Liam Byrne
MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North · Labour · United Kingdom
“The loss of 4,000 jobs at Jaguar Land Rover is a body blow for workers, families and communities across the west midlands, so I commend Richard Parker, the Mayor of the West Midlands, for moving quickly on Monday to put £500,000 on the table to help ensure that everybody gets back to work.”
“I wholeheartedly welcome this well-rounded statement from the Foreign Secretary, and put on record my thanks to the new Prime Minister for the hard yards that I know he has put in over recent days and weeks.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I offer my warmest congratulations to her on her appointment to the role; she will be a brilliant Minister.”
“Let me start with a word of thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), who is not in her place, who said quite rightly that an awful lot has changed since the Bill was first introduced to this House. Indeed, a lot has been revealed over the course of the summer.”
“The effect of new clause 34 would be to ban off-ramping, ban new forms of digital currency transactions and ban memecoins, which are exactly the kind of measures that Ministers now need to bring forward. If we want to take the crypto system out of political finance, this is what we need to do.”
“No doubt we will learn that Mr Cottrell was in fact on the electoral register when that money was passed. No doubt we will discover that his mother, Fiona Cottrell, declared and did not disguise the fact that the money had ultimately come from her son.”
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“We are so proud that the Commonwealth games is coming to Birmingham, and we are also proud of the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, which sits just seven miles south of the Alexander stadium. I hope that, when the Minister next comes to Birmingham, he will ask for meetings with people at the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine and with the Commonwealth games team to inquire how we can create a genuine foundation for the Invictus games in our city for years to come. The Commonwealth games has a proud record of inclusivity, but we want to use it as a catalyst for transforming the strength, power, depth and stretch of the teams and the facilities that we have in our city for disability sports.”
“It is because the number of homes that we have built for social rent in our region has fallen by 80% since 2010. We are building council homes so slowly that it will take us until 2052 to clear the council waiting lists. That is why I hope that, when the Minister comes to Birmingham, he will meet Saidul Haque and the Citizens UK team, which has been defining some of our demands to make sure that the village that we build on the games site is genuinely a village of homes that everyone can actually afford. The third thing that I think George Dawson would have done in this debate is to quiz the Minister on how we make sure that the Commonwealth games genuinely creates a new foundation for disability sports.”
“That is why we are determined to make sure that ours is the first living wage region in the country, and why we want to see the Commonwealth games lead the way. I hope that the Minister will agree to the amendment and not seek to have it voted down by Members on his Benches. I hope that the Minister gets a chance to discuss this matter with Mr Lee Barron, our fabulous general-secretary of the TUC in the midlands, who is bringing together a Commonwealth collective to argue the case for a much stronger social charter, but accreditation of the living wage is absolutely front and centre of our demands. Secondly, I hope that the Government will bring forward a report that ensures that, in the village, we will deliver at least 471 homes for social rent. Why is that important?”
“With that in mind, what would George Dawson say about the Bill that the Minister has presented to us this afternoon? Well, the first thing he would say is that the games should be built in a genuinely inclusive way. That is why my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin) says that we will try to amend the Bill to include our determination to ensure that the Commonwealth games is an accredited living wage employer. Why is that important to us? It is because, across our region, 571,000 people are paid less than what they need to live on. That is one in four workers in our region. Only one in 1,000 businesses in our region is actually accredited as a living wage employer.”
“He founded the arts club and the free Birmingham Daily Press . He was the driving force behind the Shakespeare Memorial library. He was determined to ensure that our new city of Birmingham was not simply a city that was a democracy, but a city that had a democracy of culture. That inspired the great words that still sit above the free Shakespeare library: “The time has come to give everything to everybody”. That democratic ethos is what should inspire our approach to the games. George Dawson had an extraordinary congregation: around 12 of them went on to be city councillors and around six of them went on to be lord mayors, including one Joseph Chamberlain. Together, they ensured that at the end of the 19th century our city was known as the best-governed city in the world. That is the ethos that should shape our approach to this Bill.”
