invest in our economy in order to grow the economy. Let me remind the right hon. Gentleman that we fought the general election in Scotland on a progressive manifesto that would have seen us investing over the lifetime of this Parliament, throughout the UK, £140 billion by increasing Government spending by 0.5%—investing in innovation and in our productive potential with a view to delivering confidence and growth in the economy. This was a sensible programme that would still have seen both the debt and the deficit reduced. It was a sensible way of dealing with the problems we face both in Scotland and in the rest of the UK.

It does not matter how many times the Government use the soundbite of “life chances” because in reality the so-called assault on poverty is a crusade to refine what poverty is and a shift towards blaming individuals rather than the Government, so that their austerity agenda can continue to attack the most disadvantaged in our society.

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[Ian Blackford]

One of the things we have done since being in government in Edinburgh since 2007 is to protect local government. What we face is the consequence of the cuts that have come from Westminster. I am delighted that an SNP Government have, through the council tax freeze, saved individuals in a typical band D house £1,500—protecting the individuals, while at the same time protecting the budgets of councils. That is what the SNP Government have done in Edinburgh.

In Scotland, the SNP Government have protected public services, despite the cuts to the Scottish budget. With cuts to Scottish public services handed down from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, lacking in compassion and empathy, the poorest and the weakest in our society are paying the price for Tory austerity.

The SNP has put forward a credible, progressive alternative to the Queen’s Speech, proving once again that it is the only real opposition to the Government in the House of Commons. [Interruption.] In our dreams? Well, let us see what the Labour party is offering. We got nothing from the Leader of the Opposition last week, and we certainly got nothing from the Labour Front Bench. It is little wonder that Labour has fallen in the polls, and fallen to become the third party in Scotland. That is the reality: no hope, no vision, and no agenda from today’s Labour party.

Although the debate could be characterised as focusing specifically on defending public services, to my mind, and those of my colleagues, it should be seen in a much wider context. The SNP has published its own Queen’s Speech, which offers hope to the people of Scotland. It says that we should aspire to do better, and that we need to create the circumstances that will allow us to deliver sustainable economic growth, thus enhancing life chances for all, while at the same time recognising the necessity of investing in and enhancing our vital public services.

Our manifesto, like our Queen’s Speech, recognised the necessity of driving down debt and the deficit, but we would not do that on the backs of the poor and at the cost of our public services. We recognise not only that austerity is a political choice, but that its implementation is, in itself, holding back not just growth in the economy, but the potential of so many people throughout the United Kingdom. Cuts in public services withdraw spending from the economy, and that undermines our moral responsibility to deliver public services that support people and give them opportunities to return to work, as well as the vital support network that allows communities to function effectively.

The attacks on services for the disabled, women and young people are a result of the Government’s programme, which holds people back from making a full contribution to society. What we in the SNP have, by contrast, is a strategy that will enhance life chances for people in Scotland and throughout the United Kingdom. It is a progressive agenda, which recognises the responsibility of Governments to show leadership in creating the architecture that will deliver sustainable economic growth. That means investing for growth, delivering stronger public services, driving up tax receipts, and cutting the deficit. Our strategy is an appropriate response to the circumstances in which we find ourselves, but it also acknowledges the circumstances in which many Governments in the western world find themselves.

We in the SNP are ambitious for Scotland. That can, perhaps, best be evidenced by the programme of Nicola Sturgeon’s Government. That programme will tackle the attainment gap, while also focusing clearly on using what powers we have to influence innovation, recognising that there is a twin track: tackling attainment must go hand in hand with improving skills, enhancing capability, and creating competitive opportunities in the global marketplace.

