Randox Covid Contracts — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Government Operations
Anneliese Jane Dodds (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Earlier in the debate, he detailed that sorry tale in devastating manner, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy). Arco had existed for 135 years, providing essential material. It was completely ignored, yet Ayanda Capital, for example—an investment firm with no PPE experience —ended up being used by the Government to purchase 50 million masks that were not even usable There were other companies that missed out. Multibrands International, based in Bradford, had been providing PPE to the Chinese Government since the end of 2019. It spent months trying to offer those services to the UK Government, but got absolutely nowhere. What did the Government do instead? They bought 400,000 protective gowns from Turkey that were unusable That is the way it always seems to be with the Conservative party: one rule for the Conservatives and their friends, another rule for everyone else—and it is the British people who pay the price. This Conservative Government are doing their best to suggest that every politician was engaged in graft. They are trying to drag everyone else down to their level and feed a growing disillusionment with our politics that damages us all. But Labour Members know that that is not true; I suspect that a fair few Conservative Members know it, too The people of Britain know when they are being taken for fools. When a party found guilty of breaking the rules tries to remake them to protect one of its own, there is a word for that: corruption. That is what this Prime Minister has brought into the heart of our politics, and the British people will not tolerate it. That is why the Prime Minister panicked last week and U-turned: because he knew that he had been rumbled We all have to play by the same rules, whatever the Prime Minister thinks. Labour has been clear that if we were in power, things would change. We would ban dodgy second jobs like those of the former Member for North Shropshire—and I mean a proper ban, not the watered-down cop-out that the Prime Minister is trying to lay down this afternoon. We would close the revolving door and ban Ministers from lobbying for at least five years after they leave office. We would stop Conservative plans to allow foreign money to flow into our politics, and ban the use of shell companies to hide the source of donations. We would create a new office for value for money and reform procurement rules to put an end to the industrial-scale wasting of public money, and we would create a new, genuinely independent integrity and ethics commission to restore the standards in public life that have been trashed by this Government This scandal has presented a clear choice about the kind of politics we want for our country. Do we want Boris Johnson’s politics of the gutter, or Keir Starmer’s politics of decency and integrity? Conservative Members have a choice today as well. They can abstain, under orders from the Prime Minister, their Chief Whip and the Leader of the House; or they can decide to make a stand. They can decide that they want to have a vote on this because they want to take a better path. Let us be very clear about the message that abstention is going to send. We have heard weasel words during this debate, and it seems clear that the scope of what the Government are proposing today, in terms of what they are willing to release, is far less than what Labour’s motion requires I see the Minister shaking her head. I sincerely hope that she has got that correct, because, having listened to what she said and compared it with what is written in the Labour motion, I think that there is far less that this Government are prepared to reveal.