Business of the House

Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

First, let me mark the fact that yesterday was VE Day; I know there will be many events going on across our constituencies during the week, giving us a chance to remember the debt we owe our forebears and also to think of those facing conflict today.

May I, too, welcome the hon. Lady’s new colleague, the hon. Member for Blackpool South (Chris Webb), to his place and pay tribute to all candidates who took part in the important elections last week? I also thank her for helping me to launch the publication to which she referred. We commissioned it and I thank all the organisations that worked on it. It is important that we combat the rise of conspiracy theories, as that is part of restoring trust in what we do here and keeping trust in democracy. This publication will be a useful product, not just for Members, but for those who wish to come here too. I shall certainly make sure that the Lord Chancellor has heard what she says about the Sentencing Bill, although he will find her concern odd, given Labour’s voting record on our measures to introduce tougher sentences.

The hon. Lady mentioned her new colleagues, and I do hope the hon. Member for Dover (Mrs Elphicke) is being made to feel very welcome in her new party. I am buoyed at the news that our odds of retaining Dover have slightly improved since yesterday lunch time—[Laughter.] It is true. But I think this is a personal tragedy for the hon. Member for Dover, as was what happened last week for the hon. Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter). It has exposed a pattern of behaviour from the Leader of the Opposition, and it is a shame that we are not due an update to Peter Brookes’ “Nature Notes”, for the decorator crab is a species that covers its surface area with materials to disguise its true form, usually selecting sedentary creatures and seaweed. The Leader of the Opposition is the decorator crab of these Benches, desperate to show that he is not really leading the Labour party at all. He has channelled Margaret Thatcher; his deputy has praised Boris; he has expelled the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) with great fanfare, a man he was campaigning for to be Prime Minister only moments before; and his exterior shell is stuck over with St George’s flags, his Gunners season ticket and several programmes from the “Last Night of the Proms”. What next? Will it be a photo op with a bulldog? Will it be a lecture on how misunderstood Enoch Powell was? Should I ask the Whip on duty on the Front Bench if he has checked in recently with my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois)?

This is Operation Radish: the concerted effort to convince the British public that while the Labour party might look red on the outside, at its heart it really is not at all.

Even the defection from the Government Benches of one of Labour’s sternest critics cannot disguise the fact that Operation Radish is not going well. Not everyone has got the memo. The shadow Leader of the House talks about the important election results last week. Has she noticed that the first act of the new Mayor of the West Midlands was to turn his attention not to investment or infrastructure, but to Israel and Gaza? Ditto for the Mayors of West Yorkshire and London, with the latter also stating “equivalence” between the Head of State of Israel and a terrorist organisation.

The anti-nuke shadow Foreign Secretary is currently trying to walk back from calling a candidate for the presidency of the United States a neo-Nazi-sympathising KKK sociopath. The hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) sought to smear a decent candidate for Mayor of London as a white supremacist. Object to ULEZ and you are a child killer. If you are a woman advocating for your rights and dignity, you are a bigot. Want to strengthen our borders? You are a racist. If you have made money through hard work, you can’t possibly get Britain. That is today’s Labour party—just as it has always been.

The politics of the PLP is more the politics of the PLO and the JCR: more comfortable in university tented encampments and on picket lines than on the international stage; more interested in thought policing than actual policing. Labour has not changed—not its behaviour or its record. It is still high crime rates, high waiting lists, higher taxes, higher levels of poverty, less pay, less opportunity, less money for the NHS and less freedom. The British people can see what is going on. They like their radishes in salads, not in No. 10.

[Mr Speaker]

I call the Father of the House.

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend indicates in provisional business for the week after next the remaining stages of the Holocaust Memorial Bill. She is familiar with early-day motion 711.

[That this House notes the First Special Report of the Holocaust Memorial Bill Select Committee, HC121, on the problems with the current proposal and the restrictions faced by the Committee considering the hybrid Bill; respects the conclusions and recommendations on page 20; agrees with the list of matters related to the current proposals for a Holocaust Memorial and believes these need updated attention on deliverability from the Infrastructure Commission, from the National Audit Office on likely capital costs and recurrent annual costs, from the Chancellor on future funding control, and from the police and security services on maintaining unfettered public access for use of Victoria Tower Gardens while protecting the Memorial; asks His Majesty’s Government and the Holocaust Memorial Foundation agency to commission the views of the property consultants on a comparison of the current proposal by Sir David Adjaye in Victoria Tower Gardens with viable alternatives, to commission the full appraisal and to hold a public consultation on the selection of site; and further asks His Majesty’s Government to commit to having this or an amended proposal considered first by the local planning authority before considering whether to call in the application, noting that an open-minded observer could doubt another minister in the Levelling Up department should be asked to make an independent decision on an application by the Secretary of State.]

