Security of Ministers’ Offices and Communications
Chris Bryant Excerpts(2 years, 10 months ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Julia Lopez
As my hon. Friend will be aware, there are different levels of document classification, so procedures are already in place to ensure that Ministers can read such documents in privacy and with great security, but if there are concerns about whether those safeguards are robust enough, we will look into them.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Something really does not add up here. As I understand it, the Minister is saying that the camera in the office of the Secretary of State was not covert. In other words, the Secretary of State knew it was there, yet we have all seen the video. If that is true, he must be the stupidest man on earth. Is the Minister really trying to persuade us that he knew that there was a camera in his office? When he had meetings with other Ministers, were they informed that those meetings were being recorded? Is that really what she is trying to suggest? It blows my mind, this idea.
Julia Lopez
I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman’s mind is blown. I am a Cabinet Office Minister who is responsible for overall adherence to Government security rules. When it comes to the placement of the camera in that office, I am afraid that it is for the Department of Health and Social Care to account for itself when it comes to what happened. It is already conducting an investigation, which we will want to look at.
G7 and NATO Summits
Chris Bryant Excerpts(2 years, 10 months ago)
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Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
I kept on thinking, all weekend, “Thank God Biden beat Trump.” I think that the Prime Minister is nodding.
Following the Carbis Bay declaration, may I urge the Prime Minister to come to Wales to sign a Cardiff Bay declaration? That declaration would include radical extra investment in Wales to do the levelling up that I think he intends, so that every person—whether they live in the valleys of south Wales, in the posher parts of Cardiff or Swansea, or wherever—has an equal chance of getting to work, an equal chance of putting food on the table for their kids, an equal chance of getting on in life and, frankly, an equal chance of having an NHS that is really able to protect them. The problems that we have in Wales are exactly the same as those in England. We need significant extra investment, and the only way we can achieve it is by real, hard co-operation between the Government in Westminster and the Government in Wales.
The Prime Minister
Yes, of course; we have massively increased support for the NHS, for instance, all of which is passported through to Wales. Funding has massively increased, and of course we work very closely with the Government—the Administration—in Cardiff. I think that it would be helpful in delivering great infrastructure for Wales, whether that is improving the A55 or the M4, if there were some consistency of approach. With the M4 bypass, for instance, and the Brynglas tunnels, I think it was crazy to spend £144 million of taxpayers’ money on a study without actually doing the bypass itself. I am very happy to work with the Welsh Labour Government if they get their act together.
Covid-19 Update
Chris Bryant Excerpts(2 years, 12 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is totally right to raise the immunocompromised and their continuing anxiety. The risks continue to diminish, as he knows—I think, today, one in 1,340 are estimated to have the virus. The number is going down at the moment quite steeply. As I said earlier to the House, it is much lower than at any time since last summer, or even before. But plainly those who are anxious, who are immuno-compromised, should continue, as I have said, to exercise caution and common sense in the way they go about their lives for some time to come.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Covid has left tens of thousands of people in this country with problems that are remarkably similar to a brain injury. They are going to need long-term neurorehabilitation. When we add them to the 1.4 million people who, before covid came along, had suffered from a brain injury—from carbon monoxide poisoning, concussion in sport, stroke, a traumatic brain injury or foetal alcohol syndrome—that is a phenomenal financial and medical need. I urge the Prime Minister—there still is not anybody in this country who takes sole charge of this area of brain injury. It is a hidden pandemic, because someone cannot often see that the person across the other side of the room is affected. Maybe the Prime Minister should meet a group of us to talk about it, because it affects every single Department of Government and I really want him to take it on, so that all these people get the support that they need.
The Prime Minister
I am really grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I know that he was going to raise him with me yesterday and I hope that he forgives for me not allowing him to intervene, entirely inadvertently. He has raised an extremely important point. I believe that not only brain injury—he is right to raise the 1.4 million people—but brain cancer is an area that is too often neglected in our system and may fall through the cracks. I certainly undertake to get him the meeting that he needs, whether it is with me or the relevant Minister. I cannot currently promise that, but he will get the meeting he needs.
