Oral Answers to Questions

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mims Davies]

The hon. Lady knows that we have some of the strongest legislation to tackle everything that she has mentioned, including religious hate crime. Over the past six years, the Home Office’s places of worship protective security funding scheme has awarded 323 grants of around £8 million with regard to religious hate crime. I will be clear: I am personally committed to the best possible response to hate crime by every force.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

2. What recent steps the Government are taking to help support women in the workplace during the cost of living crisis.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Claire Coutinho)]

The Department for Work and Pensions new progression offer will help claimants on universal credit to identify opportunities in their current role or a new role. We have also increased the national living wage, reduced the universal credit taper rate and increased the work allowance to ensure that work pays.

[Hannah Bardell]

The current Prime Minister famously insulted millions of mums across the UK during the pandemic when he showed a total lack of understanding of the pressure they were under and the discrimination they faced in the workplace. It is probably lost on a billionaire PM, but his Tory Government have overseen the second most expensive childcare in the developed world. According to Pregnant Then Screwed, 62% of parents pay the same or more for childcare as their rent or mortgage. The cost of living crisis will only worsen that. What real actions will the Minister and the new Prime Minister take? Will she and he be in post long enough to actually do anything?

[Claire Coutinho]

Childcare is an important issue. Since 2010, we have doubled childcare to 30 hours for working parents, with a universal offer of 15 hours, and covering 85% of childcare costs under universal credit. We have also had much discussion in recent weeks about childcare ratios. I will ensure that the relevant Minister writes to the hon. Lady with more detail.

Oral Answers to Questions

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am a bit concerned about offering my hon. Friend a meeting with the Housing Minister, in case any ill should befall him. But my hon. Friend is right; there is not enough power in local hands at the moment. It is too easy for local councils to be overruled by the Planning Inspectorate, and that is certainly an issue that I expect my Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to look at.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

Q4.   According to the Prime Minister’s new Deputy Prime Minister, one of the things that qualified her most for being PM, and was one of her greatest achievements, was the reintroduction of beavers. Now, I am all for the beavers, but given her flip-flopping on Brexit and her inability to understand global affairs, how can constituents of mine, such as Waz Abbas, whose energy prices will go from £7,000 to £37,000 a year, or Broadtex in Livingston—its prices will go from £50,000 to £250,000 a month—have any faith that she can tackle the oncoming humanitarian crisis? Is she going to come out of her den in No. 10 and take real action, or is she going to be as useless and corrupt as her predecessor, who has rocketed off to somewhere in the Pacific? [Interruption.]

[The Prime Minister]

I am determined to tackle the issues we face in energy, and I look forward to the Scottish Government playing their part by building new nuclear power stations.

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I want a nicer Parliament and that question was not a good example. I certainly do not want the word “corrupt” being used against the new Prime Minister. [Interruption.] I am sure that the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) will withdraw that comment.

[Hannah Bardell]

Sometimes the truth hurts, but I am happy to withdraw it.

[Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)]

May I warmly congratulate my right hon. Friend and welcome her to her place, but may I also wish her the very best with the heavy responsibilities that she now bears? Around 1.5 million households across the countryside rely on heating oil in order to keep their homes warm and cook their meals. They have faced price rises of around 130% in recent months and they are not part of the energy price cap. As rumours abound about what tomorrow’s statement may hold, will she confirm that those 1.5 million households—many of them in rural areas such as my constituency—will be specifically included in any mooted ideas about an energy price freeze?

Contaminated Blood Scandal: Interim Payments for Victims

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Ellis]

As soon as is reasonably possible.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

My constituent Linda Cannon lost her husband after he received a blood transfusion that infected him with hepatitis C. My constituent Vera Gaskin has stage two chronic cirrhosis of the liver, a serious and lifelong condition, which she got through contaminated blood. I have sat with both of my constituents and listened to them describe the impact on their life. I have been raising this matter for seven and a half years, and we are about to have our fourth Prime Minister in that time. Some 400 people have died since the inquiry started five years ago. Is the Government’s strategy to wait for more people to die before they get justice—we can give people money right now, as has been recommended—or will the Government finally pull their finger out and give justice to the people affected by contaminated blood?

[Michael Ellis]

I am sorry, but the hon. Lady’s question is unworthy. It is completely wrong to characterise anyone as waiting for people to pass on. That does not do justice to the gravamen of the situation, or to the officials working on the matter. I reiterate that good people are working hard to get the right result on this matter. I hope she will reflect on that.

Confidence in Her Majesty’s Government

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!”

The words of the great Scots poet Rabbie Burns are as resonant now as they were when he wrote them, because if we cannot, as politicians, see ourselves as others see us, we have little hope of governing responsibly or with credibility. I suspect that if the Prime Minister and some others on the Conservative Benches, with their delusions of grandeur, could see themselves as people in my constituency—and in all our constituencies—see them, and could see the damage that their Government have done to those people, they would be, and should be, horrified.