“We Opposition Members will fight like tigers to ensure that the games are a hand up for a community and not a handout for corporate sport. The Opposition know that our success will be judged not simply by the medals that we win, but by the lives that we change. We on this side of the House know that this festival of the Commonwealth games must be a festival of the civic gospel, too, which is why I turn to the father of the civic gospel: Mr George Dawson. The story of George Dawson is not so well known today. He was a radical preacher—born in Portsmouth, I believe—who in the late 19th century made his home on Edward Street in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood). From the pulpit he preached with extraordinary power, but he was the father of civic inventiveness in our city of Birmingham.”
“Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr Mahmood), with 1,500 new homes—the down payment on an extraordinary new development of 5,000 homes—that will, in total, bring to the great, lucky constituency of Perry Barr some half a billion pounds of investment. Let no one go away from this debate without understanding clearly that my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr is the greatest negotiator in this Chamber on behalf of the people he serves. Our challenge is not simply to deliver the games and to deliver the investment, but to ensure that what is a great festival of sport is also a great festival of and a great renewal of our civic spirit. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and a generation should be lifted by opportunity—lifted out of poverty, out of unemployment and out of under-investment.”
“The games that we plan to showcase will be the greatest Commonwealth games in history—and not just because they will be held and showcased in the most diverse, innovative and creative heart of the Commonwealth: in the west midlands and in Birmingham. The investment brought to our region is desperately needed. Some £800 million, about a quarter of it raised locally, is desperately needed. The facilities that have come are very welcome: I was delighted to look around the fantastic new Alexander stadium with my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West); there is the fabulous new aquatic centre, which will be built in Smethwick; and of course there is the extraordinary new village that will be built in the constituency of my hon.”
“The ethos of the games is generosity, which is why I shall start with first things first, and put on record the gratitude that the House feels not only to the chairman of the games, John Crabtree, and the chief executive, Ian Reid, but to Ian Ward and the team and officers at Birmingham City Council, along with Yvonne Davies and the team at Sandwell Council, for working miracles to step in when the bid from Durban failed. They have tried to do something spectacular, which is to put together a plan for the games in four and a half years, when normally it takes seven. The thanks of this House go out to everyone in the west midlands who has been involved in pulling together the plans for what will be the seventh Commonwealth games held on these islands.”
“It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Devon (Simon Jupp); he spoke with wit and flair and it was good to see him put Ministers on notice that he will be a doughty fighter for his constituency. It was good, too, to follow the hon. Member for Redcar (Jacob Young). We Opposition Members miss his predecessor greatly, but I know that Mo Mowlam would have appreciated the humanity and humility that he showed in an excellent maiden speech. It is a great pleasure to speak in this debate, because in a Second Reading debate we debate the principles of the Bill, and we cannot debate the principles of this Bill without debating the ethos of the games that we wish to host.”
“We are so proud that we will have the eyes of 1.5 billion people on us. We want to dazzle them, not simply with the greatest Commonwealth spectacle of sport that the world has ever seen, but with the kind of society that we have helped to build—a society that is dedicated to the Commonwealth principles of democracy, tolerance, inclusivity and peace, a society that we will have built not just with words, but with deeds.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who represents one of the youngest constituencies in our country. His constituency has suffered greatly as a result of cuts to youth services over the past few years. Let us use the possibilities of the Commonwealth games to begin turning that around. The final thing I think Dawson would say if he were here is that we should use available tickets to reward our local heroes. That has been suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green, and is one of the great ideas to come from the hosting of the Olympics. We in the west midlands would appreciate having the chance to honour the people who make the world of difference to the city and region that we share. We are so proud to be a poster child of a diverse community that lives together well.”
“When the Minister does so, will he clarify for the House whether anyone in his Department has told the organising committee that it should not become an accredited living wage employer? I tabled a parliamentary question on that, and it is fair to say that the answer was not crystal clear.”
“If the Minister is prepared genuinely to think about rail devolution, will he think not just about Southeastern but about West Midlands trains as well? Some 40% of trains were not on time last month and 2,000 services were cancelled. The police and crime commissioner has had to convene hearings because the Mayor has failed to get a grip. It is not an acceptable standard of service. We want local rail devolution and we want it now.”
“I am glad the Secretary of State raised Housing First. I know he will join me in congratulating Councillor Yvonne Davies and Councillor Sharon Thompson, who had to take back control of delivering it to drive some of the reductions we have seen in the west midlands. The point really is this: for Housing First to work, we first need houses. The truth is that the number of social homes built in the west midlands has fallen by 17% in the past year and by 18% since 2010. Surely that must be turned around.”
