Business of the House

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

Happy birthday, Mr Speaker. I join you in your good wishes to Tony.

Will the Leader of the House please give us the forthcoming business?

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg)]

Mr Speaker, as you are just leaving the Chair, may I too wish you a happy birthday, before you depart? I do not think we will sing.

The business for the week commencing 14 June will include:

Monday 14 June—Second Reading of the National Insurance Contributions Bill.

Tuesday 15 June—Opposition day (2nd allotted day). There will be a debate on a motion in the name of the official Opposition. Subject to be announced.

Wednesday 16 June—Second Reading of the Rating (Coronavirus) and Directors Disqualification (Dissolved Companies) Bill.

Thursday 17 June—General debate on the Misuse of Drugs Act, followed by a general debate on the UK’s preventing sexual violence in conflict initiative and the G7. The subjects for these debates were determined by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 18 June—The House will not be sitting.

The provisional business for the week commencing 21 June will include:

Monday 21 June—Opposition day (3rd allotted day). There will be a debate on a motion in the name of the official Opposition. Subject to be announced.

Tuesday 22 June—Second Reading of the Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Bill.

Wednesday 23 June—Consideration in Committee of the Armed Forces Bill.

Thursday 24 June—General debate on the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership, followed by business to be determined by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 25 June—The House will not be sitting.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I thank the Leader of the House for the business. Can he share with the House the reasons why the business for next week appears to have changed?

This is a great country, full of amazing, inspiring people, and this week is the Government’s opportunity to showcase our great country and its values at the G7 in Cornwall—leading, not just hosting. Yet instead of leadership, what do we have? The UK teetering on the brink of a trade war with our nearest allies, including some G7 guests, over sausages. This is about the meaning of the Northern Ireland protocol, an international agreement that the Prime Minister literally negotiated. I wonder if he actually read it, or maybe he got a classmate to do his homework.

The UK is the only developed economy and the only G7 participant to be cutting aid for life-saving global programmes. We have a Government who do not even dare to put that to a parliamentary vote.

There is no news of when Nazanin and others trapped in foreign jails for crimes that they did not commit will be reunited with their families.

We have a call to get the world vaccinated—but not until the end of next year. The virus is still mutating and none of us is safe until everyone is safe, so I urge the Prime Minister to put party politics aside and take Labour’s plan for global vaccination to the G7.

To demonstrate the extent of his commitment to tackling the climate emergency, the Prime Minister flies to Cornwall by private jet. My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) stands ready to advise the Prime Minister on train times for his return. While he is on it, perhaps the Prime Minister could sort out his failed green homes scheme. He should be leading the G7 by example and inspiration, not just putting out the place cards for dinner, so will the Leader of the House ask the Prime Minister to showcase what this country has to offer instead of his own lack of leadership?

I am disappointed that the Government have not taken responsibility for the loophole that means that a Member can be subject to a parliamentary recall petition by their constituents for an expenses charge but not for serious sexual harassment. A Member who has been sexually harassing staff will return to Parliament within weeks and shows no sign of resigning. Staff are worried and constituents have every right to be concerned, so will the Leader of the House confirm that the public can use the parliamentary petitions process to trigger a debate about the matter? Will he tell us why that Member is still, apparently, a member of the Conservative party? Will he bring forward the motions needed so that the people of Delyn can decide whether they want to ditch their MP?

On the domestic agenda, again there is failure. The Secretary of State for Education feels our children’s future is worth just 50 quid per pupil, compared with £2,500 in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Labour has an actual catch-up plan that Parliament voted in favour of yesterday. If the Government will not do the right thing and adopt Labour’s plan, will the Secretary of State for Education explain to the House what it is about breakfast clubs, mental health support and small group tutoring that he objects to?

It is Carers Week, and carers and people who need care in Bristol West want me to ask the Prime Minister where his plan to fix social care is. It was announced 687 days ago; how many more years will they have to wait? The Government have repeatedly ignored crises in health and social care over the past decade, and they failed to act on the 2016 pandemic preparedness report. They continue to ignore disabled people, people with long-term illnesses and those needing mental health support during the pandemic. They have paid no attention to the exhaustion of heroic key workers who just keep on going and need hope that things will get better soon. The Government continue to use the pandemic as their personal cash machine; the least they could do is announce the public inquiry. The Leader of the House said last time that we should not have the inquiry while the virus is still raging. He cannot have it both ways: it is either raging or it is not. If it is, the Government need to learn now the lessons about what is going wrong. There is no excuse for delaying the inquiry.

