Nadia Whittome
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Government's Management of the Economy
Nadia Whittome Excerpts(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab) [V]
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and many apologies for the tech troubles earlier.
This pandemic has revealed the impact of a decade of cuts and deepening inequality. It is not just Government failures this year that have left us with the worst death toll and worst economic recession in Europe. The last 10 years of Tory austerity have paved the way to disaster. It was because of austerity that we went into the pandemic with insufficient hospital beds; it was because of austerity that care workers across the country—I sounded the alarm on this last year—were left without adequate personal protective equipment; and it was because of austerity that the social security net that had been built over many years was destroyed.
After covid, we cannot go back to life before. We cannot go back to an exploited workforce, to families hardly surviving on universal credit or to tenants being evicted at the whim of their landlords. From the rubble of war, the 1945 Labour Government built a new settlement; we built the NHS and the welfare state.
Just as the national health service was built from ruins, our society today is crying out for a national care service. We need the green new deal to bring hundreds of thousands of well-paid green jobs to every city, region and town in our country; tenants need a long-term ban on evictions; and the key workers whom Ministers applauded last year deserve nothing less than a pay rise.
If this is not the time to demand courage and ambition, when is? People who lived through the war and rebuilt this country afterwards deserve better than to die alone. My generation deserves better than to be robbed of secure housing, secure jobs and proper mental health support. Austerity was never necessary. People who did nothing to bring about the financial crash were made to pay for it. Our Prime Minister promised no return to austerity and we have to hold him to it.