“I could give the House a barrage of statistics—”
“The reality is that what we see on our streets is that the safety net in this country—the social insurance system of which we were once proud—has now so comprehensively collapsed and the holes in that safety net are so big that anyone now hit by a twist of fate without a family to help them will fall straight through and hit the pavement, where in my region, on average, one is now dying every 10 days. That is why I say to this House that the subject of this debate is a moral emergency, which is why the response we need from Her Majesty’s Government is an awful lot stronger than what we heard today. In cities such as Birmingham, we may have planes in the sky but we have homeless people dying in the doorways. Having this in the second city of the fifth richest country on earth is not a morally acceptable situation.”
“I have a very different set of prescriptions for some of the problems set out by the hon. Member for Gravesham (Adam Holloway). Debates in this place are always political, but they sometimes touch on the personal, too. I am the adult son of an alcoholic. Since I lost my father to a lifelong struggle with alcohol five years ago, I have sought to campaign for those in my home city of Birmingham who are self-medicating trauma with drugs and with alcohol.”
“Gentleman’s borough? It was zero. The number of social homes built in the west midlands last year fell by 17%, and is down by nearly 80% since 2010. So I will take his intervention, but will he at least agree that we cannot bring together a shared agenda to tackle this problem unless we start building council homes again?”
“It took us nearly two hours to get that man an ambulance. How on earth have we come to this in this country? Thank God across our region we now have a coalition of kindness that is fighting back, with extraordinary people and organisations, including Hope into Action: Black Country; Matt Lambert, who does great work in Wolverhampton; Nobby Clarke, the Coventry night shelter and Hope Coventry; Langar Aid and Khalsa Aid International; SIFA Fireside; the outreach teams across the west midlands, which are doing extraordinary work; and Councillors Yvonne Davies and Sharon Thompson, who do extraordinary work and who have taken back control of the Housing First programme in our region, because they understand that for Housing First to work we first need homes. Can we guess the grand total of the number of social homes built last year in the hon.”
“I will come on to Walsall in a minute. I could give the House a barrage of statistics about how rough sleeping in my city is up by 1,000% since 2010; how the number of homeless children has trebled; and how we now have a crisis of overcrowding, with one in five homes in inner-city Birmingham and the Black Country now overcrowded. But I do not want to talk about statistics. I want to talk about a story. It is the story of a man I met in an underpass next to Birmingham New Street station when I was out on a Sunday morning last year with an amazing team of people called Outreach Angels. We saw a man lying on the floor in acute distress—a double amputee next to his wheelchair. This was in an underpass that stank of urine. He had been there for three days, and he was still dressed in his hospital gown with a hospital tag on his wrist.”
“I have met too many people who have been sanctioned on to the streets by the DWP. Let us end this injustice once and for all.”
“We need to radically expand the shelter that is available from places such as Tabor House and the Good Shepherd Ministry—places that provide not only shelter, but sanctuary, not just a house, but a home. But we need a Government who help, too. We need the Government to start by abolishing the Vagrancy Act 1824. I cannot be the only person in this House who thinks that homeless people do not need handcuffs—they need a helping hand. We should replace that with Kane’s law. We should bring together the Department for Work and Pensions, the Prison Service, the health system and local government, and create an obligation on them to collaborate not only to remedy homelessness, but to prevent homelessness. I have met too many people fresh out of prison at 4 o’clock in the morning in Birmingham.”
“I would add to the hon. Gentleman’s list, because not only does the YMCA do an amazing job, but so do St Basils, with the work of Jean Templeton; Tabor House; the Good Shepherd Ministry in Wolverhampton, which the Secretary of State mentioned; Homeless One; and the Ummah Care Foundation, where I used to work in a soup kitchen on a Sunday night. This coalition of kindness is basically the last bastion of civility in our country. Thank God for them. What we now need in our region is the biggest council house building programme since the second world war. What we need is a private sector, region-wide licensing scheme to stamp out bad practice. What we need are street teams delivering 24/7 addiction and mental health support.”
“We want to know whether the Secretary of State is with us or against us.”