We have focused specifically on export capabilities in key sectors. The manufacture of food and drink continues to be our top export sector, accounting for £4.8 billion in revenues. The value of our food and beverage exports, excluding whisky, rose from £755 million in 2013 to £815 million in 2014, an increase of 8%. In 2014, Scotch whisky exports reached £3.95 billion, accounting for 21% of the food and drink exports of the whole United Kingdom. Scotland has shown the way in increasing its export capability, and driving investment and jobs into our economy. That plays to our key strengths, and our reputation as a provider of high-quality food and drink. It is also based on segments of the market that offer long-term growth opportunities.

We need to tackle the relative decline of manufacturing in our overall economy that hampers our ability to meet the challenge of delivering prosperity. Growth sectors in the economy, such as biotechnology, can deliver opportunities for jobs and growth. We need a strategy which focuses on manufacturing growth that outstrips the service sector in terms of value added to our economy. That is not to downplay the desire to achieve growth in services, but to recognise that we have an imbalance in our economy that hampers our ability to maximise opportunities for all our people.

We cannot decouple a debate about defending public services from the wider economic agenda, because they are so completely intertwined. We need a well educated, healthy population who can rely not only on our education and health services but on our ability to deliver effective childcare, for example. When Conservative Members talk about small government, they reject the vital role of the state in providing much of the support that allows all of us to achieve our potential.

This Queen’s Speech is a missed opportunity to deliver a programme that could offer so much more to those who aspire to a healthier, wealthier and fairer society. We need to tackle inequality, to improve living standards for ordinary workers, to create a fairer society and to strike an effective balance between prosperity and investment in the public services that underpin a successful society. Today, we are moving away from that.

There is an increasing disparity between executive pay and rates of pay in the mainstream, leading to increased calls for action by shareholders and ultimately to stronger action if moderation cannot be achieved. With wage growth outpacing productivity growth, there are legitimate concerns about the sustainability of real wage growth and, as a consequence, taxation receipts and the ability of the Government to meet their targets, with all that that would entail for the public finances and, no doubt, for investment in our public services.

In short, to secure our public services, we need to tackle the shortcomings of the Government’s economic strategy. Of course we would invest for growth and create opportunities for investment by the private and public sectors, resulting in greater confidence and growth outcomes. Confidence and growth, on the back of modest investment in our public sector, would see the debt and deficit come down, by contrast with policies driven by this Government’s ideological desire to achieve a budget surplus at any cost. The logic behind that desire to achieve a budget surplus almost irrespective of economic circumstances beggars belief. If the Chancellor misses his growth forecasts, as has been the case on numerous occasions, his office can make the strategy work only through tax rises or, more predictably, cuts to public spending.

The trouble with this strategy is that we are now six years into it and it is not working. The squeeze on public spending is hurting and damaging services. Those of us who are old enough to remember the Thatcher Government elected in 1979 will recall the line from the Government that “if it’s not hurting, it’s not working”. Patently, it is hurting and it is not working—[Interruption.] It might have been John Major, but it is the same old Tories. The strategy is harming the life chances of people in Scotland and the rest of the UK.

Let me return to the Queen’s Speech and the future of the NHS. We strongly disagree with the UK Government’s moves to charge visitors to this country to use the NHS. NHS Scotland will not charge overseas visitors if they need to visit A&E or a casualty department if it involves a sexually transmitted disease or HIV or if they are sectioned under the Mental Health Act. That is the right thing for anyone to do in a civilised society.

[John Redwood]

Does the hon. Gentleman not understand that the Government are not proposing to charge for emergency treatment in A&E? Surely it is right, however, that if someone comes here and has elective surgery, they should pay the bill and get the money back from their own country.

[Ian Blackford]

In many cases, we are talking about the Government wanting to charge people who have come here to work and who are already paying their taxes. What a disgraceful way for any Government to behave! That measure is the latest indication that the Tories represent a real and present danger to the NHS.

The Conservatives have mismanaged the junior doctors’ contracts in England and shamefully filibustered the recent debate on a Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) that would have restated the principle of the NHS being public and free. In the Scottish election, the Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, stood on a platform of reintroducing prescription charges. Such a measure would be a regressive tax on the ill. It is estimated that the SNP’s abolition of prescription charges has benefited around 600,000 adults living in families with an annual income of less than £16,000.

