Business of the House

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Will the Leader of the House give us the business for next week?

[The First Secretary of State and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr William Hague)]

The business for next week is as follows:

Monday 9 March—Remaining stages of the Armed Forces (Service Complaints and Financial Assistance) Bill [Lords], followed by consideration of Lords amendments to the Consumer Rights Bill, followed by motion to approve a European document relating to the Commission work programme 2015, followed by general debate on the forthcoming nuclear non-proliferation treaty review conference. The subject for this debate was recommended by the Backbench Business Committee.

Tuesday 10 March—Consideration of Lords amendments to the Deregulation Bill, followed by motion to approve statutory instruments relating to counter-terrorism, followed by motion to approve a European document relating to subsidiarity and proportionality and the Commission’s relations with national Parliaments, followed by debate on a motion relating to school funding. The subject for this debate was recommended by the Backbench Business Committee.

Wednesday 11 March—Opposition day (19th allotted day). There will be a debate on a motion in the name of the Democratic Unionist Party. Subject to be announced.

Thursday 12 March—Debate on a motion relating to defence spending, followed by debate on a motion relating to education regulations and faith schools. The subjects for both debates were recommended by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 13 March—The House will not be sitting.

The provisional business for the week commencing 16 March will include:

Monday 16 March—Motion to approve statutory instruments relating to counter-terrorism, followed by motion to approve the draft Drug Driving (Specified Limits) England and Wales (Amendment) Regulations 2015, followed by the Chairman of Ways and Means has named opposed private business for consideration.

Tuesday 17 March—Consideration of Lords amendments to the Modern Slavery Bill, followed by motion to approve a statutory instrument relating to counter-terrorism, followed by debate on motions relating to the reports from the Committee on Standards on the code of conduct and on the standards system in the House of Commons, followed by business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Wednesday 18 March—My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer will open his Budget statement.

Thursday 19 March—Continuation of the Budget debate.

Friday 20 March—Continuation of the Budget debate.

I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for the remainder of March will be:

Thursday 12 March—General debate on the relationship between police and children, followed by general debate on violence against women and girls.

Monday 16 March—General debate on a petition relating to veterans’ pensions.

Thursday 19 March—General debate on the future of local newspapers.

Monday 23 March—General debate on an e-petition relating to proposed increase in fees for nurses and midwives.

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Leader of the House for announcing next week’s business. On Sunday, we will celebrate international women’s day. We have our pink bus, which is generating fantastic enthusiasm wherever it goes in the country, and half our candidates in target seats are women. Will the Leader of the House tell us what the Conservative party is doing to involve women properly in politics?

On Monday, we will consider Lords amendments to the Consumer Rights Bill, including proposals for a crackdown on ticket touting. Despite widespread evidence of touts fleecing the public and calls for action from across the leisure industry, the Government have spent more than a year opposing the measures and the Culture Secretary described ticket touts admiringly as “classic entrepreneurs”. Will the Leader of the House confirm that following their humiliating climbdown in the Lords the Government will support these proposals in the Commons and finally protect the public from this exploitation?

There are strong and powerful arguments in favour of plain packaging for cigarettes, but this Government have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into accepting them. First, they were for a vote on plain packaging, then when they took tobacco lobbyist Lynton Crosby in to the heart of Downing street they were suddenly against it. Now after five years of inaction, in the dying days of this Parliament, they are for it again. I note that the plain packaging regulations will finally be taken in Committee on 9 March, but why did the Leader not schedule a debate on the Floor of the House? Is it because he knows that his party is split right down the middle on this important public health measure but he does not want the public to notice?

Yesterday the Prime Minister repeatedly refused to acknowledge his complete failure to keep his “no ifs, no buts” promise on net migration, which is not in the tens of thousands that he promised but nearly 300,000 this year alone. In a desperate attempt at a diversionary tactic, he treated us to a selective list of things that he thinks he got right, while continuing to refuse to make himself available for scrutiny on any of them in a head-to-head TV debate with my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition.

I greatly enjoyed the Leader of the House’s speech at the Press Gallery lunch last week, decoding what he called civil service-ese and revealing that when civil servants say, “We are scaling up our response,” they actually mean, “We never expected this to happen.” So I have been doing my own decoding of the Prime Minister’s pre-election promises. When he said:

“We have absolutely no plans to raise VAT”,

what he really meant was, “ I will raise VAT when the election is safely over.” When he said, “We will not balance the books on the backs of the poor”, what he really meant was, “We will not balance the books at all.” When he said in 2009:

“I have always believed in live television debates. I think they can help enliven our democracy.”,

what he really meant was, “I will only debate with people when I’m not scared I might lose.”

In his pre-2010 election contract with the British people, the Prime Minister wrote:

“If we don’t deliver our side of the bargain, vote us out in five years’ time.”

