Tributes to Sir Tony Lloyd
Mike Kane Excerpts(10 months, 1 week ago)
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Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
I have a thousand stories to tell about Tony, having met him 40 years ago as member of the Fianna Phádraig pipe band in Stretford during an Armistice Day event, but I will save them for the Stranger’s Bar later.
My sympathies first go to Judith, who continues her work as councillor for the Longford ward in Trafford.
Tony was an active member of the Catholic community here in Westminster. Father Alexander has asked me to convey to the House that the Catholic mass at 6 pm tomorrow in the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft will be for the repose of the soul of Tony, and that all will be welcome.
Infected Blood Inquiry: Government Response
Mike Kane Excerpts(11 months, 1 week ago)
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John Glen
My right hon. Friend makes wise and fair observations. This is complex, but it is urgent. My right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Jeremy Quin) did an enormous amount of work in getting us to today’s statement and to a lot more, which will come to fruition as quickly as possible. But my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) is absolutely right: this scandal has lasted almost two generations, and I am determined to do everything I can to bring it to a conclusion.
Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
The one tradition that has been upheld today is that of the Paymaster General coming to the House to make a statement that says nothing. He is the ninth Paymaster General since the inquiry was announced, and they keep saying nothing. In the past fortnight alone, he has had to face oral questions and has been defeated in the voting Lobbies, and the Prime Minister was asked a question about this on Wednesday, but we are still no nearer where we need to be. This is a cruel, cruel tease, is it not?
John Glen
I am sorry, but I do not accept that characterisation. What I would say is that, as I think the hon. Member appreciates, there are deeply complex matters in relation to how to allocate funds in the right way and create the most effective and reliable way to honour the recommendations and deal with this comprehensively, and I am doing everything I can to make sure that is achieved.
Oral Answers to Questions
Mike Kane Excerpts(11 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
The Prime Minister (Rishi Sunak)
Mr Speaker, as this is the last Prime Minister’s questions before recess, I know that the whole House will want to join me in wishing you and all the House staff a very merry Christmas and a happy new year. I know that Members will also want to join me in sending our warmest wishes to our armed forces based at home and stationed overseas, our emergency services and all those who will be working over Christmas too. Finally, I know that everyone will want to join me in wishing Mark Drakeford all the best as he moves on from his many, many years of devoted public service.
This morning I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in this House, I shall have further such meetings later today.
Mike Kane
May I concur with the Prime Minister’s comments about our armed forces, Christmas and Mark Drakeford?
My constituent Fred Bates is 74, he has liver cancer and he is a victim of the contaminated blood products scandal. The Prime Minister had a chance to do right by Fred last week, but he failed to do so and lost the vote in this House. After half a century, Fred wishes to know when he and fellow survivors will be compensated and get justice.
Oral Answers to Questions
Mike Kane Excerpts(1 year ago)
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Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
John Glen
I understand that and, through the hon. Gentleman, I say to Mr Bates that I am doing everything I can to update the House as quickly as possible. There are a range of activities that I am familiar with from the small ministerial group of which I was previously a part. There is a lot of complexity in securing the envelope of money and then working out how to allocate it, but I am doing everything I can to bring that forward as quickly as possible.
Papers Relating to the Home Secretary
Mike Kane Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord). I was not planning to speak at length, because this all has an air of déjà vu about it, and apparently that is also true for official Opposition Members because there are so few of them here. I mean, this is an Opposition day motion and we are outnumbering them here by two to one. They are fed up with hearing about this too. It is not as if this topic has not been hashed and rehashed ad nauseam, but I suspect that Labour Members will continue to bang this particular drum for a while because, let’s face it, they have absolutely nothing else to talk about.
The right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) has taken on the demeanour of the witchfinder pursuivant lately: “I saw Goody Braverman talking to the ERG in the Aye Lobby—she must be hanged!” It is not like we are looking at the second coming of the Blair era here. We are not faced with bright, intelligent people bringing alternatives to this country; it is just more carping. They are a tired, lazy Opposition. I was going to call them beige but I think they are more of a Farrow and Ball crowd. I had a look through the range and the closest colour to beige I could find was called smoked trout, which I think is quite apt.
Mr Deputy Speaker, with your indulgence I am going to get to the motion via a slightly circuitous route. I am headed there and I am developing my argument en route. I think Labour Members might want to reflect on why they lost supposedly safe seats at the last general election, including mine in Heywood and Middleton. I know it is very easy to blame Brexit and that is of course their go-to: it must have been Brexit because everything was fantastic and they had such a good manifesto and everyone agreed with it; that is why people did not vote for them. We saw the first signs of that in 2017. There is a clear values dissonance between the Opposition’s increasingly metropolitan and louche outlook and what used to be their core vote.
When I knock on a door in my constituency I can guarantee that if I mention the Home Secretary, the first words out of someone’s mouth will not be, “Well, there was a data breach.” The first words out of their mouth will be “small boats”. Of course we are not talking about small boats today, but people want to know what we are doing to stop that influx of illegal migration. They want to make sure that our rightly generous and welcoming asylum system is not being abused by people coming here to take the mick. The fact that Labour Members care about what we are talking about today more than that issue should be extremely telling for the people who voted Conservative for the first time at the last election. My constituents want more coppers on the street and fewer boats in the channel, and I think we have the team in place to do that.
