Business of the House

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

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

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Chris Grayling)]

Before I do, it may be appropriate—I hope this view is shared by Members in all parts of the House—for us to express our solidarity with and good will towards the Parliament in Kabul, after the dreadful terrorist attack there this week. We express all our sympathies for those affected. It is a matter of great dismay to me when a democratically elected Parliament is a target in this way.

The business for next week is as follows:

Monday 29 June—Consideration in Committee of the Scotland Bill (day 2).

Tuesday 30 June—Consideration in Committee of the Scotland Bill (day 3).

Wednesday 1 July—Opposition day (4th allotted day). There will be a debate on an Opposition motion. Subject to be announced.

Thursday 2 July—General debate on Britain and international security.

Friday 3 July—The House will not be sitting.

The provisional business for the week commencing 6 July will include:

Monday 6 July—Conclusion of consideration in Committee of the Scotland Bill.

Tuesday 7 July—Opposition day (5th allotted day). There will be a debate on an Opposition motion. Subject to be announced.

Wednesday 8 July—My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer will deliver his Budget statement.

Thursday 9 July—Continuation of the Budget debate.

Friday 10 July—The House will not be sitting.

[Ms Eagle]

May I associate myself with the Leader of the House’s commiserations and good thoughts for those caught up in the awful events in the Parliament in Kabul?

There is just over a year and a half until the BBC’s charter runs out, but the Government still have not set out a timetable or plan for its renewal. After the Prime Minister’s election threat to close down the BBC, and given that the last charter renewal process began three years before the charter expired, could the Leader of the House say when and how the House will be kept informed of progress on this important issue?

On Tuesday, the Equality and Human Rights Commission revealed that a staggering 88% of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people had experienced some form of hate crime, and 35,000 such cases go unreported every year. As I dust off my pink Stetson, ready to join the LGBT community at Pride, does the Leader of the House agree that we need to redouble our efforts to root out prejudice and discrimination at home and abroad? Does he agree that the Foreign Secretary’s decision to ban the Pride flag from being flown at UK embassies around the world sends exactly the wrong signal?

Later today, EU leaders will meet in Brussels. The Prime Minister has briefed that the meeting is all about his renegotiation, but I read this morning that one senior EU diplomat has said that discussion on the subject would be “cursory”, so I thought I would take a look at the agenda. I can see items on migration, terrorism, jobs, growth and competitiveness. Squeezed in just before the end, above the adoption of the minutes of the last meeting, is our Prime Minister. His Back Benchers have got him on the run, and his tour of European capitals has been an object lesson in how to lose friends and alienate people. One Slovak official said:

“He is not the brightest spark in terms of getting what he wants…His approach is making him irrelevant”.

But not to worry: the Prime Minister has come up with a cunning plan. Instead of successful renegotiation, he has apparently decided to rebrand our membership of the EU by calling us associate members. Given that the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) has indicated that Eurosceptics, such as the Leader of the House, will resign before the referendum, perhaps the Prime Minister should consider offering his Cabinet associate membership to hold his Government together.

This Government really do say one thing and do another. Just last year, they promised more disabled people would be in work. Now we know that fewer than one in 10 disabled people on the Work programme have actually found a job. Before the election, the Government claimed they had exceeded their target for selling off Government land for house building, but now we know that they were counting land sold off from 1997. On Monday, the Prime Minister claimed he had saved £1.2 billion through the troubled families programme, but within minutes the National Institute of Economic and Social Research had dismissed his comments as “pure, unadulterated fiction”, so may we have a debate in Government time on the Tory parallel universe where a person can say something and do the complete opposite, and hope nobody will notice?

It is three months since the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) ceased being Chief Whip. I would be missing him, if he had ever bothered turning up, so I thought I would take a look at what he has been up to in the Ministry of Justice. After a period of uncharacteristic silence, he has suddenly sprung to life and issued a detailed guide on grammar for his civil servants. His rules include never using the word “impact” and avoiding “anything too pompous”. I wonder who on earth he has in mind, Mr Speaker. Over at his old Department, I notice that the Secretary of State for Education has also been tackling the big issues. She has appointed a new low level bad behaviour tsar, presumably to help deal with Tory Eurosceptics.

Finally, I feel compelled to mention the developing drama in the Liberal Democrat leadership race. Only the Liberal Democrats could manage to have a split when they have eight MPs. This week the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) had to apologise after his activists were caught discrediting his rival by calling round the party’s entire membership, which cannot have taken very long, although he earned the endorsement of boxer Frank Bruno, which means that at least he has one big hitter.

[Chris Grayling]

The hon. Lady began with a question about the BBC. The next 18 months will be an important period in deciding how the future of the BBC will be shaped. We have a new Secretary of State—a very welcome appointment—who has been in post only a few weeks. He has already started work on this important issue and the House will be updated in due course about progress on that front.

On hate crime, I absolutely agree with the hon. Lady. It is not simply a matter of those in the LGBT community; in other parts of society hate crime is wholly unacceptable in whatever form—in relation to sex, colour, creed or whatever. All of us in the House should deprecate it and we should always seek to ensure that our authorities deal with it in the appropriate way. I hear the hon. Lady’s comments about flags. She will no doubt raise that question also with the Foreign Secretary. There are many countries around the world which need to change their approach to gay rights and I very much hope they will do so.

On Europe, let us be clear. What I hope and believe will come out of the European summit is a historic agreement with our European partners to renegotiate our membership of the European Union. That is a major step forward. I listen with interest to the Labour party, which seems to waver in the wind on this issue. It opposed a referendum; now it supports a referendum. It seems to support some form of renegotiation, but it does not appear to believe that any change is necessary to our relationship with the European Union. When Labour Members have a clear policy and a clear view on what our relationship should be, perhaps we will start to listen to them and take them seriously, but right now, we will not do so.

On the employment front, I am sorry to tell the hon. Lady that the Work programme has been a great success. It has led to a massive drop in the number of long-term unemployed in this country. This Government have, and the coalition Government as well had, a fantastic record on employment. We have seen a huge increase in the number of people in work to record levels. We have seen a massive drop in unemployment and a very welcome increase in the number of disabled people in work.

The hon. Lady mentioned guidelines issued by Ministers —in this case, on grammar. I would rather have a former Education Secretary issuing guidance to his correspondence team on how best to phrase letters from his Department than a Chief Secretary to the Treasury issuing instructions to his civil servants about how to make his coffee.

Finally, it would be wrong to end without a quick glimpse at the Labour leadership contest this week. I have, as usual, taken a look to see what has been happening. I had a look at the website of the Wallasey Labour party—where else to get an insight into what is going on? There, on the front page, I found an article about the Labour leadership candidates with the headline “The candidates are awful”. Enough said.