“What we need is what I have called Kane’s law, in memory of Kane Walker, who lost his life on the streets of Birmingham last year: a duty on public agencies to collaborate to prevent homelessness from happening in the first place. Let us put alongside that the restoration of housing benefit for young people, who do not pay lower rents than anybody else; let us make sure that we take off the caps on housing benefit, which cover only two thirds of the average rent in a city like Birmingham; and let us end the shame of “no recourse to public funds”, which means that those who come to our country to seek sanctuary are ending up on the streets. The great tragedy of this debate is that if we summoned the will, we could, together, make homelessness history. We on the Opposition Benches are determined either to find a way or to make a way.”
“I know the Secretary of State has done her very best today to dress this up, but we should call it what it is: too little, too late, for a country that deserves far better. [Interruption.]”
“Why is Ofcom proceeding with that, given that the Secretary of State is commending this different approach to us this afternoon? Under the plans will consumers be able to access a choice of all four network operators in the 95% area that she has sketched out? Finally, I suppose the Secretary of State should be asked to tell us whether she agrees with Ofcom that £3 billion to £6 billion is going to be needed to eliminate all notspots in the country. If she does agree, will she explain why she is not bringing that proposal to us this afternoon? Today our network ranks not as the first, second or third best in the world, but as the 26th. Some Eighty per cent. of our constituencies do not enjoy 4G coverage from all big four operators.”
“However, to take this announcement seriously for a moment, which is more than the Chancellor obviously has, I suppose we should trouble the Secretary of State with some questions on her running commentary on half of a half-measure. Her Majesty’s Government have already backtracked on their commitment to full fibre roll-out by 2025. Can she reassure the House that this measure, such as it is, will not be diluted any further? Will she bless us with some interim targets? Perhaps they could be knocked together. If so, are we likely to see them any time soon? She told us today that the paperwork is not going to be signed until 2020, but she says that Ofcom has announced that it is moving ahead with a consultation on the spectrum auction, without coverage obligations.”
“As the Secretary of State made clear in the rapid canter through the final paragraphs of her statement, “the Government’s support does not make a legally binding arrangement or contract and does not create any expectation that Government will act in that way.” That is known as the small print; in this House, we call it, at best, a running commentary on what she is doing in the office this week. It is a running commentary on half of a half-measure that is four years late and leaves an area of the country twice the size of Norfolk without the coverage it needs. Members will therefore forgive us for not applauding this announcement from the rooftops.”
“Now the Secretary of State says it is 2025, and the industry briefing issued this morning says that will not be achieved until 2026. Nor is the proposal as well financed as is needed. Ofcom says that the cost of sorting out all the notspots in the country is between £3 billion and £6 billion, yet just £1 billion has been announced, half from industry and half from Government. At best, it is half of a half-measure. Nor, it seems, is the deal with the industry actually done.”
“Now the networks that we have, like the targets that we have set, are well behind the best in the world; so while today’s progress is, I suppose, welcome, it is really half of a half-measure, when what was needed was a bold 10-year national switchover plan to deliver ubiquitous gigabit per second access to every corner of the country. At our most generous, we welcome the commitment to 95% 4G coverage, because it is better than the 91% that we have today, but I am afraid that still leaves a 4,681 square mile area of the country where coverage will be non-existent or not good enough. As Members know, that is an area twice the size of Norfolk and much bigger than our largest county, North Yorkshire. Nor, it would appear, will progress be as rapid as was promised. In its manifesto, the Conservative party promised 95% coverage by 2022.”
“I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of her statement. May I start by welcoming her professed enthusiasm for pulling this country out of the cyber slow lane? However, having read her statement, I am afraid to say that, on close examination, it would appear that our Teletext Tories will have to do rather better than this. Let me start, for the benefit of hon. Members, with the points on which we agree. It is surely right that we dramatically step up the efforts to pull the country into the 21st century. We were a leader once.”
“There have been 295 international disputes between the second world war and the 1990s that involved a use of force by one state against another, with 171 of them entailing some kind of negotiation. Where the difficulties were the most intractable and where the breakthroughs most significant were when we accepted that there was only a multilateral path to peace. That is why we turned to Senator Mitchell to help broker the Good Friday agreement. It is why the world turned to President Carter to help broker the Camp David agreement. It is why we turned to Richard Holbrooke to help bring about the Ohio accords. The injustice in Kashmir has gone on for too long and if the Government are serious about what they say—we never know, perhaps they are—they will step up to their responsibility to bring this injustice to an end.”
