Budget Resolutions

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Thursday 9th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jackson]

The hon. Lady is making typically lucid points, but is it not incumbent on her party, given that there is a broad consensus that we need to fund social care better—the Chancellor announced an extra £2 billion —to identify where that money would come from? If she does not want it to be raised through national insurance contributions, where else will it come from?

[Kerry McCarthy]

That leads me very nicely on to my next point, which is that the Chancellor claims the Government have no choice but to raise national insurance contributions. However, he has somehow managed to find £70 billion in tax cuts for the rich and for corporations, including £1 billion for the Government’s pet concern, inheritance tax. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) for her work on this. From next month, the inheritance tax threshold for a couple will start to rise from the current £650,000 to £1 million. Over the past two years in my Bristol East constituency just 17 homes sold for more than £650,000, and not all of them would have been subject to inheritance tax. My constituents are paying the price for a tax cut that will benefit only 0.04% of the people, many of whom live in the far more affluent constituencies of Cabinet Ministers.

The Chancellor also managed to find funding for the Prime Minister’s grammar school project, despite a dearth of evidence to support the policy. It baffles me why he thinks this is more important than helping the schools we have at the moment, which face a £3 billion shortfall. What good will new grammar schools do for children and teachers at Bristol Met, where half of all pupils are on free school meals but their funding is being cut by 21%, or at Begbrook Primary, which has seen a 16% cut in per pupil funding between 2013-14 and 2019-20? West Town Lane academy has seen a 16% cut and Waycroft academy a 14% cut. I could go on. The Government’s chaotic approach to children’s education is emblematic of a Budget incapable of joined-up thinking or long-term planning. The funding is there when the Government want it to be, but not when people need it to be.

The Government seem incapable of looking beyond the short term and of recognising that cuts have consequences. Ministers are denying 18 to 21-year-olds housing benefit, but if just 140 young people are pushed on to the streets the policy will cost the Government more than it saves. Centrepoint estimates that about 9,000 young people will be put at risk of homelessness by the policy. That is not just short-sighted; it is—if you will permit me to say so, Madam Deputy Speaker—gross stupidity on the part of the Government. It is too high a cost for the sake of making very short-term savings.

I referred to the success of Bristol as a city, but that success comes at the price of a booming housing market that means homes are increasingly out of reach for Bristolians. On average, tenants are having to spend 64% of their disposable income on rent. Our Mayor has created a multi-disciplinary housing delivery team and a city office that has been working hard to try to get more affordable housing built and to find temporary beds for the homeless. They will not be helped by cuts to housing benefit and Ministers’ preoccupation with £1 million houses. I urge the Government to consider our Mayor’s request for the power and support necessary to tackle the housing crisis. It is not enough just to devolve the responsibility; the resources and the money have to go with that if he is to do what he is being asked to do.

On housing, just as on social care, public health, funding cuts and tax increases, the Government’s instinct is to pass the buck to local authorities. Bristol’s funding has fallen by £170 million over the past six years. Over the next five years, we face a £104 million funding gap as costs rise. The further 30% cut to the Department for Communities and Local Government’s budget suggests Ministers are oblivious to the difficult decisions councils are having to make. There is no recognition of the long-term costs of neglecting our infrastructure and key services. A temporary sticking plaster next year will not rescue our social care system or relieve the burden on council services.

The situation will only get worse with Brexit. Bristol City Council received £22 million of EU funding in the 10 years to 2015. The city’s two universities receive over £20 million a year from EU sources. I pay tribute to all the work my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) is doing with universities on Brexit. The European Investment Bank facilitated initiatives such as Bristol Energy, the council’s energy company. Two thirds of exports from Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth go to the EU, which is far higher than the average for UK cities.

The Chancellor claimed there would be no complacency, but neither is there any strategy. The Government have no clue about what will replace that EU investment or how to guarantee our exports market. Blithely pretending everything will be fine and dandy is not a legitimate plan. Ministers are rushing headlong into a hard Brexit and abandoning the single market, ignoring how trade with the EU is a major driving force for our economy. Turning us into a bargain basement tax haven may be what some Ministers have always wanted, but it is not what Bristol or the country needs.

The Chancellor boasted of infrastructure projects, but my constituents are fed up with broken promises and bad management. We have endured disruption because of the electrification of the Great Western line and the taxpayer has had to cope with the spiralling cost. Now the programme has been delayed indefinitely—at a cost of £330 million. The people of Bristol do not know if they will ever see the benefit, but we have already paid the price.