That is the problem with this Government and this Prime Minister. Some have become so used to the privileges, the entitlement and the trappings of government that they have become utterly insulated from reality. Our citizens have the right not to have confidence in this Government, this political system and these political institutions at Westminster, because—as this Government and this Prime Minister have shown—they are utterly broken.

We should not be surprised that we have ended up with a Prime Minister who has gone from one elitist institution to another, from Eton to Oxbridge to the House of Commons. In fact, 50% of Conservatives were privately educated. [Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) wants to intervene, he is welcome to do so.

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Jonathan Gullis]

The hon. Lady is casting aspersions against people who attended private school. I find it quite disrespectful that my mother and father, who chose to send me to that school and to use their hard-earned money to give me the best start in life—which they unfortunately did not receive themselves—should be insulted in this way.

[Hannah Bardell]

I think that there is a basic reality here. In a tweet, the academic Taj Ali pointed out that

“Just 7% of Brits are privately educated…43% of the…most influential news editors, 44% of newspaper columnists…are privately educated. A two-tier education system creates a two-tier society.”

That is the point I am making. We have a Prime Minister who is completely divorced from reality. The current leadership race and its navel-gazing narcissism have given us a window into that elitism and privilege. Among the contenders is one of the richest men in the UK, who by his own admission knows literally no one who is working class. Those people left the Government only when they realised that their own reputations would be tainted. Whether it is the Windrush scandal or the Post Office Horizon crisis, there is a litany of chaos behind this Government.

I have no confidence in this Government because they have failed to build proper social housing, failed to fund a health service that was already on its knees before the pandemic, and failed to protect the most vulnerable in our society. Instead, they have cut the financial lifelines of the poorest and most vulnerable, and have sought to balance the books on their backs while vilifying them.

The SNP Government in Scotland are sick to the back teeth of cleaning up the mess of this Conservative Government, and using our precious resources, with one financial hand tied behind our back, to clean up that mess. Mitigating the bedroom tax and lifting the poorest and most marginalised out of poverty without the full basket of financial powers is hugely challenging, but we do it because we understand what it means to govern in everyone’s interest.

This Tory Government have failed because they have failed to quell the river of dirty Russian money flowing through their financial system. I was on the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill Committee with my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) and I saw this Government turn their back on the opportunity to stem the corruption and flow of dirty money. While we are grateful for what they have done in Ukraine, it is an absolute disgrace that this Prime Minister, this Government and previous Prime Ministers did so little.

I have no faith in this Government because they have presided over a right-wing Brexit that has torn our social and economic fabric apart. We understand the notion of credibility. The sooner Scotland can get independence, the sooner Scotland can flourish and the rest of the UK can, I hope, have its own democratic enlightenment and be free from the chaos and corruption that this Westminster system of Government holds.

I have no confidence in this Government because I am sick and tired of hearing Conservative Members talking on television about how, because they had personal experience of those who lost loved ones during the pandemic, we somehow do not have the right to challenge the fact that their Prime Minister partied his way through it. The reality is—[Interruption.] Hon. Members might shake their heads, but I had to stand at the deathbed of one of my team, a dear friend, through a window in her hospice because I was not allowed to cuddle her, while their Prime Minister partied his way through it. And there he is, still sitting in power—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. I call James Daly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anna Firth]

I will not, because of the time. We have had to deal with covid, a global energy crisis and Russia’s illegal, barbaric invasion of Ukraine, yet we have never once lost sight of our core manifesto promise. It is this Government who got Brexit done—not finished, but done, none the less. It is because of Brexit that we were able to develop the world’s first approved vaccine, followed by the fastest vaccine roll-out in Europe, as has been highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Gareth Bacon).

[Hannah Bardell]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Anna Firth]

No, because of the time. The speed and take-up of our vaccine programme allowed us to lift our restrictions quicker than any other country in Europe, restoring freedom to people and benefiting our economy. This has been possible only because of this Conservative Government and because of Brexit, which was totally opposed by the Labour party.

If the Labour party had been in charge, more people would have died while we waited for the EU’s vaccines. We would have been in lockdown for longer, damaging not just our economy but people’s mental health. Also, the NHS would not have been so well funded and would have been less able to cope with covid when it happened—[Interruption.]

Sue Gray Report

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

No. What I can tell the hon. Lady is that the report is wholly independent and the judgments contained in it are a matter for Sue Gray. I am grateful to her for what she has done, and her interim report was extremely useful to the Government in making the changes that we have made.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

In the years to come, when the Prime Minister reflects on his time as PM and in government, what does he think will be his proudest moment? Will it be breaking his own lockdown laws and being fined? Will it be misleading Parliament? Or will it be lying to the Queen and presiding over such a toxic environment that, according to Sue Gray’s report, staff in his office had a lively party the night before her husband’s funeral?