In England, the Health Secretary—who is no longer in his place—seems to favour confrontation with the health service, but we in Scotland favour a more consensual approach that delivers results. The SNP Scottish Government have delivered record funding for Scotland’s NHS despite Westminster cutting the Scottish budget. They will ensure that the NHS revenue budget rises by £500 million more than inflation by the end of this Parliament, meaning that it will have increased by some £2 billion in total. Health spending in Scotland is already at a record level of £12.4 billion. Under the SNP, the number of employees in the Scottish NHS is at a record high—up by nearly 9% since 2006.

Patient satisfaction with the NHS in Scotland is high, with 86% of people being fairly or very satisfied with local health services, which is up five percentage points under the SNP. That is the result of a popular SNP Government working together with our health professionals to deliver results. Unlike the UK Government, the SNP values and respects the work of all our medical professionals. Were we to move towards a new contract for junior doctors in Scotland, it would only ever be done on the basis of an agreed negotiated settlement. Thank goodness that we are still wedded to the principles of Beveridge in Scotland and will protect the ethos of the health service as a public asset for the common good.

Turning to further and higher education, one of our driving principles is that access should be based on ability, not ability to pay. Tuition fees of £9,000 and potentially more remain a heavy burden on the working families and students of England, and the UK Government must rule out the Higher Education and Research Bill raising the cap. The SNP has guaranteed free university education for all in Scotland, but Ruth Davidson and the Tories would have tuition fees north of the border if they ever got near Bute House.

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[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

The Queen’s Speech contains an important measure, the Bill of Rights, but we are told that we need to wait and get it correct. I have no problem with that. If there is to be a Bill of Rights, it needs to reflect the liberties and freedoms that have been hard won over many centuries by people and Parliaments in our country.

I welcome the principle behind the Bill of Rights—the simple principle that our ancient and modern liberties should rest on the decisions of this Parliament, to be upheld by MPs, as custodians of those liberties, or to be amended and improved as the British people see fit and as they express their will through general elections. It is extremely difficult to root our liberties and freedoms in inflexible international treaties, or to rely on the judgments of far-away foreign judges, who may not understand the mood, the temper, the history or the culture of our country, rooted in liberty and rooted in a titanic struggle to establish parliamentary control.

There is one obvious omission in the Queen’s Speech, for the reason that we do not yet know the will of the British people on the fundamental issue that overhangs the debates that we will have today and over the next few weeks. Do the British people wish to take back control? Do they wish this Parliament to find within itself the wit, the wisdom and the skill to wrestle back control of our laws, our taxes and our decision-making powers so that we can be freer, more prosperous, more independent and more democratic; or do they not wish us to do that? I earnestly hope that they will want to be on the side of freedom and liberty.

At the moment, we are but a puppet Parliament—a Parliament that struts upon the stage and pretends to be in charge and in control, but is not in charge or in control. Let us take the mighty issue of paying for our public services, which is at the heart of this debate. I am on the side of prosperity, not austerity. I think that we do need to spend more on health and education, and I welcome the extra money that the Government have managed to find. But how much easier it would be if the £7 billion of revenue that we collected from big businesses in the last Parliament but had to give back to those companies, because the European Court of Justice said that we were not allowed to raise it, were available for our public services. [Interruption.] How much easier and better it would be to banish austerity—and the chuntering of some Opposition Members, who rightly do not like austerity—if we had back the £10 billion of net contributions that we make to the EU every year, which we cannot spend on our own priorities because it is spent elsewhere.