Time and again, Ministers do not bother to consider the bigger picture. Environmental regulation, for example, is dismissed as red tape. I have given up hoping that some Conservative Members will see the environmental necessity of so-called green crap—apologies again, Madam Deputy Speaker—but I had hoped that some would see the economic potential. The Government have chosen not to engage, or to take a very half-hearted approach, with the EU’s circular economy work, despite its potential to create half a million jobs and support a genuinely forward-thinking industrial strategy that is fit for the future. The Chancellor promised us skilled jobs and meaningful training, so I hope he will go back to his colleagues at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and look at how a genuine focus on the green economy can support that and ensure Britain really is world-leading. That would reassure me and my constituents that the Government are capable of working with cities like Bristol to help everyone to achieve their full potential.

Iran (Human Rights)

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Wednesday 11th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy]

We oppose the use of the death penalty in any circumstances, but the crucial starting point is that information on executions that are carried out should be transparent. We should know the figures for what people have been convicted of and how many executions have been carried out—half the executions I mentioned were carried out secretly, and most people would regard it as inappropriate that offences such as drugs trafficking should carry the death penalty. The issue is significant, and one on which we should continue to put pressure on the Iranian Government.

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

The hon. Lady is giving a good overview of the difficulties. Does she concede that, because of its role as a state sponsor of terrorism and other activity in the middle east, in particular in support of despotic regimes, Iran is in many ways exporting human rights abuses throughout the region?

[Kerry McCarthy]

There is certainly concern about the international role played by Iran. I do not want to stray into the territory of its foreign policy, particularly because Iran does not fall under my brief in the shadow foreign affairs team, but I share the hon. Gentleman’s concern about the influence of the Iranian regime, in particular in the region, and the wrong message being sent to other regimes.

We have not debated in much detail today the impact of human rights abuses on women in the country. Officially, under article 20 of the Iranian constitution, there is equality between men and women. It states:

“All citizens of the country, both men and women, equally enjoy the protection of law and enjoy all human, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, in conformity with Islamic criteria.”

As a recent report by the UN confirms, however, Iranian law provides an insurmountable barrier to gender equality. To give a few examples, under Iranian law, a woman’s testimony is worth only half a man’s testimony; the age of criminality starts at the age of nine for girls, whereas it is 15 for boys; mothers may never have guardianship of their children, even if they are widowed; and women do not have equal inheritance rights. For some time there has been growing concern about the crackdown on women who fail to adhere to the traditional dress code in public. For example, the number of women applying to university has declined since measures taken by the regime to enforce the dress code there.

Disturbingly, Iranian authorities blame women who have been raped for inducing their attackers to sexually assault them. In June 2011, 14 women were kidnapped and gang-raped, but the Government claimed that the women had brought the attack on themselves and that the manner in which they had been dressed was reason enough not to bring the attackers to justice. Recently, we have seen the imprisonment of women’s rights activists who signed the “One Million Signatures” campaign to repeal discriminatory laws. One activist was sentenced to nine and a half years in jail for assembly and collusion against the regime and to a further two years for participating in a protest against laws discriminating against women. Another women’s rights activist was given three and a half years in one of Iran’s most notorious prisons in May 2011.

Three gay men are known to have been hanged in Iran in 2011, and two teenage boys, in a case that drew widespread international attention, were hanged in 2005 for the same offence. Some observers report that that is only the tip of the iceberg, because in many cases the families are not prepared to make public the fact that their relatives were executed under the sodomy laws.

I finish with a few words about the role of social media in Iran. We heard from the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) about how a fairly well organised, well educated opposition movement exists in Iran, and how it is struggling to break free from the regime’s grasp. According to Harvard university, the rate of growth of internet usage is higher in Iran than in any other country in the middle east. An estimated 700,000 active blogs come from the country. In 2009, the regime was quick to blame the use of the internet, social networking sites in particular, for the outbreak of protests following the disputed presidential election. Today, the regime does all it can to block access to websites promoting democratic change. For example, in September last year, a blogger received a nineteen-and-a-half year prison sentence for propaganda against the regime, and the UN’s recent report on the state of human rights in Iran gives numerous examples of bloggers and journalists imprisoned for similar activities.

It has now been reported that internet cafés have been asked to record customers’ online footprints and to install security cameras. As recently as Monday this week, the Iranian regime announced that it intends to introduce its own internet operating system, to enable it to block websites considered unsuitable and to monitor online activity. As we saw in other countries during the Arab spring, social media are incredibly important in spreading democratic ideas and in enabling people to mobilise opposition to human rights abuses and undemocratic practices. I urge the Minister, in his discussions on human rights in Iran, to stress that freedom of expression is an important human right, and that access to the internet and to social media is now a fundamental freedom that should be protected.