Business of the House

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Will the Leader of the House make some comments today about future business?

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Mr Andrew Lansley)]

With the progress of business now certain, a formal announcement was made yesterday evening in the other place on the arrangements for Prorogation. It may be for the convenience of the House if I indicated that I expect royal commissioners to attend the other place this afternoon to signify Royal Assent to several Bills and to prorogue Parliament until Wednesday 8 May.

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Leader of the House for announcing that there will be a Queen’s Speech on 8 May. I would like to take the opportunity to thank you, Mr Speaker, and all staff of the House for their support during this Session. We prorogue today, giving Members the opportunity to get some much-needed exercise campaigning in the local elections next week. I just hope that the Leader of the House will not be in a Conservative battle bus driven by the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Norwich North (Miss Smith), because she told the House this week that Sunderland was near Bolton.

In the last few days of this Session, the Government have had to throw a series of cherished policies overboard to save their Bills from falling in the Lords. They have caved in on trying to abolish the general equality duty, on caste discrimination, on the pension age of Ministry of Defence police and fire officers, on licensing letting agents and the free market free-for-all on conservatories. In the battle over the Chancellor’s “shares for rights scheme”, they managed to spark two revolts in the Lords by two previous Lib Dem leaders and four former Tory Cabinet Ministers, including a previous Tory Chancellor. Lord Forsyth, the Thatcherite former Scottish Secretary said the scheme was

“ill thought through, confused and muddled”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 March 2013; Vol. 744, c. 597.],

while the former Cabinet Secretary, Lord O’Donnell asked:

“in the old days the price of slavery was 20 or 30 pieces of silver. Is it now £2,000?”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 March 2013; Vol. 744, c. 617.]

The Office for Budget Responsibility thinks that the cost of the Chancellor’s folly will be nearly £1 billion, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that it could “foster tax avoidance”. The Chancellor’s pet scheme was saved by an eleventh-hour compromise last night, but when will he realise that it is simply wrong to put a price on people’s right to be treated fairly at work?

Reflecting on the current Session, I calculated that up to this morning the Government had U-turned 21 times, an average of once every seven sitting days. The Leader of the House has just announced another U-turn, on the House business committee. I wonder whether we shall see even more in the next Session. That may be a promise that the Government considered for the Queen’s Speech: it is probably the only target that they could actually meet. I hope that the Leader of the House will not mind my borrowing a well-worn phrase as a piece of advice for the Government: “You turn again if you want to”—and the sooner the better.

We now know that of the 10 original members of the Downing street policy unit only three remain, and apparently two of those are actively seeking other work. So great is the exodus that Conservative Back Benchers are complaining that No. 10 resembles the Mary Celeste, and that the Deputy Prime Minister has more advisers than the boss. Can the Leader of the House arrange for the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond), to come and make a statement about the Government’s policy on emergency support for sinking ships?

In a desperate attempt to reverse his fortunes, the Prime Minister has just announced that the hon. Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson) is to be given a job at No. 10. The problem is that the Prime Minister’s Back Benchers think that he has got the wrong brother, and that it is the top job at No.10 that the Johnson dynasty really want. Meanwhile, sources tell us that the latest round of proposed spending cuts has caused such a backlash that Cabinet Ministers are turning on each other in a circular firing squad. They cannot even organise a firing squad properly.

On Tuesday, the Office for National Statistics released the latest public sector net borrowing figures. They were a quarter of 1% lower than last year’s—and that is only after the most blatant piece of creative accounting at the Treasury that we have seen for a very long time. We now know that the Government are set to borrow £245 billion more than they planned to borrow in 2010. That is the cost of their economic failure.

The Chancellor’s deficit reduction plan has been so successful that, at the rate he is going, it will take 400 years to balance the books. If we look back 400 years, we see that the gunpowder plot had just failed, the King James Bible was newly published, and the pilgrim fathers were preparing to set sail for north America. Can the Leader of the House promise a debate in the new Session on the abject failure of the Chancellor’s economic plan? Today’s anaemic GDP figures show that we are back to where we were six months ago.

This week the Chancellor told John Humphrys that he had shed a tear while listening to the headlines on the “Today” programme. Can the Leader of the House tell us which headlines he meant? Was it the IMF describing his economic plan as “playing with fire”? Was it the Archbishop of Canterbury saying that we were in a depression? Was it yet another ratings agency stripping us of our triple A status? Or was it the Chancellor’s poll ratings, which are plummeting among his own Back Benchers?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to the shadow Leader of the House for, in particular, expressing her appreciation for the House service, which I share. At the end of a parliamentary Session, we should express our appreciation especially for those who support us in the carrying on of the Business of the Chamber—the Clerks at the Table, in the Table Office and in the Public Bill Office, those who look after us in the Chamber, and of course the Official Reporters. The list of those on whom we depend is very long, and we are very grateful to them.

I am not in a position to comment on business to be conducted during the next Session, but in the current Session we have completed the passage of a substantial amount of important legislation. Some 27 Bills have been passed, including three that were carried over from the first Session to the second. Important measures were introduced, such as the Justice and Security Bill, the establishment of the National Crime Agency in the Crime and Courts Bill, individual voter registration, the new green investment bank, the Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill, and of course just this week the Succession to the Crown Bill.

At previous business questions, the shadow Leader of the House has asked about the publication of legislation in draft. In this Session, we published 15 Bills in draft, which is more than in any previous Session, including the two-year Session that preceded this one. To that extent I hope, we have continued a process established in this Parliament by my predecessor of ensuring that the House, the public and stakeholders have the greatest possible opportunity for input and contribution to the passage of legislation.

The shadow Leader of the House raised a number of issues. I know that the Prime Minister was thinking of the right Johnson when he engaged my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson) in policy making. It is not just about my hon. Friend, but about other Government Members; there is a difference. In the Liberal Democrat party, for their purposes, and in the Conservative party, elected Members of the party democratically take part in the discussion of policy, and contribute directly to policy. Labour policy is directed to Members by the trade unions. We have it from a former general secretary of the Labour party himself, who said of the trade unions that they were

“running rings around him”

—the Leader of the Opposition—

“and soon will control much of the party.”

He says that they control the selection of MEPs. They are the piper who calls the Labour party tune. In the last quarter, Len McCluskey and Unite paid a third of the Labour party’s total income—just that single trade union. Is it any surprise that it wants to go from controlling candidate selection to controlling the policy of the Labour party and who is on the Opposition Front Bench? I am sure the shadow Leader of the House is safe, but some of her colleagues are not. In the next Session, we shall see what the consequence may be in terms of changes on the Opposition Front Bench.