Turning to the motion, I would love to say that I was surprised by it, but yet again we have sixth-form politics. The official Opposition are asking to breach the confidentiality of advice regarding appointments. Officials should be able to rely on the advice that they give being done in a private and confidential way. Setting a precedent that their advice could be published as a matter of course would inevitably weaken the quality of the advice that they give to Prime Ministers of all parties.
We already know quite a lot of the salient details that the Opposition are asking for in this motion. The Home Secretary’s letter to the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee—the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) is unfortunately not in her place—said:
“The draft WMS did not contain any information relating to national security, the intelligence agencies, cyber security or law enforcement. It did not contain details of any particular case work.”
The letter also points to the fact that the data in question was already in the public domain.
I hate to labour the point, but I feel I must in the vain hope that the message starts to percolate through to the Opposition. My constituents want more police, like the 15,300 we have already put on to the streets. They want to stop illegal crossings, and they want to stop the evil traffickers who exploit and endanger the most desperate. They like the Rwanda plan and they like the tough measures in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, both of which the Labour party voted against.
Chris Clarkson
No, I will not.
My constituents think we should be banging up people who glue themselves to the roads and vandalise buildings and monuments. They want fair, controlled migration, not open borders. Any of those things would have been a worthwhile use of an Opposition day but, again, we are talking about a process issue—the same thing we have talked about half a dozen times. It is a waste of parliamentary time. Sadly, it is predictable, wearing and utterly ridiculous. Get a grip.
Oral Answers to Questions
Mike Kane Excerpts(2 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Rees-Mogg
It would be quite wrong to use taxpayers’ money for party political processes. Focus groups do not do that; they are focused on how Government policy is presented to the voters. However, if the hon. Gentleman has evidence of malpractice, he should always bring it forward to the full attention of the House.
Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Kit Malthouse)
The Government were sorry to receive Lord Geidt’s resignation and are grateful for his work in the role. Any future appointment will need to be a matter for the new Administration, given that the adviser is a personal adviser to the Prime Minister and is appointed for a five-year fixed term.
CHOGM, G7 and NATO Summits
Mike Kane Excerpts(2 years, 4 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
What the UK has been doing is leading by example. It was at Cardiff in 2014 that we set the target of 2% of GDP—a floor, not a ceiling. We were one of the first to exceed it, and eight other countries are now exceeding it. What we are seeing around the table is countries absolutely determined to follow suit and spend more. I will single out what Olaf Scholz has been doing in Germany, where there has been a quite remarkable change of events.
Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
That was a clumsy attempt to unseat the secretary-general of the Commonwealth. It was hardly good statecraft, Prime Minister.
The Prime Minister
It was a great day for democracy, which is one thing among many that the Commonwealth stands for in the world. I think that Patricia Scotland will do an excellent job for the next two years, and she will get every possible support.
Standards in Public Life
Mike Kane Excerpts(2 years, 5 months ago)
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Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)
Over the last few days, I am afraid to say that I have heard far too many people seeking to excuse the inexcusable and defend the indefensible from the Prime Minister on the basis that he got the big calls right, or that he is an election winner. Well, I would certainly take issue with the former, and on the latter I simply say that past performance is no guarantee of future success. I do not want to talk about the merits or otherwise of this Government or this Prime Minister, because that misses the point of today’s debate, and misses an important part of our function here. Those factors should never be used to excuse rule-breaking anyway. We are not here just to deliver x or y policy for our constituents; we also have a wider responsibility on the way that politics is done. That is why tolerating the chipping away of our standards because the ends justify the means should never be an acceptable response from the Government. We are custodians of democracy. How we act, what we say and where we set the limits of adherence to the rules all matter. because they form the baseline for the next generation to work from. If we are not careful, bit by bit, the standards and behaviours that we take for granted will be lost.
Our liberal democracy is fragile, and it cannot be taken for granted. It has to be cherished, nurtured and supported by us as its guardians every single day. Every watering down of the rules, every reduction in transparency, every snub to accountability has to be challenged, because many Governments want to maximise control and minimise risk. Many Governments also have a respect for the rules and understand their place in history, but when we have a Government with a track record like this one, it really is up to us to push back. Be it by shutting down Parliament, green-lighting breaking the law in a specific and limited way, trying to wriggle out of treaties they have just signed, changing the way standards rules operate retrospectively or excusing breaches of the ministerial code, this Government have a wretched track record of ignoring the rules when it suits them. But rules matter, and how our politics is conducted should be bigger than any individual Government. This place should be a force for good, for change and for the benefit of all. When the rules are bent, ignored or changed to suit a short-term political agenda, we all pay a long-term price.
This is all about the tone set from the top. It is about leadership. When the Government are led, as they are, by a Prime Minister who behaves as though the rules never apply to him, and who has used every trick in the book to wriggle out of responsibility, we risk slipping into an authoritarian style of Government that we will not easily shake off. Our electoral system and unwritten constitution mean that it is quite possible to have a Government, as we do, who can push through whatever they want and a Prime Minister who believes that he can get away with whatever he wishes to.
