John McDonnell
MP for Hayes and Harlington · Labour · United Kingdom
“It is not a laughing matter—I am sorry for interrupting the flow of the discussion. It would be useful if the review looked at NATS’s long-term investment plans, particularly since its partial privatisation in 2001, which I opposed. I thank the Minister for meeting Unite this morning and thanking the workers, who have worked so hard.”
“On a number of occasions, I have raised the case of Lee Cheuk-yan, who many Labour Members will remember was the general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and founder of the Labour party in Hong Kong. He was detained during the democracy movement five years ago.”
“I thank the Minister for his statement. NATS used to be in my constituency and then moved down to Swanwick. Of course, with Heathrow in my constituency, I receive—as I mentioned yesterday—a large amount of correspondence from a whole range of other MPs’ constituents, who think I am responsible for Heathrow airport.”
“I fully agree, and let me also say that wheelchair compensation is significant in this legislation. Most of us have dealt with cases like that. Going back to accountability in the process, a number of different organisations have provided us with notes on the legislation.”
“I apologise to my right hon. Friend; I should have checked this before the debate. The proposed new section 61G refers to priorities and objectives of the Secretary of State, which include a requirement for the Secretary of State to issue a document setting out those priorities and objectives for the CAA.”
“At the moment, when people in my constituency are faced with these problems, they do not know where to go; it is as simple as that. Finally, the debate that we will have on Heathrow expansion and the new policy statement will be interesting, given that we do not know what the flight paths will be. If I was a constituent of my hon.”
The complete record
Every one of 7,997 lines we hold for John McDonnell, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 22 of 160.
“Total spending on adult skills—for those aged 19-plus—is set to increase by 22% between 2019-20 and 2024-25, and I welcome that, but the Minister should be saying to the Treasury, “That reverses only a fraction of past cuts.” Total spending on adult skills in 2024-25 will still be 22% below 2009-10 levels. The Treasury must listen to this argument if we are going to have—as others have said—the skilled workforce that we desperately need in a 21st century economy. The IFS stated: “Spending on classroom-based adult education has fallen especially sharply, and will still be 40% below 2009-10 levels even with the additional funding.” The argument is irrefutable and I hope that the Minister does steam in, with cross-party backing for increased investment overall.”
“They were protesting about pay, but—this is why I commend them—it was also about ensuring that there is proper funding for education overall. It was a twin demand on their part: their dispute is about pay but, as importantly, it is also about ensuring that education is properly funded. Owing to my interest in FE, naturally I want to advocate for FE. My hon. Friends the Members for Wirral West and for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western) referred to the IFS figures, including the £6,800 spending per 16 to 18 student, which is lower than spending per pupil in secondary schools. I think one of my hon. Friends made the point about college and sixth form funding being only 11% or 12% greater than that of primary schools, having been two times greater in the early 1990s. I will drill down a bit further into the figures.”
“That is why I want to do everything I can to support the Minister in those negotiations with the Treasury, and to arm him with the arguments that we have heard today about the scale of investment that we need. I do not want to run through too many stats, and I will be very brief, but the reality is—we have to admit it—that education spending is below the OECD average. We are the 19th highest spender out of the 37 OECD members. I looked at the House of Commons Library figures, as others have done. They show that education fell as a percentage of GDP in every year from 2011-12 to 2018-19. That is the longest continuous decline in investment in education that we have seen. Outside this House today were thousands of teachers—National Education Union members—demonstrating and marching. I joined them.”
“I went to Burnley FE college and did my A-levels, and then I came down to do university degrees, including a master’s degree and so on. That gave me an understanding of what a liberating experience education is. It also changes life chances, and that is what it did for me. I have been campaigning for a number of years to establish a national education service built, like the NHS, on the principle that it should be free from cradle to grave—from the early years through to school, college, university and lifelong learning. That is my ambition. We are nowhere near that at the moment, but I think there is still potential for it. We cannot go on in the way we are at the moment.”
“If we are honest with ourselves, the reality is that that will be a pre-election Budget. The Chancellor has an element of headroom to create, if not a Budget that will create an economic boom, then one that will spend more money to attempt to create a feel-good factor before the general election. Every Government do it, so we have to recognise that. There is a real window of opportunity for us to strengthen the Minister’s hand in those negotiations with the Treasury, and to reap quite rich rewards for—in the discussion of wider economic issues—relatively small sums that could have such an impact. We all come from our different experiences, as we have heard. I dropped out of education and was then a production worker for many years.”