“5.] We must hear a plan from them to stand up for the interests of British citizens. I am not the only one on the Opposition Benches, or in this House, who is getting cases from people who have friends and family in the area and yet have no idea what is going on with them, because there has been a communications blackout. Crucially, we now need clear and urgent action from this Government in the United Nations to ensure that the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is given free and unfettered access to the area, on both Pakistan’s side and the Indian side. I want to know from the Minister what he has done to pursue this agenda in the UN. Surely, if we are to put ourselves at the forefront of solving international difficulties, the time has come for us to push for a multilateral solution to this decades-long injustice.”
“That danger, in turn, has been multiplied yet again by the decision to suspend all communications and put the people under curfew in what surely must be one of the largest open prisons on the planet. The UK signed a treaty, the instrument of accession, on 26 October 1947, so we are a party to this, in a way. That treaty has now been breached, but we have heard nothing from the British Government about how they plan to remedy that. Crucially, Ministers have accepted that human rights are always a multilateral issue, so we must hear something from a Government who have set out before this Parliament a clear determination to put themselves “at the forefront” of solving “the most complex international security issues” —[ Official Report , 14 October 2019; Vol. 666, c.”
“So I would like to know from the Minister why the British Government are insisting that this remains a bilateral conflict. That is a fantasy, one enshrined in the treaty of Simla. In recent days, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, has said that that treaty is dead. This is no longer a bilateral issue, and by his unilateral action to suspend article 370 of the constitution—unilateral action prohibited by the treaty of Simla—President Modi has said in clear terms that this now requires a multilateral solution. President Modi’s decision to suspend article 370 has set the stage for an incredibly dangerous slide into violence, whereby risk is now multiplied by the decision to deploy thousands more troops into what is already one of the most militarised areas on earth.”
“Much of this debate has rightly centred on Brexit issues, but our obligations, duties, moral responsibilities, history and commitments stretch much, much wider. We should therefore step up and do far more to raise our voice to try to bring a resolution to what is going on right now in Kashmir. Some people say that this is a conflict between two nuclear powers—if only it was as simple as that. This is a conflict between not two nuclear powers, but three. China is the world’s biggest consumer of Gulf oil and it is building a pipeline from China through Pakistan so that it can soon access oil through that overland route. The idea that China is going to permit someone to put its thumb on what is a new jugular vein is fanciful analysis.”
“Like my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), I welcome one aspect of the Queen’s Speech: the commitment that we will continue to play a leading role in global affairs, defending our interests and promoting our values, and that we will position ourselves at the forefront of the most complex international security issues. That is why the sins and omissions of this Queen’s Speech are quite intriguing. There is one point on Earth where we have a particular legacy, where promises were made and broken by the world community and where the world community has now left the most terrible state of injustice: Kashmir. So I was surprised that there has been no mention in today’s debate of our historical obligations to make good on the promises made in the 1940s.”
“That will not happen, but we could insist that our airports become carbon neutral and use that investment to replant Shakespeare’s great forest of Arden. The citizens in Parliament Square remind us that it is not acceptable for politics to remain frozen while the planet is warming. That is why we need to crack on.”
“Crucially, we need to transform the number of electric vehicle charging points. There are more EV charging points in Westminster than in the whole of the west midlands; that is not acceptable. We need to decarbonise our housing stock, which means we need devolved control of the £175 million of ecofunding that is our entitlement. We need to start building homes to A plus standards. Finally, we need to make sure that we have a regional investment bank to back the green firms that are creating green jobs. None of this will change the imagination without a significant investment in nature. At the moment, we need a forest the size of Tunisia to absorb all the carbon that is produced by the west midlands.”
“I will be extremely brief, Mr Gray. Labour Members are proud of the Climate Change Act 2008, but we are even prouder of the green new deal that we passed at the Labour party conference, which takes forward the principles of decarbonisation, jobs and justice. That is why we held a citizens’ assembly in Birmingham within 24 hours of Parliament declaring a climate emergency. Several ideas emerged from that, which I will touch on. First, we need green power. We spend £10 billion a year on green power in our region. Some 99% of that spend leaves the region, which is why we need a municipal solar company to turn our rooftops into power plants across the region. Secondly, we need to decarbonise our transport system. We cannot do that unless we connect transport together. That is why we need powers over bus and rail franchising.”