Our parliamentary system has relied on people behaving with honour and respecting conventions. However, when people do not live up to those ideals, and are at best agnostic on, or at worst hostile to, standards, the weaknesses in our system become all too apparent. Democracy is then damaged, and it dies not with a bang, but with a whimper over a period of years, with a tweaking of the rules here and a ditching of a convention there. We have a Government who have become arrogant because of the size of their majority and contemptuous about the need for probity.
If people see continual abuse of the rules and ever-shifting sands of accountability, they end up saying that we are all as bad as one another, that no politicians can be trusted, and that evasiveness and avarice are baked into the body politic, and if they vote at all, they do so holding their nose. There is no shortage of people out there who are only too willing to believe that that is true of every one of us here. They are only too willing to call us out for being motivated solely by personal gain, and for lacking any kind of responsibility for what we do in office. We do not need to give them any fuel for the fire. We need to show them that it is possible to govern selflessly in the public interest, that standards in public life matter, and that, when it comes to protecting democracy, we can lead, not just follow.
We have heard how the new code will, in effect, make the Prime Minister judge and jury of whatever process or complaint is put before him. That really grates for a lot of my constituents, who would question whether they have ever had that degree of discretion or latitude in their dealings with Departments, and whether they have had the opportunity to appeal decisions made against on benefit overpayment, child maintenance and the loan charge. People feel that the rules have not been applied fairly to them, and they then see the Government changing the rules as they see fit.
Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point about rules. St Thomas More—a former occupant of your Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker—said that this land is planted with rules, and that those rules, like trees, are there to protect us when the wind turns. This issue is about not just this Administration or this Parliament, but Administrations and Parliaments to come. That is why this debate is so important.
Justin Madders
I totally agree, which is why what we are arguing for today is so important. These rules will change over time, but it is up to us to ensure that the principles of democracy and accountability stand the test of time. I am afraid that they are under severe attack.
When I was a local councillor, a long time ago, we had something called the standards board, which was independent, well respected and robust. There was never any question about whether councillors could go on that and determine their fate or decide whether matters would be investigated. The system upheld the seven Nolan principles and was firm but fair. The Prime Minister does not believe that those kinds of principles can apply to how he judges complaints, but how is it possible that when I was a local councillor, we had a far more robust system? That simply does not stack up.
At the end of the day, the rules should be followed by everyone and should not be changed or watered down in the short term for political convenience. If the Government can avoid the rules whenever they have an inconvenient outcome, how can we tell the public that they have to follow the rules that the Government set? If another lockdown was needed, the incumbent of Downing Street would find it difficult to tell people authoritatively to obey the rules, given what they now know.
Standards should not be seen as something to be avoided or ignored when the going gets tough. Those values have to be central to how we conduct our business. The ministerial code should not be routinely ignored, as it is, nor should it be altered to suit the Prime Minister of the day. We have to be better than that. We have to be an exemplar—a beacon of excellence. We should remember that what we say and do here matters, not just now, but for the future, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane) said, because democracy is only as strong as those who are prepared to defend it. Having seen the empty Government Benches, I do not think that there are enough Government Members who are prepared to do that.
Ukraine
Mike Kane Excerpts(2 years, 9 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
I thank my right hon. Friend particularly for his important testimonial to the City of London, whose work should not be sullied by association with ill-gotten Russian money. The programme he sets out for sanctions is exactly the right one and the one that the Government are following.
Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
Mr Speaker,
“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”
Will the Prime Minister reiterate that our quarrel is not with the Russian people, but with their leader Vladimir Putin, who has committed a very grave error?
The Prime Minister
The hon. Gentleman is so right, and I know that is what the House thinks. We admire the Russian people. Our links to the Russian people go back to the time when we stood shoulder to shoulder with them to fight fascism. Russia’s contribution to culture, to art, to literature and to music is unparalleled. It is an extraordinary country, and nothing we do or say should obscure that.
Covid-19 Update
Mike Kane Excerpts(2 years, 10 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend asks an extremely important question. I think the answer is that there is currently no evidence, but there is certainly evidence that the different levels of vaccine take-up, and booster take-up in particular, are affecting outcomes.
Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
Disraeli gave his one nation speech in Manchester in 1872; I doubt he would recognise the party political knockabout that the Prime Minister is engaging in over a national crisis. What I will say about the situation is that tonight, with case rates rising in Greater Manchester, there are 600 patients across GM who cannot get out of hospital due to social care staff shortages. About half of care homes are not currently accepting anyone. That is not just to do with the pandemic; it is historical under-investment in our social care sector. Surely the Prime Minister sees that.
The Prime Minister
I have a couple of points—I do not think the hon. Gentleman knows much about Disraeli, by the way. The Mayor of Greater Manchester actually just said that the Government are taking the right approach. To the hon. Gentleman’s point about fixing the problems of the social care sector, which is valid, it is this Government, after decades of failure by Labour to do it—[Interruption.] Absolutely true. We are fixing social care, and they would not even support it.