“As we have heard, they enable individual MPs to come from their constituencies and report their own experience of what is happening, and that feeds into a general understanding of what is happening in the field overall. However—I take this point from the right hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Sir David Evennett)—there is another role for such debates: where there is a recalcitrant Minister, they enable us to hold that Minister’s feet to the flames, and where we have a co-operative Minister, as we do here, as the right hon. Gentleman said, they give us the opportunity to strengthen that Minister’s negotiations with the Treasury. There will be a King’s Speech in the autumn, an autumn financial statement in the normal way, and a Budget next year.”
“I thank the alliance between Wirral and Worcester for forging this debate. I must warn my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood) that she is now linked up with the militant trade unionists; in the debate we had on BBC local radio stations, the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) was strongly in support of the industrial action by the National Union of Journalists, so, given some of the attitudes at the moment, I just want to express some caution. I say these things but then I realise that Hansard has no irony, so I need to point out that that was irony. These estimates debates are useful in different ways.”
“We are dealing with people who have spent large parts of their lives gaining the qualifications that enable them to pass on that education to others.”
“I do not want to keep quoting the right hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford, because it becomes embarrassing after a bit, but that was exactly his point, and I think my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston said this, too. Without those staff, colleges will simply withdraw the course because they cannot get the qualified staff. That relates to investment, as well as to pay. One point that has been raised with me in my discussions with educators is that this also relates to the conditions of employment and to its precarious nature. If investment is not guaranteed for those courses, we get into a situation where some staff are on temporary contracts, and that cannot be right for the sector.”
“If there is anything we can do to help him, either publicly or privately, please let us know.”
“We have heard about capital investment, and I am pleased by some of the additional investment, despite the huge backlog. However, if we are going to deliver on that aim, the key ingredient is the staff. Unless we get the investment to ensure that we recruit the appropriate staff with the right qualifications—and not just recruit them, but retain them—we will not achieve what we want to achieve in terms of developing a 21st-century economy, particularly with the challenges of artificial intelligence, new technology, and everything involved in the fourth industrial revolution. I say to the Minister that whatever support he needs in those negotiations with the Treasury, he has got it on a cross-party basis. Let us make this one of the key issues for the autumn statement and next year’s Budget.”
“Every single vice-chancellor of a Russell Group university is paid more than the Prime Minister. In 2021-22, the vice-chancellor of Imperial College London received £714,000. That cannot be right, and it builds resentment when we have low pay and a casualised workforce elsewhere—to be frank, that differentiation is just abusive. At the moment, we are in a dispute in London regarding the low pay of security guards and other facility staff at universities, simply to get them paid a living wage. That cannot be right. There are other issues I would raise, but I do not want to delay the House. We have had an excellent debate today about the future of our economy and the skills that we need, but to achieve those skills, we need investment in the education itself.”
“Government funding for university teaching is now 70% below what it was a decade ago, and if we compare our spending on tertiary education with other advanced countries, we see that we are now bottom of the league. It is shocking: we put in less public investment than every single one of the other 38 OECD countries. To cite some figures, Government spending on tertiary education in the UK is equivalent to just 0.5% of GDP. In France, that figure is 1.1%; in Germany, it is just over 1%; and in the US, it is 0.9%. The average across the G20 countries is 0.9%. We are falling behind in this key sector because of that lack of investment. I want to make another point that has been made to me continuously: the one area of funding in UK higher education that does not seem to have dried up is the pay of university vice-chancellors.”
“That is a really good point, and I think that is right: we have to pay the going rate. At the moment, the going rate is not being paid in colleges, because the colleges do not have the funding that they need to do that. We will be caught in that vicious circle unless we ensure that there is adequate, decent pay within the sector. Apprenticeships have been mentioned. In real terms, the figures for 2021-22 show that the level of apprenticeship funding was 11% below the peak in 2009-2010. I cannot be on my feet without mentioning university funding, I am afraid, because it is one of the things that I have been lobbied on extensively. To be frank, the state has all but withdrawn from funding university education.”
“Before the Minister moves on from FE, it is worth acknowledging that only a few weeks ago, the University and College Union decided that it will ballot its members in September, with the potential result being industrial action in October if there is not some realistic offer with regard to pay and working conditions. Is the Minister addressing that at the moment?”
