Backing Business to Create Economic Growth

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Commons Chamber

[Ms Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

As much as I enjoy lectures from the Widow Twankey of Reform, I see this King’s Speech as an opportunity for us all to reflect on the anger that I suspect we all heard on the doorsteps in every constituency across this country during the local elections. To do that, we must be honest with ourselves about the anger that we may feel. How can any of us who say that we believe this country is stronger together—that love is stronger than hate—not accept that we are also angry? I must be honest: this weekend I bumped into the “Unite the Kingdom” protesters, many of them swaggering, beer in hand, through my local station. I honestly felt a guttural sense of anger, which is not right. I do not know those people and I do not know their motivations, but in our current political environment, that was how I felt.

I was angry because I felt that their sense of uniting this kingdom would not include my beloved Walthamstow, a community where we pride ourselves on the diversity of thought, background, and cultures that we all share—although I can promise Members that they are of one mind when it comes to the importance of bin collections, stopping fly-tipping and Thames Water not ripping up the roads. It is now a community in which my Muslim neighbours are scared and my Jewish neighbours fearful because of the violence, intimidation and fury in this place and in our culture wars, where they are used as cannon fodder.

If I am honest, though, my anger was also at myself. I bumped into those people because I had been in central London, at one of those conferences that I think all political parties have on Saturdays, where we all make the same kind of speech, using the same buzz words that we have all been using for the last 20 years. They are a comfort zone of political life, where everyone nods along but no answers are provided. This country is crying out for answers—we are all agreed on that—but the honest truth is that people are not sure that answers are coming from this place, and that is the test that the King’s Speech must deal with.

People want change in every corner, in every community and for every citizen, because right now nobody thinks that anything is working the way it should. As ever, the problem is not Muslims or Jews or bankers; it is politicians—it is us. Whether here, in Palestine, Gaza, the White House or the Kremlin, if we want to show the public that we can build a better world through debate, decision making and discourse, that starts with us. It starts with what we spend our time doing here on behalf of this nation, and whether this King’s Speech offers the difficult questions and answers that this country needs to face the world we are in.

The reason I spend too much time at weekends talking politics is that, for my sins, I chair the Labour Movement for Europe—and yes, looking at the King’s Speech and the European partnership Bill, I think how Brexit has broken all of us. Whether we voted leave or remain, the evidence is indisputable that Brexit has not turned out how anybody thought it would. Jobs and businesses have been lost—[Interruption.] The right hon. Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) asks what is the problem. He should go and speak to the 16,000 businesses that have given up trading altogether because the only benefit of Brexit was for paperwork creators.

We all walked out of the room, when we needed to be in the room to face the challenges of the modern world, whether that is national security, trade, or the climate crisis that we face. This is not a call to rejoin—that relationship with Europe is gone, and it will be a long time before we are able to rebuild it—but it is a call for us to recognise how damaging that has been for our chances as a country, and why we need to rebuild that relationship.

The European partnership Bill will do deals on food, emissions trading and electricity. Those things are all needed, but they are not enough to answer the challenge that our communities face us with: “How does life get better for us?”. Many of us who were here at the time of Brexit will already be deeply triggered by some of the things that have been mentioned, and it only makes sense to have this argument again if we are talking about a relationship that makes sense in 2026 and 2028, not 2016 and 2019. We must recognise that in the past six months we have been threatened with the invasion of Greenland, by continued aggression in Ukraine, and by a climate crisis that means we have to look again at the single market, the customs union and, yes, at freedom of movement. Any political party that denies that those conversations need to take place is not being honest with the public, because a customs union alone will not cut it.

The right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) might be surprised by this, but I agreed with the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) when he said we should get a deal that looks like the Switzerland deal. I am sorry he is not here today—I had hoped he would be, Madam Deputy Speaker, to refer to him—to agree with me that to do that, we must put behind us the fights of the past and the old red lines, and use the Bill to give the Government the negotiating mandate to do that.

We must also do what this place consistently fails to do: put families first. If we had not left the European Union, by now every family and every parent would have proper rights to paid leave to be with their kids, and we would finally be able to tackle the gender pay gap and the motherhood penalty. That is why we must ensure that the Bill does not just align for food; it needs to align for families and to put workers and their needs, not just businesses, at the heart of a new deal with Europe.

I give notice that I will try to amend the European partnership Bill, to give this place the chance to fix what it missed in the last Session: the missing piece of employment rights that businesses overwhelmingly support and that give dads and second parents the same rights as their European counterparts. We must also fix the mistake made in the last Session when we removed the European Scrutiny Committee, so that Members can be part of writing that legislation. Even colleagues who may disagree about the outcome of the European relationships that we might want to build would agree that it is time to take back control to this place.

This Bill, this legislation, this King’s Speech must be an opportunity to show our constituents that we get the challenges and barriers that they face in their lives. The honest truth is that they should be a place for discussion. None of the proposed legislation is good to go, but it can be amended through the parliamentary process to get there. Let us start with ensuring that people have confidence in our democracy. Of course we need a representation of the people Bill. There are 5 million reasons why we need to stop cryptocurrencies and company donations that are corroding people’s sense of confidence in British democracy, and we also need to end the loopholes that exist, capping donations for, and indeed from, individuals. Those who can get millions of pounds personally, or who use third-party organisations to hide their tracks, damage us all together.

We must get right the reforms for children with special needs and disabilities. For too long we as MPs have heard those vulnerable stories, seen the frustrations, and recognised that too often the tribunal has been the place of resolution. We must also get leasehold reform and the social housing Bill through. Housing is the cause of poverty in so many communities, particularly mine.

We must ban conversion therapy, because trans people are living in fear right now in this country, and that cannot be right for our fellow human beings. We need the energy independence Bill to work. I want the E in E17 to stand for energy: my community are stepping up to the plate, using our collective bargaining power to lower our energy bills by seeking bulk discounts on solar panels. We need the Government to work with us to get the interest-free loans to ensure that the community can bring everyone together in that energy transition.

We do not want the Government to be caught up in fighting to get rid of juries, when really, if we want to help victims, we should bring in specialist rape courts. Yes, we need to have the difficult conversations about immigration, because in my Walthamstow community we are proud of the contribution of our neighbours, whether they were born here or made their homes here. When we see people attacking others over indefinite leave to remain—people who are our nurses, doctors, scientists, friends and neighbours—we do not see a kingdom being united; we see people playing with culture wars rather than looking at the economic case. We want the legislation to reflect the benefits of immigration to our society.

I will defend to my death the right of people to disagree with me, to hold different opinions about the future of this country and to resolve those through the democratic process, but I will not let myself be silenced or sidelined by them. Maya Angelou taught us that hate can cause a lot of problems, but it has not yet solved a single one. I know in my heart of hearts that feeling angry at the world, including people I do not know at my local train station, solves nothing. It is up to us all in this place to rehabilitate politics through this Session, and to use the King’s Speech to show that we are truly capable of bold, radical thought. I hope to play my part in presenting ideas to my colleagues and securing their cross-party support to make that happen, because this country needs and deserves nothing less.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call Kirsty Blackman, after whose contribution there will be a speaking limit of five minutes.