[The Prime Minister]

I will look back, many years hence, on, from this period, the fastest vaccine roll-out in Europe, which was not half bad; being the first country anywhere in the world to put an approved vaccine in anybody’s arm; and coming out of covid faster than any other European country. Those are already very considerable achievements, to say nothing of delivering Brexit, which the hon. Lady would not have done and neither would the Labour party.

Debate on the Address

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ian Blackford]

I have to say to my hon. Friend—I will call him that because I enjoy his company—that if the game is up for anybody or any party, the game is up for the Tory party in Scotland and for the Union. He needs to reflect on the fact that the SNP has won the last 11 elections. We went to the public and asked for a mandate to have an independence referendum. [Hon. Members: “You didn’t get one!”] I hear from a sedentary position that we did not get one. I ask Conservative Members to reflect carefully. Let us consider the first-past-the-post elections to the Scottish Parliament last year when we won 62 of the 73 seats. There is a pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament.

The Queen’s Speech mentioned respecting democracy. Why do the Scottish Conservatives and those in London deny democracy to the people of Scotland? How many times do the people of Scotland have to elect the SNP into government yet Westminster says no? What price democracy when this place ignores the sovereign right and the will of the Scottish people? A day of reckoning will come for those who seek to frustrate the rights of Scots to have a referendum. That day will come and not only will there be a referendum, but we will win it because that is what democracy is about.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the reason that this shower of corrupt, criminal Conservatives are blocking Scotland’s democratic and legal right to have a mandate over its own future is that they know—

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. It is in breach of the House’s regulations for somebody to call someone else a criminal in this Chamber.

[Mr Speaker]

A particular Member was not referred to, as you know—[Interruption.] Just a minute—I do not think I need any help. What I would say is that we want moderate and tolerant language that does not bring the House into disrepute or expect those outside to copy the behaviour. I want good behaviour and moderate language. I want people to think before they speak. I call Ian Blackford.

[Hannah Bardell]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

No.

Referral of Prime Minister to Committee of Privileges

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Thursday 21st April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

I will say something about the Privileges Committee later but, having recused myself, I do not think it is really for me to tell its members what to do or how to behave.

One thing I am very keen on is this: I passionately care about Parliament. I believe in Parliament. I believe in democracy. The only way that I can get change for my constituents is through the democratic process. Anything that undermines trust and confidence in Parliament damages my opportunity to do anything useful in my life at all. That is why I always want to urge the House to be extremely careful in these matters of standards and privileges. Each generation of MPs has a responsibility to burnish, not tarnish, the reputation of this House, because we hand democracy on to a future generation, and if we have undermined it, it may not last.

I draw to the House’s attention the fact that in this Parliament, two MPs have been found guilty of serious offences in a court of law, and another two are awaiting trial; four MPs have been suspended for one day; a Minister was suspended for seven days; seven MPs have been required to apologise to the House for breaches of the code of conduct; three MPs have resigned their seats in the face of convictions; and the Independent Expert Panel has suspended a Member for six weeks for sexual harassment, made another apologise for bullying staff, and found another guilty of such terrible sexual harassment that he resigned his seat before he was sanctioned. All that is without any consideration of whether any right hon. or hon. Member has lied to the House. And it is not yet six months since the Owen Paterson saga, which I do not think covered the House in glory.

In a very short period of time, two of our colleagues have been murdered, and others are wearing stab vests. We have to take the reputation of the House extremely seriously. We have to burnish it, not tarnish it.

I have heard Ministers argue, quite rightly, that there must be due process. I say to the House that this is the due process. It always has been the due process. When there has been a claim that a member of the public or a Member of the House might have committed a contempt of Parliament by lying to the House, breaching the confidentiality around a Select Committee report or whatever, the standard process is that it is sent to the Committee of Privileges—or, as it used to be, the Standards and Privileges Committee, and before that the Committee of Privileges—so this is the due process.

I have absolute confidence in the other members of the Committee and that they will do a good job. They will think very carefully about, as the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) said, making sure that there is a fair hearing. The court of public opinion is not very good at providing a fair hearing, I find; the House should do a great deal better than the court of public opinion. We try to uphold the rule of law—that is one of the duties for all MPs—so it is particularly important that we make sure that there is a fair process. I am sure that the other Committee members will do that.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

rose—

[Mr Steve Baker]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker.

My second point about fair process is that it is actually quite a high bar that the Privileges Committee will have to consider. As the Leader of the Opposition said earlier, I do not think it is debated that the House was misled. I think even the Prime Minister admits, in effect, that the House was misled. It was said that rules were not broken and it is self-evident that rules were broken, so the House was misled—it got a false impression. The question is whether that was intentional. The Committee will have to devise ways to investigate whether there was an intention.