Will she arrange, at least seven days before the House returns to the Holocaust Memorial Bill, for there to be answers to the questions on recurrent costs, the total capital costs, the amount of money going to education and how much the cost of the project has risen in the last year?

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. As I always do, I shall ensure that the Ministers in charge of the Bill have heard his specific requests and that the business managers take his asks into account.

[Mr Speaker]

I call the SNP spokesperson.

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

First, may I say on behalf of my party and in the spirit of congenial politics, led by our new First Minister and all our independence-minded Ministers, how delighted I am to see the Leader of the House still in her place after her party’s catastrophic results in England? They were not catastrophic enough to mobilise her PM for PM rebels, apparently. With her weekly ill-informed comments about Scotland, she is an extraordinary recruiting sergeant for independence and I am sure she will not disappoint today.

May I warmly welcome the launch by the Leader of the House this week of the guide to recognising conspiracy theories, such as those around 5G masts and 15-minute cities? It will be useful reading for some of the Members on her own Benches, and perhaps those on Labour’s increasingly busy right wing.

Given the Leader of the House’s personal interest, and what is supposed to be a central role of this House in protecting democracy and protecting us, will she be pressing for a wider debate on disinformation and the malign influence of secretive social media groups that perpetuate these damaging myths? I am thinking, for example, of the 36 so-called grassroots Facebook groups that I raised with the Prime Minister last week. They are forums full of vile racism, conspiracy theories and Islamophobic abuse of Sadiq Khan, all with links to Conservative party HQ staff, activists and even politicians. There is reason to suspect similar groups are quietly spreading their poison across the UK, including in Scotland. Does the Leader of the House agree that this needs to be investigated and brought to light, not laughed off as the Prime Minister did?

Last week, I asked the Leader of the House about the chaos of the Tory trade tax—the border checks that Brexit now requires—or, as former Tory Ministers have called it, “that act of self-harm on the UK”.

She swerved that with a boast about Brexit boosting UK financial services. Brexit is doing its damage to Edinburgh’s trade and talent in that sector, too, but services is a sector not affected by the serious issues that I raised of rotting food, crippling import charges, biosecurity risks, and delays and chaos at the ports. The Leader of the House and the shadow Leader of the House might be content to ignore the exporters and importers, the farmers and the fishers, whose businesses have suffered while she pretends that all is well on the Brexit front, but my party and I are not. So I ask again: when can we put the record straight—after last week’s twaddle—and have a debate in Government time on the ruinous impact of Brexit all across the economy?

--- Later in debate ---

[Penny Mordaunt]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on all the work that he is doing to ensure that his constituents have the provision that they need. We have had a huge uplift in the general teaching staff; there are now 30,000 more teachers than when we came to office. Obviously, we have also been expanding special educational needs provision, but the need is growing and we are determined to keep pace with that. I think that a debate on the subject would be welcomed by many in the House, and I encourage him to apply for it in the usual way.

[Mr Speaker]

I call the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

I thank the Leader of the House for the business statement and for announcing the Backbench Business debate for Thursday 16 May. If awarded time on 23 May, we would propose debates on UK arms exports to Israel and on potholes and highway maintenance. Those would be the two debates immediately before the Whitsun recess. Although all Chamber slots until the Whitsun recess are now pre-allocated, we would still welcome applications for Thursday debates in Westminster Hall, where the new time seems to be working quite well.

Can we have a debate in Government time on the vexed question of leasehold reform? In my constituency, developers are selling, or proposing to sell, packages of property freeholds to third-party companies and denying leaseholders themselves the chance to buy the freeholds of the properties that they live in. This is a really complex legal question, but an awful lot of leaseholders do not have the wherewithal to fight the property development companies and third-party companies buying such investment portfolios. Taylor Wimpey is a company with an interest in development in my constituency that is currently doing this. Can we have a debate in Government time to try to sort out this vexed question?