“When the Russians have bombed predominantly civilian areas, resulting in the death of civilians, we have rightly condemned it as a war crime. Why have the Government not condemned these actions, which are resulting in the loss of civilian life, as a war crime? Have the Government called in the Israeli ambassador to remind her in the strongest terms possible of the legal responsibility that Israel has to protect civilians?”
“They ask straightforward questions: what happened to the Conservative party’s commitment and pledge of a royal commission on criminal justice? Will the Minister bring back those proposals? Will he commit to investing the resources, especially in staffing, that are needed to save the system from the current crisis? Will he look to improve workforce morale and retention by looking again at the issues of pay, terms and conditions, and the pension age, which is currently threatened? The final issue they want to draw attention to is the fact that there needs to be a clearer programme to reduce prison violence, ensuring there is sufficient support for prison staff so that they can perform their professional jobs without risk to their lives and limbs.”
“When there is an independent assessment of pay, the POA is not allowed to take industrial action like other unions, and therefore has to rely on the pay review bodies. That the Government say they will not honour those recommendations is utterly defeating when prisons are seeking to recruit and retain. The POA has made it clear time and again that it believes that a pension age of 68 is unacceptable for the physical job that prisoner officers undertake. It would welcome the Government returning to the negotiating table on retirement age, which they walked away from in 2016 after the POA rejected the offer to reduce retirement age. Those negotiations need to be reopened, because 68 is too late. I have tried to give some understanding of what prison officers are going through at the moment.”
“I believe that was one of the proposals considered by the Conservative party before the last election. A royal commission should examine the problems in our justice system from end to end, to try to tackle imprisonment, incarceration and, more importantly, rehabilitation and, as other hon. Members have said, to look at preventing crime and preventing people reaching imprisonment. The POA wants to raise clearly what has happened on pay and on retirement age. On pay, the unions welcome the Government’s increase in early starters’ pay, but are concerned about recent statements from the Government about not honouring the pay review rewards in future. Nothing will undermine morale more.”
“It fully supports the Safe Inside campaign to reduce violence in prisons. It is especially concerned about what it described as the “ultra-violence” in the youth custody estate. It warns that an urgent review is needed of the protections that prison officers need when working in that estate. It comes back to investment. The POA also said: “Dangerous, squalid jails…make rehabilitation impossible. Prisoners are released more criminalised, more traumatised, more addicted to drugs than when they arrived. This is madness and should be completely unacceptable in a civilised society. Prisons are often the best chance that state has to turn someone’s life around, whether through education or treatment, but we’re doing the opposite—we’re making them worse.” The POA has reached such a state of frustration that it is calling for a royal commission.”
“We have, at times, reached catastrophic levels of violence. It needs to be acknowledged—not to accept that it will continue—that violence is part and parcel of prison life. Prisoner officers cannot understand that the Government will not even include levels of violence in their new key performance indicators for prisons. My hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) introduced a private Member’s Bill in the last Session—the Prisons (Violence) Bill. We urged parliamentarians to support it to enable that sort of monitoring to be part and parcel of the performance indicators, so that the Government could develop a full strategy. The POA has joined, as a founding member, the Joint Unions in Prison Alliance, alongside the other unions and working with the Prison Service.”
“It is the blind leading the blind.” To try to give us an understanding of what that meant, he said: “When you have inexperienced staff dealing with experienced prisoners who have been in and out of prison all their lives, it has a massive knock-on effect on stability.” Spending during the first five years of austerity fell by 20%. That is why, as has been said, with spending levels cut so dramatically over a period, it is hard for prison officers to fully comprehend why £4 billion is being spent on building a new generation of prisons to boost capacity when our existing prisons have become mired in squalor—that is the description used—and, according to the Public Accounts Committee only two years ago, there was a £1 billion backlog of work needing to be done. Prisons are violent places.”
“It is unfortunately becoming almost accepted as the norm that prison officers will have to go through that. Mark Fairhurst told the Committee: “There is no support if you have mental health problems. More and more of my members are getting diagnosed with PTSD, because of the trauma that they deal with and the things they see. There is no mental health support on site for those staff. They are leaving the job with ill health or capability retirement, so there is no support there for mental health.” This is one of his most startling statements: “We have come across scenarios in some jails where the most experienced member of staff on that same wing has nine months in the job.”