Debate on the Address
Chris Bryant Excerpts(2 years, 12 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
No, no, no.
My hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire is a kindly man and a lawyer, but unlike some other lawyers in this House he is tough on crime. In fact, he is so tough that when three thugs were so rash as to attack him in Covent Garden, he transformed himself like Hong Kong Phooey and floored all three with moves that have earned him—I can tell the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras—not just a black belt but a Blue Peter badge.
The Prime Minister
I can certainly say that we will do that within this Session—yes, absolutely. I have made that clear before. It is essential that we have a full, proper public inquiry into the covid pandemic, and I have been clear about that with the House.
The Prime Minister
No, thank you.
We will establish a new UK infrastructure bank headquartered in Leeds, with £40 billion to invest as part of the greatest renewal of British national infrastructure since the Victorian age. We will ensure that the British people derive maximum benefit from the £300 billion of their money that the Government spend every year on public procurement by creating a wholly new system, consolidating 350 separate regulations into one regime, so that public investment can be even more effective as an instrument for levelling up the country.
We will use the sovereignty that we regain from the European Union to establish at least eight freeports, including in Teesside. Now that we are free of EU state aid rules, the Queen’s Speech proposes a new national subsidy system—
The Prime Minister
I will give way in a minute to my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Virginia Crosbie).
The Queen’s Speech proposes a new national subsidy system, allowing the Government of the devolved Administrations to spur the creation of jobs and businesses.
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is completely right. Anglesey could have no more powerful or effective champion than her not just on the matter of freeports, but on nuclear power as well, which she was probably also going to mention.
The Prime Minister
No, I will not take an intervention from the hon. Gentleman just yet.
We will use the powers that we have recovered from the EU to strengthen our borders and reform the asylum system, cracking down on the criminal gangs that profit from trafficking in human beings, by ensuring that, for the first time, the fact of whether people have entered the UK legally or illegally will have an impact on their asylum claim. At the same time, we will uphold Britain’s great tradition of providing a haven for those facing persecution and repression, opening our arms to our friends the British nationals in Hong Kong safe in the knowledge that our Government have recaptured overall power to control our borders.
As the compassionate one-nation Conservative Government, we know that crime falls disproportionately on the poorest and the most deprived parts of our country and our communities. That is why the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill in the Queen’s Speech will end the outrageous injustice—the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras voted against this—of serious sexual and violent offenders being automatically released halfway through a standard sentence of between four and seven years. The Bill will support our police with new powers to deal with highly disruptive protests and—
Ian Blackford
I have to say that I am disappointed in the hon. Gentleman. It is going to be important over the coming weeks and months that we can debate properly the choices for the future of Scotland. I make this offer to him: all of us who have Scotland’s interests at heart should be able to debate rationally and honestly what those choices are. Let us respect the electorate in doing that.
Everybody knows that the Scottish National party is the party of independence, and everybody knows—without prevarication, without doubt—that the SNP stood on a very clear manifesto commitment of giving the people of Scotland the choice to have that debate and to have a say in their future. It was clearly contained in our manifesto. We said to the people of Scotland, “Put us back into government again and allow us to lead the country through the pandemic,” but the promise that we made to the people of Scotland was that if they voted for us in that election and delivered a majority for independence in that Parliament, nobody—not the Prime Minister and certainly not the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie)—would stop them having their democratic choice.
The hon. Gentleman has to recognise what happened. Let us look at this in the context that Westminster looks at it—on the basis of the first-past-the-post system. Now, we do not support that system; we support proportional representation. But there are 73 first-past-the-post constituencies in the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish National party won 62 of them. We won 85% of the constituencies on 48% of the vote—the highest number of constituencies ever won by any party and the highest share of the vote ever won by any party. For the Conservatives to try to argue that black is white and they won the election, if we listen to the hon. Gentleman—frankly, nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that the ambition of the Conservative party in Scotland is to be in opposition. The ambition of the Scottish National party is to govern and to take our people to independence.
