Conduct of the Right Hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip — House of Commons, 2021-11-30
Topic: Government Operations
Anneliese Jane Dodds (Labour, Centre-left): I regret the fact that the hon. Member is confused. There appears to be a fair amount of confusion this afternoon. Labour has set out those measures for MPs, and we have made it very clear that we would not stand back, as his party appears to be doing. We would take that action because we are determined to clean up politics for the future. Indeed, those measures are urgent and necessary because the current system relies on having a Prime Minister who respects the rules and understands that there must be consequences for breaking them Labour set out those radical proposals for reform because it is so urgently needed. When it comes to cleaning up crony contracts, we are insisting on transparency because we have to learn from the mistakes made by the Conservatives, not least during this crisis, and I am afraid that we also have to learn from mistakes made by any party, including the SNP. I regret that the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, for whom I have a huge amount of respect, was not more reflective on the actions of his own party today. The SNP Government had already been criticised for treating journalists and politicians differently in their responses to freedom of information requests when the SNP’s Health Secretary tried to have freedom of information requests suspended. Disturbingly, it has been revealed that an SNP Cabinet Minister then directly intervened to try to prevent the publication of statistics on care home deaths before the Holyrood elections. The Financial Times newspaper has had to battle to force the SNP Government to reveal the total cost of their guarantee to Sanjeev Gupta’s businesses, which appears to be to the tune of more than half a billion pounds. Labour believes that sunlight is the best disinfectant, in Whitehall and in Holyrood Rules are there for a reason: to regulate our Parliament and its elected representatives; to uphold standards in public life; and to protect our institutions from the cancer of cronyism and corruption. As the Prime Minister has discovered in recent weeks, ripping up these rules is thankfully easier said than done. But while he fails to take action to strengthen the system, working families in our country continue to pay the price. In response to what the Minister tried to set out before, I say to him that they have been paying the price. They have been paying the price with the longest squeeze on living standards in this country since Napoleonic times, with rising fuel prices and no plan to tackle them, with life expectancy falling in many parts of our country and with 5.5 million people on NHS waiting lists. They are also paying the price with rail in the north being scaled back, and they will pay even more of the price with the Conservatives’ working-class dementia tax. The Minister tried to claim that his Government were delivering what the people of this country wanted, but they do not want the Conservatives picking their pockets, they do not want their incompetence on public services and they do not want their sleaze, graft or corruption either.