Mr Speaker, there are only nine weeks to go.

The Liberal Democrats are no better. This week we have learned what their red line in any future coalition talks would be. Having campaigned to scrap all tuition fees during the last election, only to vote to triple them after the election, they now plan to veto Labour’s plan to cut fees by a third and increase grants for poor students. I wonder whether we could have that in writing, because then we will know for sure that they will do the exact opposite.

It is not surprising that the Lib Dem right hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker) has decided that he needs to take matters into his own hands. On Tuesday he held an Adjournment debate on the plight of endangered species, and he has written about it on Politics Home. He laments:

“The facts are stark. … numbers have fallen … the poachers are highly organised. … we are in a race against time.”

Before long, the Liberal Democrats will be going the way of the woolly mammoth.

I have learned this week that the Conservative party is busy preparing for a Labour victory in May. The Chancellor has apparently hatched a long-term cunning plan to curb the regicidal instincts of the Conservative party—good luck with that—and keep the Prime Minister on as leader after 7 May even if it loses. According to one Back Bencher, “He either wins or he goes.” Once again showing his strategic prowess, the man he has chosen to assist him in this mission to avoid a leadership battle is the ever-absent Tory Chief Whip. Apparently they are going to form a protective ring around their leader and claim that he won a moral victory even if the Conservatives lose. Is this why the Chief Whip is never here, Mr Speaker? He is too busy forming a protective ring around the Prime Minister to bother to come to this Chamber. Having just listed some of their broken promises, I feel I should offer some comfort to the Conservatives. If there is one target that I am confident the Tories will not miss, it is the one on the Prime Minister’s back.

[Mr Hague]

The shadow Leader may not be in a strong position this week to talk about party leaders since this is the week in which the Doncaster Free Press released its power list and revealed that the Leader of the Opposition was the fourth most influential person in Doncaster, ranking, interestingly, behind the star of One Direction who just happened to grow up in Doncaster. The right hon. Gentleman is regarded as having less influence on the town than that. We will return to these matters in a moment.

On the hon. Lady’s specific questions, she asked, rightly, about international women’s day, which we look forward to commemorating on Sunday. She referred to the pink bus that has caused so much amusement around the country and asked what the Government have been doing. We have been achieving more women in work than ever before in history—up by 839,000 since May 2010. There are more women-led businesses than ever before in the history of the country and 37% of start-up loans are now going to women. There are more women on FTSE boards than ever before in the history of the country, with no all-male boards remaining. More than half the people lifted out of income tax altogether—58% of them—are women, and the state pension reforms have particularly benefited women, who have historically done poorly under the complicated two-tier system of pensions. That is a tremendous record of achievement, which is superior to any previous Government’s record in assisting the welfare of the women of this country.

The hon. Lady mentioned students—rather bravely, in a week in which the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said that Labour’s proposed reform of tuition fees

“sounds progressive. . . Sadly, it isn’t.”

It

“will mainly benefit mid- to high-earning graduates who would otherwise have been repaying all or most of their loans.”

That is the position bizarrely adopted by the Labour party on which it is now condemned to fight the election.

It was brave of the hon. Lady, too, to mention migration, as it was a completely open door under the previous Government which brought millions of people to settle in this country.

Following my extensive translation of civil service-ese at the Press Gallery lunch, the hon. Lady did a translation of Prime Ministerial statements, but I have my own translation of what the Leader of the Opposition was saying yesterday when he was calling for a debate, which means, “I am desperate because the election is slipping away from me and I have nothing else to ask about at all.” That is the translation of that. When I was Leader of the Opposition in 2001, I recall asking Tony Blair for a television debate. There was not even an offer of a debate from Tony Blair, not even the pretence of a debate. There was a very clear “No debate whatsoever.” This Prime Minister is offering a debate and that is an offer that should be taken up, which was never offered by Tony Blair in similar circumstances.

Talking of debates, the hon. Lady asked about the debate on the plain packaging of cigarettes. As she knows, because of EU procedures it has been possible to lay regulations but not to make them until after 3 March. That is the reason for the timing. It is normal for such statutory instruments to be considered in a Committee after going through the scrutiny procedures and, subject to the deliberations of that Committee, it will then be possible for the whole House to vote on the outcome of that Committee’s deliberations.

I should have thought that the hon. Lady would welcome the Government’s move in the other place on ticketing. She did not ask about the economic situation in the country, but what has defined the past couple of weeks is what has happened on the economy. Today we heard that new car sales for February were up 12% on last year. This week we heard that average household incomes have returned to pre-recession levels. In the past two weeks we have seen growth in manufacturing and construction up, public sector borrowing fall, and small firms win more than a quarter of Government contracts—the highest percentage ever. That is very clear evidence as we move to the end of the Parliament that a long-term economic plan is right for this country and is working.