Debate on the Address

Edward Miliband Excerpts

Wednesday 4th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Edward Miliband (Doncaster North) (Lab)]

This Friday we will mark 70 years since the Normandy landings, when wave upon wave of allied forces poured on to the beaches of northern France. They marked the beginning of the final chapter of the second world war, which preserved the freedoms that we enjoy today, so I want to start by honouring the service of those veterans and the memory of their fallen comrades—a feeling that I am sure is shared across the whole House.

I am sure that across the House today Members will also want to remember and pay tribute to the work of our armed forces over the past decade in Afghanistan. At the end of this year, British combat operations will come to an end. We should be incredibly proud of the service of our armed forces in that country. They have fought to make Afghanistan a more stable country, a country with democracy and the rule of law, and a country that cannot be used as a safe haven to plan acts of terrorism here in Britain. We grieve for the 453 members of our armed forces who have been lost, and our thoughts are with their families and friends. All of them and all the people who have served have demonstrated, as did our Normandy veterans all those years ago, that they represent the best of our country.

By tradition, at the beginning of each parliamentary Session we remember the Members of the House we have lost in the last year. In January, we lost Paul Goggins. He was one of the kindest, most honourable people in the House and someone of the deepest principle. At a time when people are very sceptical about politics, Paul Goggins is a reminder of what public servants and public service can achieve.

Let me turn to the proposer of the motion. The hon. Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt) gave an excellent speech—so far, so good. It had a sense of history, a sense of place and a sense of humour. From reading about her background, she can only be described, as we saw from her speech, as one of life’s enthusiasts. Before coming to this House, she had a varied career. She was a magician’s assistant when a teenager and then had a job that was nearly as dangerous—running the foreign press operation for President George W. Bush.

The hon. Lady made headlines for her recent appearance on “Splash!”, to which she made reference. If she will allow me, I will quote her admirable line in self-deprecation about her performance:

“I have the elegance and drive of a paving slab”.

I say unequivocally today that that is wrong. As she got to the quarter finals, I am not sure what that says about the contestants who were knocked out before her. It certainly takes guts to get in a swimming costume and dive off the high board. If she is looking for a new challenge, she should try wrestling a bacon sandwich live on national television. In any case, it is clear that she deserved her place on the podium today.

The seconder of the motion made an eloquent speech. The hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) came to this House with more than 20 years’ teaching in further education and the Open university behind her. Since being elected in 2001, she has campaigned with distinction on children’s issues and has been an assiduous local Member of Parliament. She voted against tuition fees, has described being in the coalition as terrible and says that the Lib Dem record on women MPs is dreadful. By current Lib Dem standards, that apparently makes her a staunch loyalist. On gender representation, she can take consolation from the fact that she can now boast that 100% of Liberal Democrat MEPs are women. As she said, she will be standing down at the next election. For her outside experiences, her wisdom and her all-round good humour and kindness, which I remember from when I was first elected to this House, she will be much missed.

Before I turn to the Loyal Address, let me say something about one of the most important decisions for generations, which will be made in just a few months’ time—the decision about the future of our United Kingdom. The history of the UK, from workers rights to the defeat of fascism to the NHS to the minimum wage, is the story of a country stronger together—a country in which representation from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England has helped us to advance the cause of social justice. It is a decision for the people of Scotland, but I believe passionately that this kingdom should remain united.

The ritual of the debate on the Loyal Address has existed for centuries. Today we do not just debate the Queen’s Speech; we assert the importance of this House and the battle it has fought over hundreds of years to exercise power on behalf of the British people. But what the recent elections show is that more than at any time for generations this House faces a contemporary battle of its own—a battle for relevance, legitimacy and standing in the eyes of the public. The custom of these debates is to address our opponents across the Dispatch Box, but today that on its own would be inadequate to the challenge we face. There is an even bigger opponent to address in this Queen’s Speech debate—the belief among many members of the public that this House and any party in it cannot achieve anything at all.

About 10% of those entitled to vote at the recent elections voted for UKIP, but as significant is the fact that over 60% did not vote at all. Whatever side we sit on in this House, we will all have heard it on the doorstep—“You’re all the same. You’re in it for yourself. It doesn’t matter who I vote for.” Of course that is not new, but there is a depth and scale of disenchantment that we ignore at our peril—disenchantment that goes beyond one party and one Government. There is no bigger issue for our country and our democracy, so the test for this legislative programme, the last before the general election, is to show that it responds to the scale of discontent and the need for answers.