I want us to take back control of our money so that we can banish austerity. I want us to take back control of that money so that we have it for our priorities of health and education. While we are taking back control, as a free people, we should empower people in an elected Assembly to decide how to raise revenue and which taxes to impose. I want us to restore that power on behalf of the British people. I would like us to abolish the tampon tax. I would like us to say to the European Court of Justice, “We do not accept your verdict that we have to put up taxes on green products to 20% from 5%.” However, that is its judgment, and that is what this Parliament will have to do after the referendum should we decide to stay in and not to leave.

The Government say that they have made progress in their renegotiation, that there will be some relaxation of the requirements, and that we will get a little bit more power back over the imposition of VAT. However, I have now read the document issued by the European Union after those negotiations and I am afraid to tell the House that that document makes absolutely no mention whatsoever of any deal or settlement between the United Kingdom Government and the European Union. It makes no mention of our need to abolish the tampon tax, and it makes no mention of our wish to keep our green taxes down at the 5% level because we want to encourage people to have more draught excluders and insulation so that they can keep warm in the winter at lower cost. It is not an unreasonable request, so why is there nothing in the European Union document on that reform that makes it clear that we could do that? There are only two things in that document: one is more centralisation of our future VAT system so that it can collect more and ensure that we are collecting all that it wishes; and the other is some general statement that perhaps at some point in the future, if the European Parliament and all the member states so agree, there could conceivably be some greater flexibility, but it is extremely unlikely.

The sadness of the document is that it shows that there is no political agreement whatsoever in the European Union to give back to us the right to impose the taxes that people should pay and that they might accept. There is absolutely no right for this Parliament to do what it clearly wishes to do by overwhelming majority on the issue of the tampon tax and the green tax.

We see before us the parting of the ways with those who believe that it is fine to belong to a subsidiary Parliament that pretends to be able to make choices on the part of the British people, but that has to give away a lot of its money to the European Union, has to accept a series of judgments on things such as trade union law, which it does not like, and has to accept that we are no longer free to make the laws that we need to make to reflect the will of the British people.

Is there nowhere in this Parliament on the Front Benches where we can find the Hampdens, the Miltons and the Cromwells not guilty of our country’s blood, who will rise up and say, “Surely now is the time to take back control, to make sure that we can choose our own laws, to make sure that we can impose our own taxes, to make sure that we can redress the wrongs before we ask people to pay those taxes, to go back to the fundamentals of United Kingdom democracy fought for over many centuries, and to go back to the foundations of democracy as so brilliantly chronicled in the founding documentation of the United States of America”? We can only say that we have a proper Parliament and not a puppet Parliament if we do those things. More Members need to urge their constituents that now is the time and now is the moment to seize control and to banish the puppet Parliament.

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[John Redwood]

Is the TTIP draft treaty not just another example of what I was trying to say, which is that more and more things are no longer under the control of British law makers and electors, but under the control of unelected people in Brussels, and that such things are not amendable once they have been agreed?

[Mr Lilley]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. If we let TTIP through, it will be a further transfer of law-making power away from this country to international bureaucrats and multinational companies.

There is a referendum dimension to the TTIP treaty issue. First, the only absolutely certain way of preventing it is of course not to be part of it—by leaving the EU on 23 June. We might be able to exempt ourselves or to prevent the treaty from going ahead if we remain in, but that is far from certain. Secondly, as my right hon. Friend has said, there is a certain similarity between such courts of a supranational nature—run by bureaucrats to enforce laws negotiated by bureaucrats, which have never been endorsed by this House and are not open to rejection by it—and it is natural that those courts should sympathise with each other and carry the treaty forward. If we were outside, we could negotiate our own deal with the United States, which I hope would not need any such system of courts. Why should America need such courts to invest in this country or for us to invest in the United States? That deal would require a stripped-down and far simpler Bill, and it would be far quicker and easier to negotiate.

Some people have said, “But President Obama has said we won’t be allowed to negotiate a deal and we’ll have to go to the back of the queue”, but the House of Commons Library has revealed that there is no queue. After the negotiation of TTIP, there are no countries with outstanding negotiations with the US. Not only was President Obama trying to bully us, but he was doing it on the basis of a bluff. We will be not at the end of the queue but at the front of it, and we will no doubt be able to negotiate with his successor.

