Dame Angela Eagle
MP for Wallasey · Labour · United Kingdom
“The Kremlin increasingly relies on proxy organisations to pursue its objectives, seeking to undermine our security while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability. The so-called GRU Volunteer Corps is a clear example of that approach. It is not an independent force or a loose collection of volunteers.”
“This Government have introduced support for the Jewish communities who have been threatened and directly targeted by IRGC proxies. Just a couple of days ago, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced an extra £250 million for policing to ensure that we can support and protect our Jewish communities.”
“I will move on to the Islamic Movement of Companions of the Right. The IMCR has publicly claimed seven attacks at UK locations linked to Jewish and Israeli communities and to Persian-language media, including the antisemitic arson attack on four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green on 23 March.”
“We expect platforms to act responsibly and not to provide space for state threat-linked activity, propaganda or recruitment. We will be keeping a close eye on that, as well as liaising with social media companies to tell them about how this law impacts them.”
“The IRGC Quds Force and the IRGC Intelligence Organisation, together with the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, form the Iranian intelligence apparatus. As a key component of the Iranian state’s security apparatus, the IRGC is answerable directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader.”
“It provides a targeted and proportionate means of disrupting those involved in foreign power threat activity based on the recommendations of Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of state threat legislation. To answer the hon.”
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“There are regulatory failings, there are legislative failings with the structures we have to try to deal with this, and there are certainly enforcement failings of the laws that we do have.”
“We have also seen, and perhaps it is inevitable when it is one of the biggest global centres of financial services, that London has attracted the attention of international criminals and fraudsters who wish to launder their money through cities like London. We know that, as a major financial centre, it is a target for all of these kinds of people. The Intelligence and Security Committee, in its Russia report, which was suppressed for far too long and was finally published after the 2019 general election, said that London is considered the “laundromat” for corrupt money. We have seen that kind of magnet effect, which is extremely disturbing, and I do not think that we have yet really got a handle on it.”
“These are what I would call threats to the reputation of the financial services industry in this country. First, I want to talk about economic crime, which I think poses a threat to the entire sector and its integrity if it is allowed to get out of hand. We know that there are rising levels of economic crime, fraud and scams that have been turbocharged during the lockdown. The sector itself has survived covid and the lockdown pretty well so far, because it could manage remotely—it does a lot of its work remotely in the first place—but one of the things we have all seen, unfortunately, is the rise in fraud and scams.”
“The job cannot be so big and complex that it is un-doable. Sometimes, the way that the FCA has to cope means it is difficult for it to achieve a balance and be given a job that it can sensibly do. We know there is a big turnover of staff at the FCA at the moment, and that there is workplace stress and unrest. We know that the head of the FCA is trying to transform that organisation into what he calls a lean organisation that can respond very quickly to what is going on in the market and in the areas it has to regulate. I am not convinced that it has that balance right yet, and I am not even convinced that that job can sensibly be done without more support. I want to deal with a couple of areas that the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire did not touch on.”
“When things go wrong, the reputation of the entire financial services sector is at stake, so it is a difficult balance. The Financial Conduct Authority gave evidence to the Treasury Committee yesterday, some of which reflected how difficult it is to try to remake a regulator after scandals such as London Capital & Finance, at the same time as operating within all the extra complexity and uncertainty. It has a formidable task. I suspect that being chair of the FCA is one of those jobs where people are told that, if they do a stint, they will get the diplomatic equivalent of the Washington embassy as a reward. The current Governor of the Bank of England is one example of that. The FCA needs to be strengthened. We as policy makers, and the Minister in particular, have to think about how it can practically do the job.”
“In the face of such change—technological, structural or the disjunction of Brexit—any Government would want to see how they could remake the environment in which the financial sector can operate and flourish to benefit and protect the sector so that it can benefit and protect our economy. We certainly all have a stake in ensuring that that is the case. In that area of flux, we have to remember that the regulators, although they could be powerful, are struggling with an increasingly complex and fast-moving environment that they are not always geared up to deal with in detail or to keep on top of. We have seen the travails of the Financial Conduct Authority and how it manages the perimeter, and philosophically the view of caveat emptor—that the buyer should beware in all circumstances.”
“In 2020, it was worth £164 billion to the UK economy, which is the third largest sector by size in the OECD. That is 8.6% of economic output, half of which is generated in London but half of which is generated across our regions. Of the 1.1 million jobs, 91,000 are in my region of the north-west. As the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire pointed out, it is one of the few sectors where we have a healthy trade surplus—£46 billion in 2020. It is the fifth largest economic sector in our economy, and all the more important for that. As the hon. Gentleman also pointed out, the sector is important for taxation, with £28.8 billion in tax taken from it. According to PwC, it makes up £75.6 billion, or 10% of the total receipts.”
