Debate on the Address

Rob Marris Excerpts

Wednesday 27th May 2015 Commons Chamber

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Macclesfield (David Rutley), my co-chair of the all-party mountaineering group in the previous Parliament. Every member of the group, in all parts of the House, was re-elected. We heard a stunning speech by the new hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara), who beat a Liberal, so he will be particularly welcome to come and join the group. In the past we have had good contacts with the Mountaineering Council of Scotland in his constituency, which would be a fine place for us to consider visiting at some stage for our non-parliamentary pastimes. I congratulate his colleagues, who have bothered to turn up here. I am always a little astonished when people seem to spend half their lives fighting selection battles to become parliamentary candidates and fighting elections, and then, when they get here, do not turn up.

That lot over there on the Government Benches have won and there are hardly any of them here. Having seen what their legislative programme actually is, that does not surprise me. The main part of this dismal programme is a Bill that says what we are not going to do. Is that how good it gets when you have been out of power for 23 years and then get back in? I know that the Front Benchers present at the moment are hugely embarrassed. I hope that a few Government Members with a bit of ingenuity will come up with some ideas, and if they are good ones we will be able to back them on a cross-party basis.

But what about my own party? We have just been knackered in an election. We have got some new MPs, and our Whips cannot be bothered to get them in on the first day to listen to the debate. I will tell you what—

[Rob Marris (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)]

I’m here.

[John Mann]

You’re a retread. There are a few here and great credit to them and others who have been in, but our Whips need to learn a lesson. This lot beat us in Scotland. One of the reasons they beat us, in my view, is that they were better organised. They thought through how to win elections, and they are thinking through how to get in and use this place. If we are going to do anything as an Opposition, we are going to have to get off our knees and start fighting, and that means having Labour Members—I hope some are watching on the telly at the moment—in here arguing the case, asking questions and challenging these useless Tories and their invisible programme of nothingness. I do not know why SNP Members are wearing the Yorkshire rose. It is like the Geoffrey Boycott fan club, all on the way to the test match at Headingley to support England who are taking on New Zealand on Friday. I will be happy to welcome them there.

What should be in the programme? Two things should be there. Everyone seems to be saying—London is joining in now—it is all ours: we want this, we want that. Hon. Members should hope that Bassetlaw does not do that, because we have the coal power stations, and if we tax coal for the coal power stations, everyone would be paying a lot of money because we keep this country heated. But we are generous. We see this as a socialist country. Therefore, we are happy to share the energy that pollutes our lungs as we are making it. We are not asking for extra things.

I tell you what we do want though: we want to see power localised. The stupidest thing that the Tory party has not done—it would have been hugely popular among their voters, our voters, the SNP’s voters, everyone’s voters—would have been to say, with planning powers on housing, wind farms and fracking, “We’re going to give the power back to local communities. We’re not going to have the man from the Ministry, the Department for Communities and Local Government, overruling local communities on what they want.”

When people talk about housing—every party seems to want to have hundreds of thousands of houses—let me say that my constituency dun’t need any more new houses. We have got new housing plans in every field going. Everyone wants to put them there because we have got the land, but we have not got the people to go in the houses. The houses should be in the cities, such as in London, where there is a shortage; not more in my area. We will have a few—we have got plenty planned—but we do not need more and more. London needs them, Birmingham needs them, loads of cities need them. That is what localism should be about, and the Tories have abandoned localism for some reason—more fool the Tory party. We need to get our act together on that.

Localism ain’t just about saying, “Here you are, let’s give the NHS to a bunch of councillors. We were bad as MPs running it. Let councillors run it.” I would not put my councillors in charge of the national health service, any more than I want politicians in charge. The Government have got some more meddling stuff with schools and the NHS. Well, get your hands off it! That’s what I’m trying to say. Get your mitts off the health service and education.