In this election we heard concerns about the way the EU works and the need for reform. We heard deep-rooted concerns about immigration and the need to make changes, but I believe there is an even deeper reason for this discontent. Fundamentally, too many people in our country feel that Britain does not work for them and has not done so for a long time—in the jobs they do and whether hard work is rewarded; in the prospects for their children and whether they will lead a better life than their parents, including whether they will be able to afford a home of their own; in the pressures that communities face. and above all whether the work and effort that people put in are reflected in their sharing fairly in the wealth of the country.

The Governor of the Bank of England gave a remarkable speech last week, saying that inequality was now one of the biggest challenges in our country. We should all be judged on how we respond to this question, right as well as left. There are measures that we support in this Queen’s Speech, including tackling modern slavery, an ombudsman for our armed forces, and recall, but the big question for this Queen’s Speech is whether it just offers more of the same or whether it offers a new direction so that we can genuinely say that we can build a country that works for all and not just for a few at the top.

For me, this task starts with the nature of work in Britain today. It is a basic belief of the British people that if you work all the hours God sends, you should at least be able to make ends meet. We all, on all sides of the House, say in our slogans that those who work hard and play by the rules should be rewarded for what they do, but we should listen to the voices of all those people who say that their reality today is that hard work is not rewarded and has not been for some time. All of us on all sides will have heard that during the recent election campaign, such as from the person I met in Nottingham who was struggling with agency work and total uncertainty about how many hours’ work he would get. This was his working life: every morning at 5 am he would ring up to find out if there was work for him. More often than not, there was none. He had a family to bring up.

The fact that this is happening in 21st-century Britain, the fourth richest country in the world, should shame us all. This is not the Britain that that man believes in, it is not the Britain we believe in, and it should not be the Britain this House is prepared to tolerate. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] We have seen the number of zero-hours contracts go well above 1 million. We need to debate as a country whether this insecurity is good for individuals, families and the country as a whole. It is not.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that we need to continue to create more and more jobs, but one of the things we have to make sure of is this: we have just reduced national insurance by £2,000 for employers, so will he now rule out any increase in employers’ or employees’ national insurance?

[Edward Miliband]

I believe we actually called for that proposal first, but I say to the hon. Lady that there are two schools of thought on the recent experience of the election, one of which says that this country is fine and the economy is fixed. I do not believe that that is the message of the recent elections.

[Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Edward Miliband]

I am going to make a bit more progress.

We must debate, as a country, whether we should really be prepared to do something about the problem, and we need to debate the wider problem. Five million people in Britain—one in five of those in work—are now low paid. The shocking fact is that, for the first time on record, most of the people who are in poverty in Britain today are in work, not out of work.

[Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)]

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that politics cannot be the same. In that spirit, will he be clear and transparent and rule out once and for all—should he enter Downing street, God forbid—any new tax on employment through increases in either employers’ or employees’ national insurance contributions?

--- Later in debate ---

[Edward Miliband]

We want to see taxes on employment fall—that is why we have proposed a 10p tax rate to actually make work pay for people.

The shocking fact is that for the first time on record most people in poverty are in work—so much for hard work paying. None of our constituents sent us here to build such an economy. At a time when we face significant fiscal challenges into the future, it is costing the taxpayer billions of pounds. It is no wonder that people in this country do not think this House speaks for them. To show a new direction for the country, and to show that it is not just more of the same, the Queen’s Speech needs to demonstrate to all those people that it can answer their concerns.

There is a Bill in this Queen’s Speech covering employment, but the Bill we need would signal a new chapter in the battle against low pay and insecurity at work, not just business as usual. What would that involve? It would set a clear target for the minimum wage for each Parliament, whereby we raised it closer to average earnings. If someone is working regular hours for month after month, they should be entitled to a regular contract, not a zero-hours contract. If dignity in the workplace means anything, it should clearly mean that. We could make it happen in this Parliament and show the people of this country that we get what is happening, but this Queen’s Speech does not do that.