“We are currently running at 16% for prison officers and 19% for operational support grades. Some areas of the country have seen attrition rates of between 35% and 45%.” The Chair of the Select Committee mentioned the survey of how prison officers are feeling. Exactly as he said, half of those surveyed do not feel safe at work and 80% said that staff morale at their establishments was bad. When we talk to officers at some establishments, they tell us that it has collapsed completely. Many have a lack of confidence in the future. It was also raised with us in conversations that the number of prison officers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder is rising and at critical levels. Serving and ex-prison officers receive little support for PSTD, and it has an overwhelming impact on their lives.”
“Having laid so many staff off, we also got into a vicious downward spiral of insufficient staff and increasing violence, and therefore problems with retention. Recruitment drives simply failed to resolve the situation. On one estimate, during that period we lost 100,000 years of professional experience built up over decades. As a result of that, exactly as has been said, prisons are fearful places with prisoner-on-prisoner assaults and assaults on staff, which have soared, so prison officers and support staff are leaving in droves. We have heard some of the statistics. Mark Fairhurst, the POA national chair, presented evidence to the Justice Committee, where he explained, just as my hon. Friend did, that many leave “within the first two years”. He said: “We are at the highest attrition rate that the service has ever seen.”
“Mention has been made of the budget cuts that have taken place over the years and how we have arrived at this situation. To give one statistic, at one point at the height of austerity after 2010, the Prison Service saw a 30% cut in overall expenditure. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith has said, the figure is still 12% below what it was in 2010. Alongside that, we have had a number of fairly disastrous privatisation experiments—those have not just been in probation, but in the maintenance of the prisons themselves. What happened in the first years of austerity was startling. In the early-2010s, a quarter of the operational workforce was laid off, and a crisis of violence was unleashed.”
“It can only be described as being in crisis, and that is not just putting prisoners and prison officers at risk but putting the public at risk of dangerous reoffending. The second message is that Ministers need to understand that they cannot run prisons on the cheap. It requires investment, particularly in staffing, to ensure safe, secure and purposeful regimes. The third message, which the Chair of the Select Committee has raised and which I will come back to, is that prison officers want the Minister to know that they are fed up. Morale is at an all-time low, and it is developing into real anger at how they have been treated. To give one quote, they felt like they were “disposable commodities” to be “worked to the bone” and then discarded. They are voting with their feet to leave the service.”
“There is no financial interest, and in fact I am told by the POA that it does not even gain me an extra pillow in a cell if I ever need it. It is as simple as that. We have had discussions over recent months—in particular a presentation in the Jubilee Room a few weeks ago, which a number of us attended—where we have been meeting prison officers working on the frontline. I want to report the conversations we have had and, on their behalf, set out some of the concerns they have expressed, which build much upon what my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) said about the state of prisons. There are three messages that prison officers want to get across. The first is that the austerity Budgets have taken so much from the Prison Service over the past decade that prison officers have left the system.”
“I pay tribute to the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), who gave a comprehensive overview of what is happening on prisons and probation. I am so pleased that the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) raised the issue of children. When we had the debate on imprisonment for public protection sentences, it focused on the fact that the whole family is serving the sentence and we do not give enough consideration to the implications for the family, and particularly to the support needed to assist the rehabilitation of prisoners as they are released. I will declare an interest, as I am an honorary life member of the Prison Officers Association.”
“The debate has largely focused on the specific BDS movement and Israel. Just to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon), I want to talk about the right to boycott, to disinvest and to sanction as an issue. At the weekend I drafted an article, because I wanted to get clear in my own mind the whole issue around boycotts and the past history of the boycott, disinvestment and sanctions movement. To be frank, virtually all of my life I have been involved in some boycott, disinvestment or sanctions campaign, so it was almost like a flashback. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), I was outside the South African embassy when the City of London anti-apartheid group was on a 24-hour permanent picket.”
“Reference has been made to Bob Kerslake consistently throughout today. Bob and I were friends. I go back longer than most, because I go back to 1981, when I was a young man and a GLC councillor and Bob was a young man and a GLC officer. I fully concur with all the tributes that have been paid, but I also want to say that he was a good man. He was a very good person and a good friend, and we will miss him. Let me come on to this debate. I do not want to repeat some of the arguments, but I want to get on record for my constituents why I am voting the way I am this evening. I will vote in solidarity with the amendment, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) on her speech, but I will also be voting against the Bill, because I cannot do anything else.”
“All we saw today was a diatribe of the lowest politics we have seen for a long time, which divides our community unnecessarily and, to be frank, appallingly.”