Chris Bryant
If we are talking about victories, could the right hon. Gentleman add to his speech a little bit of a reference to Wales, in particular the 19% swing to Labour from Plaid Cymru in the Rhondda and the fact that Adam Price completely overplayed his hand? Nationalism is a false chimera—I suppose every chimera is false—and he should not put all his trust in one line.
Sir Peter Bottomley
It shows that we can go on having these exchanges. Sometimes I will speak before the right hon. Gentleman, sometimes afterwards. He has now done both, so I congratulate him on that.
I turn to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and congratulate him on the general success of the elections on Thursday. In trying to deliver the sorts of things that people want, we should recognise that there is good on all sides, and where the parties can overlap for progress it is best. If there is a contest of ideas, let the people decide.
In my constituency, the Labour party did better than some people expected. It is our job to try to find out what we can do to match it, although we took seats from other people, as well as Labour taking some seats from us. It is the kind of contest where if the Liberals are on the up in my area, Labour is down, and if Labour is on the up, the Liberals are down. Conservatives have control and responsibility for most of the decisions made for the quiet, undramatic provision of local services, which is what most of the local elections were about. They were not national elections. They were across the country, but they were about providing services to local people.
In this Queen’s Speech, there are many points to welcome. If I may say to the Prime Minister, one thing is not in the Queen’s Speech, and I am glad it is not there. When the Chancellor had to come to the House and announce he was cutting the official overseas aid budget, he said there would be legislation. I am glad that has changed. One of the points of leadership is being prepared to change one’s mind.
Will my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister lead his Government in re-establishing that target of 0.7% on aid and getting there as soon as possible? We know that the coronavirus epidemic has hurt us. It has hurt other parts of the world and hit the poorer people much, much harder, and our job is to try to help them to raise their standards.
Turning to building safety, there was a major fire at the end of last week. Three storeys caught fire. The builders who two years ago should have taken the dangerous Grenfell-style cladding off the building—that work actually started two weeks ago—said that the affected cladding did not catch fire. I think that was by chance, not design. The only people who have got no absolute right to sue the builders, the regulators and the component suppliers are the residential leaseholders themselves.
The only people who are being asked to pay the extra £10 billion—that is on top of the £5 billion that the Government have rightly started as their contribution towards the costs—are the leaseholders. They are left carrying £10 billion, with no right to sue those who are responsible. Will the Prime Minister kindly have a summit on fire safety with the affected groups—the cladding groups, the National Leasehold Campaign, the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership and the officers of the all-party group on leasehold and commonhold reform—and then put to the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, together with the Chancellor, this simple point: provide all the money that is needed, whether the building is above or below 18 metres, and then find out who can sue those who are actually responsible?
What the Government are doing with levy and taxes is one thing, but that £10 billion outstanding makes people’s lives impossible. They have homes that are not safe, that are not saleable, that cannot be funded and that they cannot afford. If we want to know the effectiveness of the waking watch, we should remember that for a fire in daylight it was not effective. The Government have to step in, although not necessarily to say that the taxpayer will pay the money in the end—it can come from those who were responsible. It is partly a public responsibility on regulation, but it is mostly the responsibility of those who designed, built and went on selling components that were known not to be safe, or were not known to be safe.
I say to media people, “Do appoint a housing editor,” because when housing stories come up, it is too bad when each individual producer or reporter has to learn from scratch what is happening. This is as important an issue as health, so it needs an approach that is consistent, effective and fast, and that works.
I turn to some small issues. One is the VAT treatment of yachts that are being brought back to this country—it may be a small point, but I think that the Treasury or VAT people should look at it. If VAT is paid on a yacht that is then kept abroad for more than three years, it has to be paid again when the yacht is brought back. That will not produce any revenue, because no one will bring their boats back.