Britain, like countries all round the world, faces a huge challenge of creating the decent, middle-income jobs that we used to take for granted, and many of those jobs will be created by small businesses. There is a Bill in this Queen’s Speech on small business, but we all know—[Interruption.] A Government Member says “Hear, hear”, but we all know that we have a decades-long problem in this country of banks not serving the real economy. Companies that are desperate to expand, invest and grow cannot get the capital they need. For all the talk of reforming the banks, is there anyone who really believes the problem has been cracked, with lending to small businesses continuing to fall? The choice that we face is whether to carry on as we are, or whether we say that the banks need to change, break up the large banks so that we tackle our uncompetitive banking system and create regional banks that properly serve small business, but the Queen’s Speech does not do that.

A Queen’s Speech that was setting a new direction would also tackle another decades-long problem that has happened under Governments of both parties, and would devolve economic power from Whitehall to our great towns and cities. If I may say so, Lord Heseltine was right in his report—we do need to give our towns, cities and communities the tools to do the job. That is even more important when there is less money around. They need more powers over skills, economic development and transport, and the Government should be going much further. None of that is in the Queen’s Speech.

[Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman rule out a jobs tax on workers in my constituency should he get into power?

[Edward Miliband]

Here we have it: the country wants answers to deeply serious questions, and what do the Government do? They get every Tory Back Bencher to read out a planted Whip’s question. I have to say it: no wonder the public hate politics, given the way Government Members behave.

The first thing this Queen’s Speech needed to do was signal a new direction in the jobs we create in this country and whether hard work pays, and it did not rise to the challenge.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way to the question that I have obviously been given by the Chief Whip. In his opening and thoughtful part of his speech he called for a different form of politics, but as soon as he gets on to the detail it is business as usual and he criticises us for doing the same. May we go back to his first speechwriter, who was actually giving us something rather interesting?

[Edward Miliband]

I say to the hon. Gentleman that the man who called for a pact with UKIP clearly has great confidence in the prospects of the Conservative party and its ability to win the election.

Let me come to the child care Bill. We support measures on child care, which is part of the cost of living crisis, although the scale of that challenge means that we could go further on free places for three and four-year-olds. We also support the Bill on pensions, although we want to ensure that people get proper advice to avoid the mis-selling scandals of the past.

The next task for this Queen’s Speech is to face up to another truth: for the first time since the second world war, many parents fear that their children will have a worse life than they do. No wonder people think that politics does not have the answers when that is the reality they confront, and nowhere is that more important than on the issue of housing. We all know the importance of that to provide security to families, and we know that it matters for the durability of our recovery too. The Bank of England has warned that the failure to build homes is its biggest worry, and that generational challenge has not been met for 30 years.

[Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)]

Thirteen years!

[Edward Miliband]

The hon. Lady speaks from a sedentary position, but I say that that challenge has not been met for 30 years. Part of the challenge we face as a country is facing up to the long-term challenges—[Interruption.] I say to Government Members who are shouting that in no year of this Government have there been as many housing completions as in any year of the last Labour Government. It is a long-term challenge that we all have to face. We are currently building half the homes we need, and on current trends the backlog will be 2 million homes by 2020.

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

Will the Leader of the Opposition confirm that in 13 years of a Labour Government, fewer council houses were built than under even the Thatcher Government?

[Edward Miliband]

What I can say is that we built 2 million homes under a Labour Government, and we had a faster rate of house building than under this Government. As I have said, we face a big long-term challenge in this country, and the question is whether we are going to face up to it or just carry on as we did.

This Queen’s Speech proposes a new town at Ebbsfleet. That is fine, but it does not do enough to set a new direction in building homes. What is the fundamental problem? The fundamental problem is a market that is not working, with a small number of large developers not having an incentive to build at the pace we need. We know there is a problem of developers getting planning permission, sitting on land and waiting for it to accumulate value. There are land banks with planning permission for more than half a million homes, and we can either accept that or change it. We could give councils powers to say to developers, “Use the land or lose the land”, but the Government repeatedly refuse to do that. We could give councils the right to grow where they need more land for housing. The House could commit today to getting 200,000 homes built a year—the minimum we need. After all, in the 1950s that is what a one nation Conservative Prime Minister did. However, the Queen’s Speech does none of those things.

A Queen’s Speech that is rising to the challenge on housing would also do something for the 9 million people who rent in the private sector. There are more than 1 million families and 2 million children with no security at all. Children will start school this September, but their parents will have no idea whether they will still be in their home in 12 months’ time—and we wonder why people are losing faith in politics.