“Consequently, we are not calling for some kind of bonfire of the quangos here. What we are asking for is for some proper thought about how those 13 different regulators and advisory bodies might number something closer to one—not one, but not 13, either. We believe that we will have to start bringing these regulators together, if we are to concentrate the firepower that is needed to take on the biggest and most complicated regulatory challenge in human history.”
“We are now facing off against some of the biggest, wealthiest and most powerful companies on earth, yet the regulatory infrastructure that we have today would be described by Sidney Webb as a mish-mash: Ofcom; the Information Commissioner’s Office; the Competition and Markets Authority; the Payment Systems Regulator; the Financial Conduct Authority; the Advertising Standards Authority; and the Independent Press Standards Organisation. There is a slew of non-regulatory advisory bodies. Something like 13 different advisers and regulators have some kind of bite in relation to what happens online. They all do an important job and they are all staffed by excellent people. My hon. Friend used to work for one of them—indeed, she helped to set it up—so she knows very well how long it takes to set up a regulator or to merge regulators.”
“Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) insisted on during the Committee stage of the Bill that became the Data Protection Act 2018. Crucially, we also believe that there should be some kind of right of ownership and control of data that is created through our use of technology. That was absolutely at the heart of the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central. At some point, the Government will have to step up and provide some answers as to what they think about this issue. I hope that the Minister will begin that business of stepping up in about five minutes’ time. These charters—these bills of rights—are meaningless without two further pieces of the puzzle. The first is an effective system of powerful regulation.”
“I think that some of the issues are uncontested; I think we agree on equality of treatment and on the right to security. I also think we agree on the right of free expression, although we believe that we should incorporate lessons from Germany, which has pioneered the NetzDG legislation to take out hate speech online. I think we agree on equality of access, although, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central said, ideas such as the national education service are important here, because of course they will transform rights to digital literacy. We believe in universal digital literacy; we believe that it is a fundamental right for the 21st century. We also believe in a right to privacy; I believe that is uncontested. However, what is perhaps not agreed on is the kind of rights to algorithmic justice that my hon.”
“That was something that people needed in order to participate in civilised society at the time when Adam Smith was writing. These days the capabilities that people need will be different. We therefore have to ask ourselves what those capabilities are and how we turn them into rights. That is why, given the complexity and the regulation and re-regulation that is to come in this century, it would be wise now to set out a document of first principles. We believe that a Bill of digital rights will make the business of regulating far simpler over the next 50, 60, perhaps 113 years. Who knows what the life cycle of this debate might be? We set out in the debate some of the rights that we think should feature in a charter. We set them out because we wanted to have a debate, and I am pleased to be able to have a bit of that debate this afternoon.”
“The rise of temperature, robots and conflicts will define our economy over the next 20 or 30 years, so we need not only just transition but just transitions, and at the moment we have nothing from the Government to tell us how that journey will be steered over the years to come. As the Minister knows, because he was at the sharp end of these debates during the proceedings on the Data Protection Bill, which became the Data Protection Act 2018, our approach is rooted in a particular philosophy. Our inspiration is the work of Amartya Sen and the work that he set out first in “Development as Freedom”. Over the course of the revolution in this century, we must ask ourselves what capabilities we want every citizen in this country to have. Adam Smith talked about how a man might need a linen shirt to go out in public.”
“Over the course of the 19th century there was not one factory Act but 22 different factory Acts and Bills, and over this century there will no doubt be just as many different attempts to reform, revise, regulate, legalise and make lawful or unlawful different aspects of the technology that we are debating here today. So my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham and Rainham was right to say that what is needed from the Government is a plan for a just transition. We now understand what “just transition” means when it comes to climate change, but we need a plan for technology just as much, just as we need a plan for just transition given the new trade conflicts that are now ensuing.”
“Peter Drinkwater’s factory manager was a man called Robert Owen, who went on to found New Lanark mill in Glasgow. It was 1825 before steam technology was incorporated into Locomotion No.1, which was set to work on the Stockton to Darlington railway. The point is that it was 113 years over which the steam revolution unfolded and began to transform every aspect of this country, including our economy. The speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham and Rainham (Jon Cruddas) was important in setting the wider stage and the bigger story, because the new technology required a revolution in law and regulation.”