“The advice of every human rights lawyer I have spoken to so far, and all the briefings from human rights groups and trade unionists, have all made it clear that that range of activities will be outlawed and it will be made illegal for decision makers even to talk about the strategy. That is why I oppose the Bill. I am voting against it because we have heard today, right across the House, that not a single clause has stood up to scrutiny. Therefore, I do not believe it can be amended; it is fundamentally flawed and should be defeated. Let me make one final point, as an aside. We should change the Standing Orders or look at “Erskine May”, because it would have been useful if the Secretary of State coming here to present the Bill had actually read it or addressed the same Bill that we are addressing in this debate.”
“They have certainly not backed such campaigns and would have outlawed them overall. All those campaigns have focused on pressing for action from Government, local councils, pension funds, private companies and investors. It is interesting that a few hon. Members have mentioned the focus on the local government pension fund. I declare an interest as a member of the local government pension fund, and I think it is up to members of the fund to determine its investment policies. I must say, as a constituency MP, that the campaigns have reflected the diversity of my constituency. There is not a campaign that has not involved a constituent or group of constituents or has not been asked for by my constituents. It is a matter of standing in solidarity.”
“All they were demanding was adherence to democracy by the Chinese, and they have been inside for two and a half years, without any form of access to their families in many instances. The common factor in all those campaigns is that they would not have been supported by Government policy. Therefore, they would have been rendered illegal in their demand for action by public authorities to boycott, disinvest and sanction. I agree with the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) that there needs to be clarity about who is making foreign policy and what is being referred to, because actually the Bill makes the Secretary of State ex cathedra—infallible—and puts at his whim decisions about what is right and what is wrong across the globe, when Governments in this country have consistently got it significantly wrong.”
“In solidarity, young people in my constituency went round the local shops asking them to check where their goods were coming from and urging them not to sell goods from the occupied territories. There has been some reference to BDS campaigns being associated with antisemitism. That is not what I have witnessed in my constituency, but if there is evidence that individuals associated with these campaigns are antisemitic, we already have laws to deal with that, and I believe that the full force of the law against racist behaviour should therefore be deployed. More recently, I have called for sanctions against the Chinese Government for the barbaric treatment of the Uyghurs, and also because they have imprisoned a group of my Unite trade union friends who worked with me on the British Airways campaigns.”
“I have campaigned against the Sri Lankan Administration owing to their genocidal attack on the Tamils, with their continued abuse of human rights, their use of torture, the disappearances, and the colonisations of Tamil homelands. Again, I have lost constituents who have been disappeared when they have gone out there. I campaigned for sanctions against the military junta in Myanmar to halt the attacks on the Rohingyas and to demand the freedom of Aung San Suu Kyi. Yes, I have supported the boycott of goods coming from the Palestinian territories occupied illegally by Israel. The campaign in my constituency was undertaken by young people when the bombings in Gaza were killing young people there.”
“I got off lightly. All we were singing for was the release of Nelson Mandela. For the other one, I plead guilty. I was one of the organisers of the demonstrations over a decade ago against the royal visit of the Saudi leaders. We were calling for no public contracts to be awarded to companies operating in Saudi Arabia, because at that time they were beheading gay people for being gay. That was later focused on military support from this country for the Saudi attacks on Yemen. The list of BDS campaigns that I have supported goes on and on. I campaigned against the Bahraini regime and its ongoing brutal repression of the country’s democratic movement, and the continued imprisonment of opposition political leaders. We have met some of them over the years, and they are still inside.”
“Secondly, I would welcome a debate in the House on what is happening at Harmondsworth, because there are continuing concerns about the welfare of both detainees and staff, and this has continued year after year without resolution.”
“As you know, Mr Speaker, I also sought to raise the matter in the House on Tuesday, but other business understandably took precedence. I contacted the Minister’s office on Wednesday and basically said that, if I had not heard anything by noon, I would be raising a point of order. Twenty minutes before noon, I received a reply, which was inaccurate. I understand how busy people are, but this is just unacceptable behaviour when I have constituents and others contacting me about this incident. There are continuing problems, so I ask the Leader of the House, first, to raise this with the Ministers concerned and say that this behaviour is not acceptable.”