When the Opposition published our proposals for three-year tenancies, some people said they were like something out of Venezuela. If something as modest as that is ridiculed as too radical, is it any wonder that people who rent in the private sector do not think this Parliament stands up for them? Those proposals would not transform everything overnight, but they would tell 9 million people who rent in the private sector that we get it, and that something can be done. It is not an insecurity hon. Members would be willing to accept, so why should other people have to accept the insecurity they face?

There is another area where people are fed up being told that nothing can be done: their gas and electricity bills. It is eight months since Labour called for a freeze on people’s energy bills. Just this week, we have seen figures showing that companies have doubled their profit margins. That is a test of whether the House will stand up to powerful vested interests and act or say that nothing can be done. The companies can afford it, the public need it, and the Government have ignored it: this Queen’s Speech fails that test.

Another test for the Queen’s Speech is whether it responds to the anxieties people feel in their communities—[Interruption.] I say to the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson) that shouting from a sedentary position is another thing people hate about this Parliament. [Interruption.] We are seeking improvement. We all know that one of the biggest concerns at the election was around immigration. This is an important point. I believe that immigration overall has been good for the country. I believe that as the son of immigrants, and I believe it because of the contribution that people coming here have made to our country, but hon. Members know that we must address the genuine problems about the pace of change, pressures on services and the undercutting of wages.

Some people say we should cut ourselves off from the rest of the world and withdraw from the European Union. In my view, they are profoundly wrong. We have always succeeded as a country when we have engaged with the rest of the world. That is when Britain has been at its best. Others say that nothing can or should be done. I believe they are wrong, too. We can act on the pace of change by insisting on longer controls when new countries join the EU. We need effective borders at which we count people in and out. The House can act on something else that all hon. Members know is happening in our communities by tackling the undercutting of wages. We should not just increase fines on the minimum wage, but have proper enforcement.

[Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)]

I am sure the entire nation is grateful to the Leader of the Opposition for allowing the British people to speak about immigration—the Opposition have previously denounced as racist many of our fellow citizens who have spoken out on the matter. Will he apologise for the policies of the previous Labour Government, who admitted uncontrolled migration of 2.2 million people into this country—deliberately—the result of which is huge pressure on our social services and a massive increase in the demand for housing, to which he has referred.

[Edward Miliband]

Let me say to the hon. Gentleman plainly that it is not prejudiced to have concerns about immigration—he is right about that. We should have longer transitional controls, as I have said on many occasions, but the question is what we are going to do about the problem now. Are we going to tackle what is happening in our labour market? I do not understand why the Government are not taking action on those issues. Employers crowd 10 to 15 people into a house to sidestep the minimum wage. We all know it is happening. Gangmasters exploit workers from construction to agriculture. We all know it is happening. We should stop employment agencies from advertising only overseas or from being used to get around the rules on fair pay. We all know it is happening.

[Alun Cairns]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Edward Miliband]

I am not going to give way.

It is no wonder people lose faith in politics when they know those things are happening and Parliament fails to act. If the House believes those things are wrong, we should do something about them. Responding to the concerns we have heard about work, family and community is the start the House needs to make to restore our reputation in the eyes of the public.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Edward Miliband]

I am not giving way.

At the beginning of my speech, I said that there is a chasm between the needs and wishes of the people of this country and whether or not this House and politics are capable of responding. We need to rise to this challenge. This Queen’s Speech does not do that, but it can be done. That is the choice the country will face in less than a year’s time. This is what a different Queen’s Speech would have looked like: a “make work pay” Bill to reward hard work, a banking Bill to support small businesses, a community Bill to devolve power, an immigration Bill to stop workers being undercut, a consumers Bill—[Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Mr Cairns, you have done quite a lot of yelling loutishly from a sedentary position, which does not greatly advance your cause. I invite you to note that it is not difficult: the Leader of the Opposition is not giving way. The hon. Gentleman should therefore exercise his judgment.

[Edward Miliband]

This is what the Queen’s Speech should have done: a “make work pay” Bill to reward hard work, a banking Bill to support small businesses, a community Bill to devolve power, an immigration Bill to stop workers being undercut, a consumers Bill to freeze energy bills, a housing Bill to tackle the housing crisis and a NHS Bill to make it easier for people to see their GP and to stop privatisation. To make that happen we need a different Government: we need a Labour Government.