All our important nautical brokerage in this country depends on those yachts being here, so we should either bring in a marine passport or lower the rates that are above 5%. We should have talks with the Royal Yachting Association and get on with finding a solution, not just say, “It is the way the thing has to be.” It is not the way the thing has to be; it is not right, and it will not work. I confess an interest, but my boat is an open canoe, not a boat that is affected by the 5% rate or the 20% suggestion.
I know that many hon. Members want to speak, but I turn briefly to the importance of the Government’s approach to levelling up. More and more young families and households are coming to the south coast and living there as happily as those in more mature households, who may be of retirement age but are not inactive. All of them need the kinds of things that I think are now being provided with the support of all parties.
Education is now much better than it was. The prospects of people getting training and apprenticeships and moving on to further and higher education are good; I pay tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan), who has been doing the media round today and putting forward the Government’s approach.
Chris Bryant
No; I am sure that the hon. Gentleman was not going to ban Wales from the conversation, but this is on levelling up. I will ask the question that I was going to try to ask the Prime Minister, which is about acquired brain injury.
Children in the poorest houses are four times more likely to suffer a traumatic brain injury before the age of five years. The significant effects that that will have for the rest of their lives—and the problems with concussion in sport, which leads to so many sportspeople in this country suffering early onset dementia—surely mean that it is about time we had proper legislation to make sure that everybody gets a decent chance when they have had a brain injury.
Sir Peter Bottomley
I think that the House will approve that approach.
If I may, I will conclude with a sensitive issue; I say this having put it on record that in my extended family and connections, over 100 died in the holocaust. At some stage, a decision will be made by the Government on the inspector’s recommendations—the inspector was not allowed to make a conclusion—on the proposed holocaust memorial and learning centre in Victoria Tower Gardens. The decision was supposed to be made by the Minister of State, because the Secretary of State is the applicant. I ask the Prime Minister to ask advice on whether the September 2015 specifications for the proposed memorial and learning centre are met in any way by the present proposal put forward by the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. They are not.
Secondly, will the Prime Minister ask for a briefing on the area of central London that was then thought to be acceptable, which ran from the west of Regent’s Park across to Spitalfields and down to the Imperial War Museum? Will he then consider having a meeting with Baroness Deech, with the architect Barbara Weiss, and with the people who are proposing the present monument, which has a design very similar to one that was not accepted as the Canadian national memorial? Will they see whether it is possible to stop this system of trying to push something through when it is not justified; get a proper memorial and a proper learning centre, probably using the one at the Imperial War Museum; and make sure that we can be proud of what we do?
For the sake of those who died in the holocaust and in other genocides, I say in public to the Prime Minister what I have said to as many people as I can in private: what is being put forward now is the wrong proposal in the wrong place in the wrong style. I ask everyone to reconsider it, starting with the specifications made in September 2015.
Mrs May
I am grateful to the hon. Member for her intervention, but I remind her of the commitment that the Government have already shown to the issue of green homes for the future in their proposals. There are issues that have yet to be looked at, such as retrofitting in relation to heating systems, but the Government are already starting to show the way forward on this. However, it is important, in looking at the planning system proposals, that those issues are also taken into account.
The Gracious Speech commits the Government to bringing forward proposals on social care reform. This commitment has been made by Governments of all colours over the last two decades, and it is a bit rich for the Leader of the Opposition and other Labour Members to complain about the Government on this issue, given that they were 13 years in government and had, I think, six or seven different proposals, but never actually delivered anything on this. I know it is not an easy issue. I put forward a plan. It was comprehensively rejected, so I recognise the difficulty in trying to come forward with something here, but it is an issue that we need to grasp. The pandemic, and the issues around social care that came up in the pandemic, have shown the importance of this and of reform that genuinely provides a sustainable social care system into the future. However, it also needs to be a system that does not exacerbate intergenerational divisions.
