Economy and Jobs

Sammy Wilson Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

Sometimes we can be bemused by interventions from Government Members, and I find it bemusing that they have got us into a Brexit mess, they have called an unnecessary general election, they have an unstable Government, yet they talk to us about confidence!

Let me quote a few other comments and I will try to move on quickly—I see you are getting worried about time, Mr Deputy Speaker. The Bank of England’s chief economist said last week that 7% of our entire workforce could be on zero-hours contracts within a decade. The director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies called the low wage growth in this country “completely unprecedented.” The IFS also referred to

“unacknowledged risks to the quality of public services”

under the Conservatives, and judged that their austerity plans would be so harsh as to be potentially undeliverable.

What is the Government’s response? It is a Queen’s Speech devoid of any serious measures to address the economic challenges facing this country and the pressures that ordinary people and our public services are under. Austerity will continue to impact on our schools, our health service, emergency services, and people’s living standards. In the autumn Budget it will be interesting to see how the Chancellor covers the black hole derived from his last disaster of a Budget. We are aware of at least £2 billion, and according to some commentators it could grow to anything up to £7 billion. It would be particularly helpful if the Chancellor explained today how he covers the cost of the £1 billion grubby bribe to the DUP to keep his party clinging on to office. That is £100 million a vote. If I were a Tory Back Bencher, I would want to start negotiating a slice of that action.

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that his party has a lot to tell us about grubby bribes in the form of letters to terrorists to get them off their murder charges and so on? What is grubby about money put into the infrastructure of Northern Ireland to promote jobs, or money going into the health service in Northern Ireland or the education system? What is grubby about that?

[John McDonnell]

I will tell the hon. Gentleman what I think is grubby—[Interruption.] Sorry—I thought he was sitting on the Government Benches; I didn’t realise. What is grubby is that if we were to abide by the rules of our system, and the Barnett formula in particular, England would get an additional £59 billion, Scotland £6 billion, and Wales £3 billion. After the miraculous discovery of funds for the DUP deal, in future I do not expect to hear much more about magic money trees from the Government Benches. One billion pounds was found for the DUP, but there is nothing to address the fundamentals of our weak and precarious economy, which as my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) said, is now faced with the challenges of Brexit.

Increasingly, people are waking up to the fact that a Government lacking—what can I call it?—a strong and stable leadership, are incapable of securing a deal that protects our jobs and economy. There are divisions at the top of Government, a Cabinet divided, and rows between members of the Government and their own negotiating team are breaking out on a daily basis as they position themselves for their own leadership challenges. As a result, we witness weekly changes of direction in the Government’s negotiating stance, including even by the Chancellor. Only weeks ago the Chancellor was threatening no deal, walking away to set up the UK as a tax haven off the coast of continental Europe. Now it is reported that he is potentially looking to the customs union, and a long and uncertain transitional period. Only months ago, he went along with the Government prioritisation of immigration control over the protection of jobs. Now he claims to want a jobs-first Brexit.

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[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

We will support the Government on the Queen’s Speech this evening—[Hon. Members: “Ah!”]—not because of what the shadow Chancellor described as some grubby backroom deal: it was not a backroom deal, for a start. It was published in this House. Everyone knows what the deal was; it was a deal we struck with the Government because the Government wished to have the influence of our votes. I suspect that the Scottish nationalists, had the party that lost the last election tried to approach them to form a coalition, would have done exactly the same. Let us make that clear.

We support many of the things in the Queen’s Speech. We support the fact that the Government are committed to the Union, while the alternative is committed to breaking up the Union and, indeed, has supported parties in the past that have tried to break up the Union by violence.

Secondly, we support the Queen’s Speech and the Government because we share the same values when it comes to leaving the European Union. We support the stance that the Government have taken in their White Paper on leaving the single market, leaving the customs union and ensuring that we are free from the diktats of Europe and free to make deals with those parts of the world in which economies are expanding. It makes sense to do so, and the Queen’s Speech is committed to that.

Thirdly, we support the Queen’s Speech because we share the same economic values as the Government. We do not wish to see the kind of fiscal irresponsibility proposed today by the shadow Chancellor, in which hundreds of billions of pounds will be borrowed. He then has the cheek to say that he does not want to create a burden, and that one of the reasons young people are voting for his party is that they do not want to be burdened with debt in the future. Who does he think will pay back the billions that will be borrowed for the madcap schemes that his party proposes? Of course we support fiscal responsibility.

Indeed, this Queen’s Speech is not vacuous, as it has been described. There are good supply measures in it. To enable our country to compete, we need an education system that produces people who have skills. We need people with technical skills. We need infrastructure that enables the economy to work smoothly. We need an industrial strategy and we need sound finance.

For all those reasons, we believe that this Queen’s Speech is worth supporting. It plots a way forward, and it has a responsible attitude to the future of the economy. Of course, there will be times in the future when we will disagree with the Government, but then a lot of their Back Benchers disagree with them anyway. Indeed, we have already seen that the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen) disagrees with them over the deal being struck with the Democratic Unionist party.

We are committed to supporting a Government who are committed to the Union, committed to the defence of this realm and committed to growing the economy. For that reason, we will give them our support tonight.