Safe Streets for All

Jon Trickett Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

In a striking opening comment in the Queen’s Speech debates, the Prime Minister remarked that genius can be found everywhere in our country—of course, you and I know that that is especially true in God’s own country, Madam Deputy Speaker, but we will draw a veil over that. He also said that opportunity is lacking throughout the country. We arrive, then, at the central thrust of the Queen’s Speech: the idea that we should level up. There are two things to say about that. The first is that we have to will the means as well as the ends, and the Government have failed to do that, as I will describe in a moment or two. Secondly, we have to analyse why the country needs levelling up in the way that the Prime Minister described.

Three aspects of the Queen’s Speech address the levelling-up agenda, and none of them works for Yorkshire. First, the Prime Minister wants infrastructure, but he must then explain why seven times as much is spent on transport in London as it is in parts of Yorkshire. Infrastructure takes decades to introduce, and people in our area and elsewhere will feel that it is jam tomorrow and that no difference will be made now.

Secondly, there is the idea of education and skills. But then the Prime Minister has to explain why, over the past 10 years, the Government cuts to school funding in my constituency were 16 times higher than the cuts in his constituency.

The final point that the Prime Minister makes is about IT, which he says is the way forward. The fact of the matter is that in my constituency and other parts of Yorkshire, the broadband speed is less than half of what it is in his constituency. For all those reasons, we can understand how it came about that output per worker in our area is half the level that it is in London, that wages in my constituency are £300 a week less than they are in the Prime Minister’s, that there are twice as many top jobs in administration and management in his constituency than mine, and that children born today in my constituency—according to his Social Mobility Commission—face a future that is much more difficult than it is in other parts of the country.

The Prime Minister climbed his way to the top by arguing for a turbocharged inequality, and now he is trying to paper over the cracks of the very inequality his party helped to create. This Queen’s Speech does not address the central problems facing my community and many others I try to speak for in this House every day—it papers over the cracks. We require a Government who will transform our country, create a rupture with the way in which this British establishment has ruled our country for the past two to three generations, and build a fairer, more just and more democratic society.