We want a vision in the Labour party. I have got a good vision. How about we let those in education run education, and we let those in the health service run the health service, so that local communities have a proper say? I do not want this Government trying to shut my ambulance stations like they did last time, or trying to shut my accident and emergency, and trying to shut my maternity department. I did not want it, my community did not want it, and we fought back. We stopped it, and the cuts went somewhere else, because somewhere else did not do the job and fight it hard enough. In Tory Newark, they do not have a hospital any more. In Tory Grantham, it is 80 miles to the nearest maternity unit. That is what happens if you do not have localism—it is not a good idea.

There is one other issue that new Members need to be aware of, because it is going to haunt this Parliament. Yesterday on Sky television, Esther outlined it bravely. I have been in touch with her today. She has gone to the police with the name of an MP who she and others allege abused her as a child, but I am expecting other people with other names to come forward from other parts of the country in the near future. Others have already gone to the police. The scandal of historical child abuse in this country will be one of the defining issues of the next five years. It is going to corrode everything during this Parliament because it is so huge and involves so many people. Just in my area, I have had people come to me. One man was kept as a slave, forced to work in a foundry, aged 11 to 16, and that is nice compared to what happened to the rest of his family. I have 26 victims of child abuse just in my constituency who have been to see me—and who am I for them to come to? That is how big this scandal across the country is.

The last Government were right to set up the Goddard inquiry. I have tabled an early-day motion—for those who do not know, an early-day motion is usually a bit of nonsense we sign so we can send letters to people telling them how good we are—calling on the Government to lift the restrictions of the Official Secrets Act, because a lot of people, including former members of special branch, want to speak out to answer the basic question I pose to anyone who wants to know: why was Cyril Smith allowed to get away with prolific child abuse for so many years? But it was not just Smith. There were far more, and what was revealed in Staffordshire yesterday was just one other aspect.

My constituency is no worse than anywhere else in the country. This is nationwide and touches every aspect of society. The number of people, on top of the 26, who have been to see me who do not want the police involved, never want to go public and never actually want to say anything is phenomenal. That is how they have dealt with that childhood trauma—and it is their right to do so. A man flew back from Canada, having not visited my constituency in 30 years because of what happened to him, to spend 20 minutes in the library of my surgery, just to tell me about it, knowing nothing could be done, before flying back again. That is the impact of historical child abuse, and this Parliament is going to have to deal with it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rob Marris (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)]

First, I should apologise to you, Mr Speaker. I stepped out of the Chamber but got a bit interrupted and my return to my place was delayed by five years. I am pleased to be back and in a moment I will remind hon. Members of what I was speaking about five years ago, when I was rudely interrupted—by democracy, of course—because it has a curious echo. A Conservative Member, whom I shall name in a moment because he is still a Member, had said:

“Cabinet Ministers, including the Schools Secretary, have been tripping over themselves to claim that they have to cut only x hundred million or y hundred million pounds from their budgets. The truth is that they do not know how much they will have to cut, because they do not know what their budgets will be as the Chancellor has not told them and he has not told the electorate.”

That sounds a bit familiar. My response was:

“The hon. Gentleman decries the Chancellor for lacking credibility, vision, energy and new ideas”.

—[Official Report, 30 March 2010; Vol. 508, c. 732-733.]

Plus ça change. The Member in question, the right hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr Hammond), was in opposition at the time.

We still have huge problems with the economy. In a moment, I will deal with the two big myths about the economy, but first I should briefly like to pay the tribute due to my predecessor, Paul Uppal. I acknowledge, as do many of my constituents, the amount of work he did in the constituency, how honest he was and how frequently he visited the constituency. I thank the voters of Wolverhampton South West for electing me this year for the third time, and I have to say that it was a lot easier than it was five years ago, when I had the millstone of Gordon Brown around my neck.

The first myth of the two that I shall delineate is the Labour myth on the economy, which is that there was no problem with the economy when the world economic meltdown occurred in 2008 and that all our economic problems thereafter were due solely to world factors. That is a myth and it goes back to 2001. Some of my colleagues may recall the Labour slogan for the 2001 general election, which was “an end to boom and bust”. That was brought forward by Messrs Brown and Balls. It was economic nonsense. I am a Keynesian, but whether we are talking about Kondratiev long waves or whatever, for 300 years capitalism has been cyclical, and that nonsense about an end to boom and bust was on none of my election material. It continued with the nonsense of the private finance initiative, which was a sleight of hand to disguise Government borrowing and, sadly, a sleight of hand that continued under the coalition Government.