I hope that hon. Members will consider the EU dimensions of TTIP seriously. I accept that people who are very optimistic about what we can achieve within the EU, and about what the EU might be able to achieve in negotiating TTIP with the Americans, might want to take the risk. It is not a risk that I want to take. It is not a risk that those who give high priority to the NHS, or those who are worried about environmental standards, health protection standards and potential threats to our education and other public services, will want to take. In the light of the topic of today’s debate, I hope that we will give priority to protecting public services rather than going along with something that none of us has ever seen—we are not allowed to see it, and it is being negotiated in secret—and that has aspects that most of us ought to find offensive to the House and dangerous to the people of this country.

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[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

I welcome the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy to his place and look forward to hearing what he has to say, but it is extraordinary that the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport could not be bothered to turn up to wind up his part of the debate on the Gracious Speech at the very beginning of this new parliamentary Session. What a dereliction of duty. Who knows whether he is otherwise engaged—no doubt on the vote leave battle bus—or whether the Prime Minister simply does not trust him enough to let him out of the Cabinet dog house to which he has no doubt been confined on the shortest of leashes because of his support for the leave campaign.

We have had a broad-ranging and excellent debate. We have heard from 31 Back-Bench colleagues, one of whom, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Gill Furniss), made an excellent and well received maiden speech. It showed quite clearly what a great MP she is going to be, rooted as she is in the community that she now represents. Sad though the circumstances are that have brought her to this place, it is quite clear from her remarks that she will do an excellent job.

This was the Queen’s Speech that was not supposed to happen ahead of the EU referendum, and it showed. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) and my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) said, we were told in Government briefings in March that the Queen’s Speech was to be postponed until after the EU referendum, but the Prime Minister then changed his mind. Perhaps that explains the ill thought out programme, with a small number of Bills, many of which seek to do things that everyone agrees with, being cobbled together to give an impression that all is well with this relatively newly elected Government—except that it is not.

We can see clearly that the Prime Minister is not focused on this legislative programme because he is otherwise engaged. It is no wonder, given that his fractious, warring Cabinet members seem to have lost all mutual respect, denouncing each other in language more suited to bitter political enemies. I will give two examples. The erstwhile Welfare Secretary thinks that the Chancellor tells fibs—he has said today that Pinocchio,

“with his nose just getting longer and longer and longer”,

is

“very similar to the Chancellor. With every fib you tell, it gets longer. Who am I to judge how many there have been?”

Meanwhile, the Employment Minister has accused the Prime Minister of “concocting Armageddon scenarios”, calling some of his claims about what will happen if we leave the EU “fantastical”, “hysterical” and “incredible”. It was clear from the context that she did not mean it in a positive sense.

We have heard an echo of those debates on the Government Back Benches today, with the right hon. Members for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) and for Wokingham (John Redwood) being opposed by the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) on EU issues. My hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) called it a Tory “Game of Thrones”, and the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) even went so far as to offer parallels with individual characters from that drama. It makes for an interesting spectacle, but not for good governance or an ambitious legislative programme.

[John Redwood]

Could the hon. Lady give us an up-to-date view on how the Labour party is getting on with the arguments on unilateralism and the nuclear deterrent?

[Maria Eagle]

Certainly not in 10 minutes.

The Government’s extraordinary decision to announce that they will accept an amendment to the Humble Address if necessary, clarifying that the NHS will be exempt from arrangements in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, is highly unusual, not to say humiliating for them. That major concession before we have even got to the end of the debate on the Gracious Speech shows how desperate the Prime Minister is to avoid being defeated on the Floor of the House by his own Brexit-driven rebel Back Benchers, at least 25 of whom have signed the amendment—enough, along with all the rest of us, to defeat the Government. Without that retreat, this would have been the first vote on a Gracious Speech lost by a Government since 1924.

