Easter Recess: Government Update — House of Lords, 2022-04-25
Topic: International Affairs
Richard Newby (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, this almost entirely vacuous Statement is in three unconnected parts. The first deals with "Partygate" and is really desperate stuff "I paid the fine immediately" said the Prime Minister, as though this was somehow praiseworthy rather than a legal requirement "As soon as I received the notice, I acknowledged the hurt and the anger" said the Prime Minister, as if, until he received the fine, he was not aware of what the country has been feeling for many months "It didn’t occur to me, then or subsequently", said the Prime Minister, "that a gathering in the Cabinet Room could amount to a breach of the rules", as though this inadvertent thoughtlessness or straightforward ignorance was an excuse for breaking the law. We are told that there may be more prime-ministerial fines; we read that the Gray report will be excoriating about his behaviour; and we now have the prospect of a long wait until the Commons Privileges Committee decides whether he has misled the Commons. For the Prime Minister, this is death by a thousand cuts; but for the country, it is a continuing shame and embarrassment Over recent days, a number of Cabinet Ministers have explained that they support the Prime Minister and have set out their reasons for doing so. I was out of the country for a week, until yesterday evening, and so may have missed any such Statement from the Leader of the House, so I wonder whether she will take this opportunity to inform the House whether she believes that the Prime Minister’s law breaking is as irrelevant as many of her colleagues do, and whether the Prime Minister still has her full support The second part of the Statement is about Ukraine. While the Prime Minister’s travelogue, complete with random comments about people bumped into on the streets of Kyiv, is interesting, he has literally nothing new to say. We obviously support the assistance which the UK is now giving Ukraine and share the Prime Minister’s admiration for the courage and heroism of the Ukrainian people. We agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, that sanctions could be tightened in some respects We also agree with the noble Baroness that the asylum process is as dysfunctional as her examples proved. It beggars belief that the rules are so bureaucratic and inhumane—and that they still have not been made less bureaucratic and humane. I also look forward to hearing the noble Baroness the Leader’s figures for the number of people who have applied, have been accepted and have arrived through the asylum process But a lesson from this crisis that the Prime Minister has yet to draw publicly, I think, is that it is a mistake to appease tyrants like Putin, as successive British Governments did over the last decade. It is right that the UK is now prepared to offer long-term support to Ukraine to protect it from any future invasion, but the lesson here surely is that, if we had given the country more support at an earlier stage, there would not have been such an invasion in the first place Thirdly, the Statement makes passing reference to the most serious domestic issue facing the country: the cost of living crisis. It says that the Government are "tackling" the long-term impact on energy prices and cites as one of their main achievements that "we are helping families to insulate their homes" The Government should indeed be helping people to insulate their homes, but they scrapped the green homes grant last year and, in the Chancellor’s recent Spring Statement, there was literally nothing new to insulate so much as one single additional home. This is a typical case of prime ministerial hyperbole. It would be great if what he claimed were actually true, but it is not Finally, the Prime Minister says that his job is "to make the British people safer, more secure and more prosperous" That should indeed be his job. However, as we now see on a daily basis, Brexit is making the country less prosperous and less secure—and it remains his proudest boast So the Prime Minister’s record is to diminish the office that he holds, diminish the standing of Great Britain across the world and fail the British people on the core requirements of government. As I believe he will discover in next week’s elections, the British people have had enough of it. For all our sakes, the sooner he goes, the better.