Chris Bryant
I completely agree with what the right hon. Lady is saying on this. I just wonder whether we do not actually need to look at the issues that lead to dementia, making sure that there is more research, in particular, on acquired brain injury and concussion in sport, which does seem to have had a dramatic effect on the number of people who are now suffering from dementia, and whether that needs to feed into the process of looking at the issue of social care.
Lobbying of Government Committee
Chris Bryant Excerpts(3 years ago)
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Brendan O’Hara
The hon. Gentleman is right. I think we all know from our postbags that, regardless of which side of the House we are on in this debate, we are all tainted by this. Anything that can shine a light on this —admittedly where some might not want it to be shone—would be a very good thing, and I wholeheartedly support it.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Is there not another point here, which is that whatever inquiry needs to be done must have the proper powers? For instance, it needs to be able to guarantee that anybody who gives evidence can do so without fear of prosecution, so that if there is a whistle that needs to be blown, it can be blown. It also needs to have subpoena powers, so that people who do not want to give evidence could be forced to do so. So far as I can see, those powers could be provided only by a judge-led inquiry—maybe we should go down that route, but I think it is unnecessary—or by a parliamentary inquiry.
Brendan O’Hara
The short answer is yes, and that is something that I will come on to in a moment. That is why this is so important.
It is not just Members of this House who are questioning the corrosive culture of cronyism at the heart of this Government; it has been attracting some fairly high-profile international attention too. At the end of last year, The New York Times decided to investigate how the UK Government managed what it described as the greatest spending spree in the post-war era. It concluded that of the 1,200 central Government contracts worth nearly $22 billion,
“$11 billion went to companies either run by friends and associates of politicians in the Conservative Party, or with no prior experience or a history of controversy.”
That is an incredible amount of money, and any hint that it has been spent at the behest of someone with close ties to Downing Street or for the benefit of companies that have political allies in Government is deeply worrying. It has to be examined—and examined fully, robustly and independently.
While people might understand and accept that things had to happen quickly in the circumstances, and perhaps that normal procurement rules were not sufficiently speedy, they will not accept that a Government have any right to rip up every rule, every standard, every safeguard and to start throwing about public money like a scramble at a wedding, particularly when it is their mates who are there waiting to pick it up.
Chris Bryant
Of course, the Nolan principles are embodied in the code of conduct that affects all MPs, and all this does is raise the danger of bringing the whole of the House into disrepute, so I very much hope that the hon. Gentleman’s Committee will work with mine, the Committee on Standards, as we are reviewing the code of conduct to make sure that it really does work for the modern era.
Mr Wragg
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention.
Hon. and right hon. Members should always be careful in using the privilege afforded to us in speaking in this House, but I find it odd that the leaked emails should be from the late Cabinet Secretary, which cannot be contextualised or challenged by a man who is dead. We must be mindful of scapegoating, especially when it appears too neat, but neither should we allow conspiracy theories to abound without challenge. In the debate that follows, difficult as it may be, I would ask my hon. and right hon. Friends not to unquestioningly defend the integrity of others if they have doubts or have been asked to do so. Whatever little or imperfect integrity we have ourselves—for we are all fallible—it is the only integrity we can seek to protect.
His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
Chris Bryant Excerpts(3 years ago)
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Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Madam Deputy Speaker,
“Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room.”
So preached Henry Scott Holland, Regius Professor of Divinity, at St Paul’s Cathedral in May 1910, following the death of Edward VII, whose body lay in Westminster Hall—the first monarch ever to lie in state in this Palace. I always railed against those words when I was a curate conducting funerals in High Wycombe, because I found them too lazy, too immediately, conveniently consoling. I preferred the brutal truth of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer:
“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live…In the midst of life we are in death”.
That seemed, and still seems, more honest. In the setting by Purcell for Queen Mary’s funeral in 1695, those words of Cranmer’s appear so stark, so bleak, so pared down. They seem to render a general truth about life.