That also shows how willing Tory Brexit rebels are to inflict such a defeat on their own Prime Minister. Indeed, some reports over the weekend suggested that it would be followed by the rebels going on strike to block Government legislation after the referendum unless some of their number were promoted—an extraordinary state of affairs. Meanwhile, one pro-remain Minister is reported to be demanding that the rebels should all be kicked out of the Tory party; a Tory “Game of Thrones” indeed. No wonder this legislative programme is so slim. The Prime Minister will be spending all his time after 23 June on party management. I can only congratulate the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden, who spoke to his amendment with great cogency, and my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff) on causing such Government turmoil. My hon. Friend has now secured Government concessions on both the Budget and the Queen’s Speech—she is really getting the hang of how this place operates.

I am sure the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) will be glad to hear that the Opposition agree with the aims behind some of the legislation that has been announced. In the case of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, how could one object to the Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Bill, which will implement The Hague convention to which the UK has been a signatory for many years? We support it wholeheartedly. We also welcome the aims behind the digital economy Bill, as did the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs, the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and the hon. Members for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), for High Peak (Andrew Bingham), for Mid Worcestershire (Nigel Huddleston) and for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry).

We particularly welcome the proposed introduction of the universal service obligation for broadband, automatic compensation for customers deprived of good service, and enhanced transparency for consumers to make an informed choice. We will look carefully at proposals to introduce a new electronic communications code, protect intellectual property rights online, and introduce age verification for pornographic websites. It is extremely disappointing that the Government will break their promise to automatically roll-out broadband to all households, so perhaps the Minister will spell out the additional costs that many households and businesses will need to bear to get connected, and give us the total number that he expects will be adversely affected.

Despite their desperate efforts to appear uncontroversial in this legislative programme, the Government pose an underlying threat to all our public services—many of my hon. Friends referred to that during the debate. The Government seem to know the price of everything and the value of nothing, and their obsession with marketisation as a prelude to privatisation leaves them with a tin ear to the value of the public service ethos. As my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) said, they seem to believe that the public sector is automatically bad, and the private sector automatically good.

Unfortunately, the Government are developing that theme across Departments. As my hon. Friends the Members for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson), for Manchester, Withington (Jeff Smith), for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), for West Ham (Lyn Brown), and for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Gerald Jones) said, the Government seem unable to accept the fact that public service broadcasting and the public service ethos—as exemplified by the BBC—makes a hugely positive contribution to our society, boosts the UK creative industries and creative economy, and is successful and massively popular, providing great value for money for licence fee payers and high-quality broadcasting for us all. Channel 4 fulfils its remit without any input from the taxpayer or licence fee payer.

However, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport has shown himself to be utterly committed to denigrating and diminishing the BBC, which he recently described as no more than

“a market intervention of around £4 billion by Government”.

He wants to privatise Channel 4—he said so just last month, although I notice that there is no Bill for that in this legislative programme.

The constant assumption that the private sector is better, and that the public sector should be diminished or sold off, is based on ideology, not evidence, and is out of step with public opinion. Just last week the BBC announced that it would start to do what the Secretary of State said he wants, which is to cease activity that duplicates what can be done in the private sector—something he calls “distinctiveness”. The BBC announced that it would remove its online recipes. The huge public outcry was instructive, and the Government should take note. So far 195,000 people have signed the petition asking the BBC to keep that trusted resource. The Secretary of State immediately said that the plan was nothing to do with him, but we all know that it was.

Some of our debate has been about the national health service—our most loved public service—and I tell this House and the Government that the Labour party will not stand by and watch the health service be denigrated, reduced or cut. This legislative programme will do nothing to deal with the real challenges facing our public services, whether our NHS or the BBC. We know the value of our public services, and we will make it our business to speak up for and defend them.