The Labour Government continued with the nonsense of light-touch regulation and a Treasury Minister, one Ed Balls, boasting that Labour had become the financial capital of the world because we did not have the millstone of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was introduced in 2002 in the United States of America after the problems caused by WorldCom and Enron. The nonsense continued, as has been adverted to tonight, with the fact that we ran a deficit in seven of the 10 years in which Labour was in office before the meltdown in 2008. We should not have done. By the time we got to the world economic meltdown in 2008, our structural deficit just before it, according to the OECD, was 3.1%. That meant that when the wave came in from across the ocean it overtopped our defences much more than it should have done because our economic defences were not as high as they should have been. I have to say to the House, to make it clear, that before the world economic meltdown I made all the points I have just made to my then Labour colleagues.

The second myth paraded tonight is the wonderful economic performance of the coalition Government. Most of that is complete nonsense. Let us start with the deficit. The deficit is still £90 billion and still 5% of GDP. In the past five years, the national debt has gone up by 55%. We have a balance of trade crisis because we are not exporting enough. GDP per capita is still below what it was in 2008, productivity is down, we have rising personal debt, soaring house prices, jobs that people are forced into or forced into in a sense—such as bogus self-employment jobs, minimum wage jobs and jobs on zero-hours contracts—and falling living standards. Much of the economic growth we have seen in the past six months has not been prompted by anything the coalition Government did but by something the SNP Members will know about—that is, falling oil prices.

The right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) talked earlier about the problems of a deficit because of the intergenerational transmission of debt. What the coalition Government have done and what this new Government have proposed to do is carry on privatising intergenerational debt in two main ways: through soaring house prices so that young people cannot afford a house; and through a huge rise in student debt for the half of young people who go to university. That is simply privatising the transmission of debt to the next generation and it totally undercuts what the coalition Government and the new Government have said about needing to get the deficit down to protect the next generation. I agree with that aim, but all they are doing is privatising it.

This Government will either have to borrow money, as the last Government did, to meet their promises, such as an £8 billion rabbit out of a hat for the NHS, or they will have to put up taxes. However, they have restricted themselves in the Gracious Speech so that they cannot put up income tax, VAT or national insurance contributions. Growth will not get them out of the hole, so I therefore suspect that they will cut even more than they have said that they will.

What we need in our economy is Government borrowing to invest in infrastructure and training and to stimulate economic growth, and Government borrowing for house building so that we have bricks and mortar to show for it. Let us face it, when most people in this country buy a house—although perhaps not some Conservatives, with their inherited wealth—they borrow money to do so. It is what we all do. To drive productivity, we need to drive up the minimum wage and to get rid of zero-hours contracts, which are exploitative. We need restored rights for employees at work, because that will drive investors to substitute capital for labour, which will drive productivity. We also need a bit more compassion, frankly, in our society and in our Government.

What we need from the Labour side is not only a recognition that economic faults were made before 2008, not just by Brown and Balls but by a lot of them. We need to challenge the power structure of this country. Yes, I support devolution, whether it is the northern powerhouse or something from my own west midlands or wherever, but I want a Government who intervene in markets and break up the big banks, which are too big to fail and will land us with another crisis all over again. Capitalism is cyclical. I do not know when that might happen; if I did, I could make a lot of money. We need to break up those big banks. We need to regulate the energy companies a whole lot more. They are ripping off all our constituents. We need to raise the tax on the richest. We need to abolish phoney non-dom status. Above all—this is one of the key lessons from the electorate both for the Conservative party, which has its majority, and for the Labour party—we have to recognise that one of the appeals of UKIP is that it represents itself as not part of the London-centric political élite. Believe me, we in Wolverhampton do not like that élite. I do not want to see any more of it, but I see nothing whatever in the Queen’s Speech to address the imbalance of power in our country.