[Hannah Bardell]

rose—

[Sir William Cash]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

I think I ought to give way to the hon. Lady first.

[Hannah Bardell]

The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent and poignant speech. Does he not find it strange and deeply worrying that we seem to be in a position in which the Prime Minister seemed unable or incapable of following his own rules and his own laws, yet he is using the rules and processes of this place to frustrate the course of, as the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) said, natural justice?

[Chris Bryant]

I would normally agree with the hon. Lady on these kinds of things, and I sort of would have agreed with her last night, but I think we are getting to a better place now. In a sense, sometimes the Back Benchers persuade the Front Benchers of a better course of action—I am looking intently at the Government Chief Whip at the moment.

As the Clerk advised in the case of whether Stephen Byers had misled the House on a single occasion in 2001:

“In order to find that Mr Byers committed a contempt in the evidence session of 14 November 2001, the Committee will need to satisfy itself not only that he misled the Sub-Committee, but that he did so knowingly or deliberately.”

As I said, that is quite a high bar, but it is for the Privileges Committee to decide that.

Sue Gray Report

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Monday 31st January 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend. That is why we are taking up the findings of the Sue Gray report. We want to make sure that No. 10 works better and that the whole of the Government work better. It has been focused very much on covid, but we now need to deliver exclusively on the great priorities of the people.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

Last summer, my team and I said goodbye to our colleague through the window of her hospice as she died of cancer. We did not get to hug her, and we were just like many millions of people across the UK. We followed the rules, while the Prime Minister and his colleagues did not.

It makes me sick to my stomach that we will not get the findings of the report because the police were so late to the party—the same Met police who were happy to arrest women who were protesting the murder of Sarah Everard. It makes me sick to my stomach that he does not understand the anger, fury and upset of millions of people across the UK. Sometimes, an apology will not cut it. It is time for action. It is time for a clear out. It is time for him to resign.

[The Prime Minister]

Again, I sympathise very much with the experience of the hon. Lady’s constituents and all the pain that people have gone through throughout this pandemic. I must say to her, though, that she is prejudging the issue in question. I do not think that is the right thing to do. I have a great deal of respect for the police and they should be allowed to get on with their job.

Oral Answers to Questions

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Wednesday 24th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend very much for his question and I will do my utmost—he has invited everybody, and I hope that a lot of people will be going to Lincoln. I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport will have listened carefully to what he had to say.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

Q6.   “Inexplicable” is how the former vaccine taskforce chair Kate Bingham described this Government’s decision to cancel their contract with Livingston-based vaccine developer Valneva—a company that the Prime Minister has himself visited. She also noted how shoddily Valneva had been treated and how damaging his Government’s decision had been for UK life sciences, exports and jobs in my Livingston constituency, where a state-of-the-art vaccine manufacturing plant now lies unfinished. There has been no apology for the incorrect statements in the House, so will the Prime Minister please meet me and representatives of Valneva, and will he tell me whether his Government have tabled proposals to reach the amicable resolution that was promised from the Dispatch Box? If not, when will they do so?

[The Prime Minister]

I was personally very disappointed when we could not get approval for the Valneva vaccine in the way that we had hoped, and I know how disappointing that was to colleagues in Scotland. I will certainly ensure that the hon. Member gets the relevant meeting. What we are doing is investing massively in this country’s vaccine capability across the country so that we are prepared for the next pandemic, and I very much hope that Valneva will be part of that.

Ministerial Code

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Monday 26th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

Totally. As I pointed out earlier in response to the question from, I think, the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn), I had been in a meeting in the Cabinet Room with the Prime Minister. I would not ordinarily go into discussions that take place in Cabinet Committees, for reasons that the hon. Gentleman will well understand, but I never heard the Prime Minister say any such a thing. We were all wrestling with an incredibly difficult decision—the decision to lock down necessarily imposes costs in other ways, as we are all aware. The Prime Minister concluded at the end of our discussion, which was a sober, serious and detailed discussion, that it was necessary not only to have that second lockdown but, sadly, to have a third lockdown as well.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP) [V]]

According to Opinium for The Observer, 53% of people in Scotland think that the Prime Minister is corrupt. Whether it is covid contracts for his cronies, peerages for his pals, or tax breaks over texts, the Prime Minister is leading a Government who are rotten to the core and fast losing public trust. Any healthy democracy must have leaders with credibility. Will the Minister do the right thing and ensure that a public inquiry happens and recognise that people in Scotland have a right to decide their own future—a future free from Tory sleaze and corruption that they did not vote for?

[Michael Gove]

I think we are grateful for that party election broadcast. The most important thing to stress is that, on each of the detailed questions raised quite understandably by the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss), I explained the position and it is not as the SNP would wish it to be.