Prorogation (Disclosure of Communications)

Debate between David Linden and Rachel Maclean

Monday 9th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Maclean]

I am delighted to hear that, and I absolutely acknowledge my right hon. Friend’s support for the withdrawal agreement and for any future deal. It is wonderful to hear that.

Special advisers are caught up in this Humble Address. I do not have a lot of experience of special advisers. I am a junior Parliamentary Private Secretary, and I have had the privilege of working with a few special advisers in the Departments I have been honoured to assist, and I have found them all, without exception, to be dedicated and conscientious individuals who do their job to the best of their ability.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

How many special advisers has the hon. Lady worked with who have been found in contempt of Parliament?

[Rachel Maclean]

That is a hypothetical point, because we have not yet passed this motion. As I said at the start of my remarks, I have not been here long and I have very limited experience, so I have worked with none.

This would be an unprecedented situation for individuals who came into public life and into politics for the best of reasons. They want to perform public service and carry out their offices, and this Humble Address puts them in an extremely difficult position.

Governments of all colours have special advisers, which is an established role. It is not just this Government who have special advisers. The Labour Government had special advisers, too. We need to be extremely careful about tying their hands and constraining their freedom to advise the Ministers with whom they work.

Welfare Reform and Work Act

Debate between David Linden and Rachel Maclean

Wednesday 21st March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) on securing this important debate. It is a pleasure to follow her speech, which raised some very important issues. As Members of Parliament, we all want to ensure that the welfare system operates correctly. I am a strong believer in what the Government are doing on welfare and find myself, once again, in a debate about welfare reform. I am glad to be here, because one of the Government’s most important jobs is looking after those who are unable to look after themselves. I am proud of what this Government have done during the time I have been in Parliament, and of the record since the 2010 coalition Government and the Conservative Government that followed.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

The hon. Lady talks about how proud she is of this Government’s actions, but by the time this debate concludes, at 11 o’ clock, St Stephen’s church café in Redditch will open as a food bank. Does she not understand that there is a clear correlation between this Government’s actions on welfare reform and the food banks in her constituency?

[Rachel Maclean]

I visited the food bank and have spoken to the people there, but time does not permit me to talk in depth about those issues. I have an ongoing dialogue with both the people who run the food bank and the people who use it. I understand very well what is happening in my constituency of Redditch and, if the hon. Gentleman will forgive me for moving on, I will speak about some of my experiences with universal credit and the jobcentre there.

I will focus my remarks on universal credit because it is a key plank of the Government’s reforms. Since my election, I have made it a priority to understand what services exist for my constituents who face challenges, whether those are unemployment, poverty or physical and mental health problems. As a constituency MP, I understand very well what is going on. There are areas of deprivation in Redditch, as there are in every constituency up and down the country. It is up to the Government to ensure that the help is on the ground, where it is needed.

It is important to revisit the principles behind the drive to reform the system that we inherited from the last Labour Government. In that system, people had little or no incentive to get back into work. When they did, they found themselves worse off and liable to lose money if they took on more hours or a better paid job. How could that be right?

The hon. Member for Central Ayrshire talked about tax credits. It is my understanding from DWP statistics that tax credit spending ballooned from £1.1 billion at its introduction to £30 billion a year by 2015. I do not think it is right to spend such a rapidly escalating amount of GDP on benefits. That indicates there is something fundamentally wrong at the heart of the system.

There is widespread public support for the principle that welfare should be not a life sentence, but a lifeline as someone transitions through difficult circumstances or the loss of a job. The old welfare system had become labyrinthine in its complexity, with a number of different benefits adding to the confusion over what someone was entitled to. It was not a system that gave people a ladder to a better life, but rather one that trapped them in worklessness and poverty.

Balancing the Public Finances

Debate between David Linden and Rachel Maclean

Tuesday 11th July 2017 Westminster Hall

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) on securing this debate. It was somewhat mischievous of him to comment on one side of the Chamber being empty—interestingly, the Government side was empty last week when we were debating WASPI women.

For far too long, balancing the public finances has generally been done on the backs of the poorest and most vulnerable in our society.

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[David Linden]

I will not, because Members have taken quite a long time. Despite several years of austerity, Her Majesty’s Government continue to miss their targets on debt, deficit and borrowing. Quite simply, austerity has failed to rebalance our public finances, and we need to reassess and re-evaluate our approach.

The biggest contributor to a sluggish UK economy and the biggest threat to our public finances is the reckless hard Brexit currently being pursued by Her Majesty’s Government. That has not been helped by Labour Members voting to give the Prime Minister a blank cheque by voting against single market membership only two weeks ago.

Scottish National party Members will continue to stand up not only for access to but membership of the single market and customs union. When we look at our public finances, we see a major trade deficit, which in the three months to April was £8.6 billion, up from £6.9 billion in the previous quarter. By turning our back on the single market and pursuing a hard Brexit, we risk delivering further shocks to our already precarious economy.

The UK economy grew by just 0.2% in quarter 1 of this year. In comparison, in the same quarter Scotland’s economy grew four times faster. That was somewhat of a surprise, not least because colleagues in the Scottish Conservative party were briefing last week that Scotland was about to move into recession, which certainly did not happen.

We face difficult financial decisions in Scotland, not least because Scotland’s budget faces a real-terms cut of £2.9 billion due to UK austerity. That figure of £2.9 billion is significant, because had Barnett consequentials been followed during the Government’s grubby deal with the Democratic Unionist party, Scotland would have stood to receive £2.9 billion.

I want to move on and to some of my concerns about the deeply worrying consequences posed for Scotland by a hard Brexit. The stark reality is that Brexit threatens to cost the economy around £11 billion by 2030 and result in 80,000 fewer jobs compared with remaining within the EU. We understand and accept that, despite 62% of Scots voting to remain in the EU, we are leaving. However, the Scottish Government have sought to be reasonable and amicable, and have come forward with a compromise that would allow Scotland to remain within the single market. Unfortunately, those pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

We know that Her Majesty’s Government are pursuing a reckless approach to the economy, with a hard Brexit coupled to an ideologically driven obsession with austerity. SNP Members believe it does not have to be like that. Cuts are a choice, not a necessity. During the recent general election campaign, we put forward a responsible and credible fiscal plan that would return a balanced budget by the end of the Parliament. However, in doing so, we would generate an additional £118 billion cumulatively over the next Parliament, with around £10 billion flowing to Scotland. Our fiscal plan would stabilise net borrowing at the level it was before the financial crash and see debt begin to fall as a share of GDP from 2019-20.

Ministers and Conservative Members regularly tell us how employment is high under this Conservative Government. What they do not say is that much of that is due to part-time work or, worse still, exploitative zero-hours contracts. Unstable and low pay is a worry for my constituents in the east end of Glasgow, with the Resolution Foundation estimating that the period 2011-2020 will be the worst decade for wage growth in 210 years. That is before we take into account the Government’s con trick of the living wage, which will actively discriminate against under-25s.