Debate on the Address

Seema Malhotra Excerpts

Monday 14th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Quite simply because we do not trust the Prime Minister.

This Government have had three and a half years to get Brexit done and they have failed. The only legitimate way to sort Brexit now is to let the people decide with the final say. To pass this House, any deal needs to meet the needs of workers and businesses. That means including a new customs union—a close single market relationship—and guarantees of workers’ rights, consumer standards and environmental protection; and, if I may say so, guarantees that the Good Friday agreement will not be damaged or undermined in any way. A withdrawal agreement was announced, but we do not know yet if the Government have done a deal. What we are sure of is that this House has legislated against crashing out with no deal and that the Prime Minister must comply with the law if a deal does not pass this House.

The Queen’s Speech talked about the opportunities that arise from Brexit, but the Government’s own figures suggest that a free trade agreement approach would cause a near 7% hit to our economy, while a no-deal crash-out would cause a 10% hit. Those seem like opportunities that we could all live without. For many people, the economy of this country is fundamentally weak. Since 2010, there are more workers in poverty, more children in poverty, more pensioners in poverty, more families without a home to call their own and more people—fellow citizens—sleeping rough on our streets. Fewer people can afford their own home, and wages are still lower than they were a decade ago. Productivity is falling, and the economy contracted last month.

At the weekend I was in Hastings on the south coast, where last year food banks staffed by volunteers distributed 87,453 meals, and one in seven people in that town live in fuel poverty. Are those not shocking figures in this country in the 21st century? There was nothing in the Queen’s Speech to address our stagnant economy, nothing to address low pay and insecure work, and nothing to reverse the rising levels of child poverty or pensioner poverty.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the challenges of rising child poverty, compounded by the mental health issues that young people face and rising special educational needs not being met due to our education system lacking the resources it needs, are contributing to the next generation growing up in despair, for which the country will pay the price for generations to come?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. We have almost a lost generation. Children are going to understaffed schools with very few teaching assistants, where headteachers are going to parents with a begging bowl to try to match school budgets, and too many young people are growing up in bad housing, with incredible levels of stress and worry about the future. That contributes to the mental health crisis that this country as a whole must address.

Will the Prime Minister match Labour’s commitments to scrap the benefit freeze, end the benefit cap, ditch the bedroom tax, scrap the two-child limit and the disgusting rape clause, and end punitive sanctions in the benefit system? While we welcome the legislation to ensure that employers pass on tips to their workers—something that the Labour and trade union movement has long campaigned for—the Government must go further, and I urge them to listen to the package of measures set out by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Laura Pidcock) in her brilliant speech at the TUC last month. This Queen’s Speech was supposed to herald an end to austerity and a new vision. Instead, it barely begins to unpick the devastating cuts to public services.