Some suggest, unthinkingly perhaps, that there is less to grieve about after a long life—more than threescore years and ten. I disagree profoundly. Yes, 99 years is a long time, but even that feels short when your other half is gone. Such was Prince Philip’s vigorous embrace of life, both in fighting Nazism and after he had faced several life-threatening conditions, that I suspect he perhaps had more time for the words of Dylan Thomas:
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day”.
I have no great anecdotes about Prince Philip. I never did the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award—I am feeling rather left out. I did dance the Highland fling for him in Stirling castle when I was very young, and he teased me relentlessly when he came to Treorchy in 2002. Some have their memorials in stone, in works of art, or in great literature they have written. No doubt there will be similar memorials to Prince Philip: after all, there are already thousands of plaques all over this nation and the Commonwealth that bear his name. He even gave the Rhondda Borough Council its royal charter in 1955, and went down Fernhill colliery afterwards—rather bravely, in a white coat. Others have spoken of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, which is a phenomenal achievement, but perhaps we should determine to invest far more in our youth services, especially in our most deprived communities, as a further legacy to him.
However, Prince Philip’s greatest memorial is a relationship: a single, singular, special royal relationship spanning decades, its every twist and turn played out in public. Few of us can genuinely imagine what studied torment that involved: to fall in love in public, to marry in public, to row in public, and to grieve in public; to have every glance and gesture viewed and reviewed by millions, and then played out in some television drama. To keep one’s counsel, year after year, in such circumstances is to lay down one’s life in the line of duty.
I do not know what he would have made of today. He would have probably said, “What a load of nonsense. Shut up, man.” He did not care for sycophancy, and I am not sure that he was all that much of a fan of people wearing their hearts on their sleeves. However, there is perhaps one consolation at moments such as these: the words of Scott Holland again, from 1910:
“the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.”
I, like so many others today and many thousands in my constituency in the Rhondda, wish Her Majesty every consolation. Whatever they were to each other, that they are still: a fixed point in an ever-changing world.
Integrated Review
Chris Bryant Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
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The Prime Minister
I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for his suggestion. I remind him of what I said about the commitment of this country to overseas aid, which is enormous by any objective view. On the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, this is the only vaccine in the world, under the terms of the deal struck between the UK Government, the Oxford scientists and AstraZeneca, that is sold at cost around the world. I thank him for raising that, because it is another reason for people in this country to be proud of the outward-looking, engaging, fundamentally compassionate attitude of the British Government and people.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Dealing with authoritarian regimes around the world, especially those that do not want to play by the rules, is always complicated and difficult. I understand that, but we have to be consistent, coherent, determined and brutally tough when we need to be. What I do not understand, in relation to Russia and to China, is why the Government still refuse to declare what is happening in the Xinjiang province as genocide, why they have used every power to try to prevent Parliament from coming to a determination on that, why we will still not use the Magnitsky sanctions—which I applaud the Foreign Secretary for having introduced in the first place—against Carrie Lam for what is happening in Hong Kong, and why we still refuse to do enough about the dirty Russian money that is imperilling our financial transparency in the City of London and in our overseas territories.
The Prime Minister
As the House has heard many times, it is up to a competent court to determine whether genocide has taken place. We have consistently called out what has happened in Xinjiang, and what continues to happen. As for the use of Magnitsky sanctions, actually they have been used by this Government against Russia for what it did, and by the way, at that time, Labour Front Benchers, including the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras, were sitting like great squatting Buddhas, immobile, while the then Labour leader was effectively endorsing the line from the Kremlin.
Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
Chris Bryant Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab) [V]
This Chancellor has an extraordinary record: he has overseen the biggest decline in economic output of any major economy and the largest number of excess deaths in the world. Why has the UK done so appallingly? Well, for a start because the Tories starved the NHS for 10 full years. We have fewer than seven intensive therapy units per 100,000 head of population in this country. Germany has 30. Now, today, there is a hidden cut of £30 billion to the NHS budget. Our social care for the elderly is a disgrace after 10 years. The poor, the elderly and key public sector workers in the Rhondda have died in their scores, but the Chancellor has not said a word about the poverty that is at the heart of that.