Successive Tory Governments have run down public services, eroded working people’s ability to pay rent and feed their families, and left productivity stagnant. That is in stark contrast to the Labour Government, who left the country with the brilliant Sure Start scheme for early years; thousands more police, nurses and doctors; the shortest waiting times on record for key treatments; and low crime rates—plus an economy that was recovering well after the global financial crisis. This Government announce a few tutors here or some more nurses there, but it is a drop in the ocean compared with the destruction of the past 11 Tory years. It is not just the pandemic: children need tutors because Tories cut education; crime rates soar because Tories cut police numbers; and rape victims wait years for justice because Tories cut the justice system. And now they expect people to be grateful for the thin gruel they are offering. No wonder the people of North East Somerset are voting Labour.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Lady may have fallen into the nostalgic trap—I am sometimes accused of falling into one myself—of looking back at a golden age past but forgetting the reality of the misery of the last socialist Government. That socialist Government left us with an annual deficit of £150 billion a year, the worst financial crisis that we had seen in decade after decade and a situation in which, as one of her own Members said, there was simply no money left. Much though I think we should admire, like and revel in our past history, we have to remember the failures of socialism and that every socialist Government that this country has ever had, at the end of their complete term, have left unemployment higher than when they came into office.

As regards police, we now have over 8,000 more police, meeting our promise to recruit more than 20,000. We are ensuring that the police are on the streets so that we are kept safe. We have reformed education with the advent of more academy schools, which are raising standards. The hon. Lady blamed the need for tutoring on the Conservative party, whereas, actually, the need for extra tutoring and the fact that a package of £3 billion in total has been provided to help children is because of the pandemic. That seems to have passed from her mind. It is quite right that the pandemic should have an inquiry, as the Prime Minister has promised, and that will be set up by the end of this parliamentary Session, because it is right to look at it when the decisions have all been taken and we begin to see the proper consequences of it.

The hon. Lady talks about leading in the G7. That is precisely what the Prime Minister is doing; he is showing the clearest possible leadership. The vaccine roll-out in the rest of the world will be helped enormously, and particularly, by the Oxford-AstraZeneca drug. Why? Because of the agreement made with Oxford-AstraZeneca to provide it at cost price. That is the fundamental difference that means that it can be afforded, to allow it to spread across the world, helping millions upon millions of people—leadership by the United Kingdom.

The Prime Minister will call upon the G7 leaders to make commitments to vaccinate the entire world against the coronavirus by the end of 2022. He is calling for emissions cuts and is hosting COP26 later in the year. It is an extraordinary degree of leadership that is being shown among the democratic nations that are showing the way, encouraging people to have freedom and democracy.

The hon. Lady seems to want to ban British sausages from Northern Ireland, but let us not fuss too much about sausages. Sausages are important and they may be a nice thing to have for breakfast, but the scandal is that the European Union takes it upon itself to think that life-saving cancer drugs may not go freely between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This is not the act of a friendly organisation. This is an act of an organisation playing games, playing ducks and drakes with the peace process. There is a brilliant article by David Trimble in the newspaper today setting out the risk that the European Union is taking. We should be absolutely clear that the protocol was there to respect the integrity of the United Kingdom, as well as to help the single market. It cannot have one side but not the other.

Then the hon. Lady came to things that can perfectly well be catered for by Opposition days. There are dates that have been announced over the next two weeks. If she wants to debate membership of this House for individual Members, I call upon her to put down a motion; it is up to her to do it. If she wants to have a debate on overseas aid, I call upon her to do it, but no sensible Government would be continuing with overseas aid at its previous levels in the current financial circumstances. It is extremely sensible to cut our coat according to our cloth. That is what Her Majesty’s Government are doing, and that is quite right. It is the proper thing to do and it still means that, as a percentage of GDP, we are one of the most generous donors in the world, and we are giving more than was ever given by that socialist Government of happy memory that I started with. Do we not remember what the hon. Lady was saying at the end—how glorious it was by 2010? They gave away less money then, so they do not have that much to be proud of. We as Conservatives do.