Debate on the Address — House of Commons, 2022-05-10
Topic: Mixed Topics
Matthew Toby Perkins (Labour, Centre-left): That is absolutely the case. Whether courts are not seeing people in time, or deciding not to send people to jail who they really should because jails are so overcrowded, or giving people shorter sentences, there are a whole variety of reasons why these violent criminals are making our streets less safe The Government claim that they will fund the NHS to reduce covid backlogs. This is the Government who caused the pre-covid backlogs. We went into covid with the longest waiting times since—guess when?—the last time we had a Tory Government. Labour left government with a two-week cancer guarantee and waiting times below 18 weeks across the country. This Government reduced NHS spending from when they came to office in 2010 to 2019, when the covid pandemic hit, so that Britain went from being in line with the European average to being a backmarker once again. They presided over an NHS staffing crisis, failed to train enough doctors or nurses, and discouraged European nurses from helping out. This failure is on their watch—and I have not even got to the end of the first paragraph of the Gracious Speech. We have a Government who ask us to believe that they are the party to address the very problems they have caused. These are not issues that the Government inherited, but ones that through a decade of austerity, through their failure on Brexit and their prioritisation of culture wars ahead of the business of government, explicitly acknowledge the failure that 12 years of Tory rule has led to We should not be fooled into believing that this is a Government with a plan to address those failings. The Budget showed that a Government who have normalised food bank usage will not be a Government committed to helping people with the cost of living. It is remarkable. We heard the Prime Minister on his feet today claiming that we will see action on the cost of living in the coming days, only for Treasury sources to brief that the Chancellor of Exchequer knows nothing about that, and that there are no plans. This Government not only fail to take action on the cost of living, but they fail even to agree on a line about when they will take different steps The Government had a choice about how the global rise in energy prices could be tackled. They could have chosen to ask energy companies to share a little of their grotesque wealth, or they could have asked landlords and property billionaires to pay a little more. Instead, the Chancellor’s eyes fell, as they always do, on the working poor, with the British Government uniquely raising taxes for working people. This is a Government big on tactics but bereft of strategy. The Home Secretary wanders around looking for a culture war to join, while failing to address the issues that make our streets, and indeed our homes, less safe A Labour Queen’s Speech would have contained measures genuinely to alleviate food and energy poverty, and support people with the cost of living crisis. We would have seen a commitment to an industrial strategy that targeted the greatest resources on those areas that need them most, and addressed the ways that things such as the apprenticeship levy are failing. A Labour Queen’s Speech would have recognised that we cannot cure NHS waiting times unless we resource and value carers in our community, and that overseas workers help us to allow our elders to grow older in dignity. A Labour Queen’s Speech would have tackled tax avoidance and non-dom status—as it turns out, that was the modus operandi of prominent members of the Cabinet and their families—and rooted out the scandalous wastage of public money that the Government routinely allow. It would also have prioritised repairing relations with our European counterparts so that Brexit can be a mutual success, rather than revisiting previous failures as it appears that, depressingly, the Government intend This is a Government exhausted of ideas and too mired in their own disgraces to address the problems of the nation, and it is well past time for them to be gone. They have now reached the stage where the Prime Minister is so weakened that he has to threaten his own party with an election if they do not offer him their support. Labour will be ready when that election comes, and that cannot come a moment too soon Ordered, That the debate be now adjourned.—(David T. C. Davies.) Debate to be resumed tomorrow.