“I preface my remarks by saying that I completely appreciate how busy Ministers are and the workload they carry, which is why I have never before raised such a concern in Parliament. On Sunday, there was a demonstration by detainees at Harmondsworth detention centre in my constituency. I emailed the relevant Minister on the various email accounts that are available to us, and I simply wanted to know what was happening. I was concerned about the welfare of the detainees and staff, many of whom are my constituents, and I received no response on Sunday. I thought that, in the normal run of things, we would have had either an oral or written statement on Monday, as we have had in the past. Nothing happened, so we contacted the Minister’s office again. Nothing happened on Tuesday, so we contacted the office again, and no response.”
“I apologise to my hon. Friend and to you, Mrs Latham. It is one of those days when there is a lot going on in the other Chamber that we take an interest in, so I will need to go, but I want to raise one point first. I completely understand why the Chair is twitchy about sub judice issues, but the whole point of having this debate is so that maybe some good can arise from this tragedy. There is potential for our Government to lead on legislative reforms, which can then be developed internationally to ensure the accountability of companies, prevention of human rights abuses and environmental protections. It is about directors’ responsibilities as well. There is an agenda that the Government could seize to turn this tragedy into something beneficial globally.”
“Many of the staff found it completely disingenuous and, actually, insulting when Tim Davie, Jason Horton and Rhodri Davies argued as if they were archaeological exhibits who do not provide the digital services of the future.”
“Since the announcements, management has told some of these people that they will not know their future until October. A sword of Damocles has been hanging over their head for nearly a year, which has had an impact on people’s wellbeing and mental health, as evidenced when we met staff. If Members remember the briefing session, they will know that what staff find really insulting is the argument that this is all about a shift to digital. These staff do digital, with no help from the BBC. A lot of the time, these people trained themselves on digital so they could enhance their programmes and provide the BBC with a range of services.”
“In all our discussions with the broadcasters, we have made the point that local radio is not just about news; it is about companionship as much as anything. There has been no acknowledgement in our discussions with the BBC of the digital divide, which has been brought out by the data. People are angry that this has been driven through without consultation, as the director general admitted in front of a Select Committee. We have talked a lot about presenters today, and we all have relationships with our local presenters—good, bad or indifferent—because they rightly hold us to account, but there are many more people behind them. There are producers, production assistants and others, many of whom are on even lower wages that the union has been arguing for some time are unacceptable.”
“That seems to be the strategy: to make the service unsustainable, cut by cut. As a London MP, I will talk about services in London. Radio London produces 133 hours a week. That is being cut to 85 hours. That represents a cut from 79% to 51% in our local output. Industrial action has meant that we have won some gains in London. We are keeping the London afternoon show from 2 pm to 6 pm, but the rest will be combined with Kent, Surrey and Sussex. To be honest, that is not good enough. As everyone is saying, local radio should be truly local, which means it should be locally produced. London needs a specific service due to its range of ethnic diversity, its differing levels of affluence and poverty, and the scale of its vulnerable audiences.”
“I am secretary of the NUJ parliamentary group, and I thank all Members who came to the lobby and briefing with the NUJ a few weeks ago. It was a very successful event. I also thank all those who have offered support and joined us on the picket lines. I welcome the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) to revolutionary syndicalism. It has been interesting to see that conversion. It is depressing for most of us who are advocates of public sector broadcasting to have to come back to this debate so often. There is genuine anxiety among many staff that we are seeing a whittling away of local radio services so that eventually BBC management will prove the point that it wants to prove: that the services are no longer supported and therefore unnecessary. It will then close them down altogether.”
“When we met the staff who came to the lobby, I was moved by how many of them have long service and how many of them have dedicated their life to the BBC. They love the service they provide. I caution the BBC that the strikes will be back if it does not listen, because the staff are not going to sit back and take this. At the same time, it is interesting that there has been overwhelming support within our communities for industrial action. Our communities agree with the staff. Where else can they go? What else can they do to save this service when the BBC is not listening? Let us hope the BBC will listen to this debate.”
“The right hon. Gentleman makes an extremely valid point, although I do not think I need the extra minute. We all respect the BBC’s independence, but the BBC should reflect the community it serves. What has come out of all these debates is that, on this particular issue, the BBC has belligerently ignored the views of local communities. Members of Parliament are meant to be the voice of our constituents, and we are saying with a strong voice today, and the motion says it all, that the BBC needs to think again, on behalf of our communities, on behalf of our constituents and—I say this as secretary of the NUJ parliamentary group—on behalf of the staff who have served the BBC well over the years.”
“That will undermine the commitment across the House to try to develop a growth economy again, rather than one held back by disputes, some of which have been engineered in recent times because of the cost of living crisis.”