This Chancellor has repeatedly made poor decisions. He excluded 3 million people from any support whatever over the last year, including tradespeople and people in the creative industries. His vanity project, eat out to help out, directly contributed to the second wave of deaths. He fought against a firebreak in the autumn, which led directly to a much worse wave of deaths in January this year. He constantly delayed decisions about extending furlough, which meant that people were laid off completely unnecessarily. His support for the aviation industry, which is vital in this area, has been non-existent. He has failed to understand that it is easy enough for a middle manager to self-isolate in a large house in suburbia, but if you are on a daily or an hourly wage with hungry children to feed, it is impossible. He opposed free school meals in holidays and now he is starving local council budgets, even though councils are doing all the work that we rely on. We even have a Prime Minister who thinks he is so hard up and so hard done by that he has to set up a charity with a single beneficiary—himself. But there is no pay rise today, is there, for the people we all applauded last year? What hypocrisy!
The Chancellor boasts about spending £407 billion. It is easy to spend taxpayers’ money. Time and again, he has awarded massive contracts to people who have been recommended by Tory MPs and peers, and has now unlawfully refused to reveal those contracts. A few have massively and immorally enriched themselves on his watch.
I have one final complaint. In the old days, Chancellors used to resign honourably if any part of their Budget leaked before it was announced to Parliament. Purdah keeps Chancellors honest, because privileged access to information in the Budget has a value and a currency, especially in the markets. I know this Chancellor is very pleased with himself—he has done a video to tell us as much—but an empty pot makes a big noise and fills no bellies.
Covid-19
Chris Bryant Excerpts(3 years, 4 months ago)
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Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab) [V]
It has been great to see vaccination already starting in the Rhondda, but obviously we can only give the vaccine when it arrives. The Prime Minister quite rightly said earlier that we should be prioritising the vaccine for those who are at risk of mortality. Rhondda Cynon Taf, unfortunately, has the highest rate of death per 100,000 of any local authority in the country. We have a very large percentage of people who are extremely vulnerable, and we have a higher than average percentage of people who are working in the NHS, so can I urge the Prime Minister, as a matter of urgency, to prioritise communities like the Rhondda and make sure that Rhondda’s surgeries are getting not just 70 or 80 but hundreds of doses of vaccine a week so that we can vaccinate everybody who is at risk?
The Prime Minister
The hon. Gentleman makes an eloquent point about the way in which many people in the Rhondda will naturally fall into the high qualifying groups that have already been identified by the JCVI.
EU Withdrawal Agreement
Chris Bryant Excerpts(3 years, 5 months ago)
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Michael Gove
Given that there is very little trade that I am aware of in conflict diamonds from Northern Ireland to Great Britain—if anything, it is an even smaller trade than, for example, endangered species products such as tiger skins—I suspect that the bureaucratic burden will be so small as to be almost naked—sorry, I mean invisible to the naked eye. [Laughter.]
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The mind boggles.
I am all for pragmatism, because that is the best way to sort out a deal that works for Welsh lamb farmers and, for that matter, British car manufacturers and all the rest of it, but I want to ask the right hon. Gentleman about the foreign policy element. On a pragmatic basis, we have always done rather well out of persuading other countries in Europe to adopt, for instance, sanctions against Putin, and we have tried to get people on board with our policy on Hong Kong. How will we be able to do that in future if we have poisoned the well by not having any long-lasting trade deal at the end of the week?
Michael Gove
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. Obviously it would be in our interests to secure a deal, but not at any price. He has been a consistent champion of a tougher approach towards Russia and an advocate of the Magnitsky sanctions. The Foreign Secretary also was a consistent champion for that. We adopted those sanctions, and the EU followed. That is no criticism of the EU, but it is the case that we can continue to have influence. Obviously, if we have a satisfactory arrangement with the EU, that would work for everyone.