“Those markets can be volatile—the wild west—but the capacity of software such as open registers and blockchain, and their potential for transparency and in-time and open trading of all sorts of things, could be harnessed for good purposes as well as for the more nefarious ones that feature on the darker edges of the net. On top of that, the demands of climate change will cause a systemic change in the way that things are valued, priced and assessed for value. That structural change will completely change the context in which the financial services industry has to exist. In the UK, which is one of the most open economies in the world and always has been, we know how important the financial services sector is, and not only to London as a global centre.”
“New technology has the capacity to change things and lead to innovation, some of which might be fantastic and some of which might be awful. That structural issue has hit us greatly through the innovations of digital currencies. The systems that control financial services have to deal with the practical and philosophical issues that arise, such as whether digital coins are ever stable, what central banks ought to be doing to deal with that, and whether the wild west of Bitcoin and the rest should be left as a gambling thing on the side.”
“Clearly, financial stability is also crucial in an era when markets are becoming more rapid and more global. In the context of highly rapid technical change, financial stability becomes even more important, because innovation outruns the capacity of many regulators to keep up with what on earth is going on in some markets. Those two important issues have to underpin all regulation; the future of the entire financial services industry rests on them. Regulatory change in a rapidly evolving situation with a lot of flux is inevitably difficult for those who participate in the market and for those who wish to regulate it. It is also difficult for those such as the Minister who want to see how it can be properly harnessed and allowed to be beneficial to our economy while being safe. It is a period of big uncertainty and flux.”
“We certainly need to be significantly more tooled up than we have been if we are to have proper oversight of what the regulators are tasked with doing, what philosophical direction the Government wish to go in, and what the practical aspects of that method will mean for our financial services industry and, of course—they have not been mentioned much—for consumers in the UK and for financial stability. We should not lose sight of those two basic reasons why we have to get regulation right. Consumer protection is a huge issue in financial services, as the hon. Gentleman touched on when he said that financial services are not always the most popular sector of our economy. Perhaps some of those who supply and form part of the industry ought to stop and think about why that is the case and do some self-reflection about it.”
“Gentleman acknowledged in the exchange we had during his speech. The Minister must go weak at the knees when he thinks of the detailed work that he will have to put in to deal with the onshoring in the aftermath of Brexit, and whether we want to move quickly or slowly to adapt the laws and regulations that we have imported. Members of the Treasury Committee have also gone weak at the knees thinking about how they might have some oversight, because of the highly technical nature of much of that regulation.”
“We have a sharp disjunction with the recent past, after 40 years of that kind of influence, that we will have to deal with in the coming period. We have the inadequacies of the non-existent deal on financial services, which was part of the EU-UK so-called trade agreement, and those are already having an effect. The hon. Gentleman was right to say that we are in a period of rapid regulatory change, which would have been the case regardless of whether we left the European Union. The fact that we have, and the fact that we have onshored all this regulatory machinery, means that we now have to start looking at how we wish to change all of it. Even thinking about the sheer weight of work and oversight that will have to be done by the Treasury Committee is quite overwhelming, as the hon.”
“It has not been a very friendly divorce to date, and there may well be implications to that, too, in terms of competition for business. We have seen some of that in the wholesale markets for euros and we will doubtless see more of it. The outcome of our way of leaving the EU will challenge some of the agreements that we came to and the influence we were able to have when we were inside the Council chambers, the European Parliament and the European Commission, rather than the situation we find ourselves in now. As the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire said, that can be an advantage, but it can also be a disadvantage. It is an opportunity, but there are also threats and issues that we have to deal with.”
“I can see the Minister is nodding, possibly because he recognises some of those tensions, which always existed when we were in the EU. When we were in the EU, because of the size of the influence of the UK financial services industry as part of that bloc, we had a very good and effective way of pulling at least a lot of the regulation that went on more towards our way of doing things. One of the worries I have post Brexit, which I suppose is a philosophical and practical worry, is that the EU will now go off and do a lot more of the things that we were able to persuade it not to do when we were a member. The divergence between how EU regulation works and how we may wish our future regulation of financial services to work is likely to grow larger.”
“I could not agree more with the hon. Gentleman, who is a distinguished Chair of the Select Committee on Justice. He is also a practitioner himself, so he knows about the practicalities of these issues. It is hard, in contemplating the extra work that has to be done because of Brexit, to know quite where one starts, but if we do not get it right and if we do not get on with it, this terrible reputation of London having become a laundromat for dirty money will only persist and perhaps get stronger, which will do us untold damage. I urge the Minister responding to this debate to give us some words of comfort that he is getting on with the economic crime strategy. We have an economic crime strategy—”
“That makes it difficult for average consumers who want to put their money somewhere, make money, protect their money, or get a reasonable return on their money, and who find it too complex to do so. I do not believe that this is serving customers well, catering, as it does increasingly, for just a few at the top of the earnings distribution rather than the many who have smaller pots of money. I hope that the Minister will reflect in his response about what might be done to reverse that trend. With that final observation, Madam Deputy Speaker, I am happy to draw my remarks to a close.”
“Madam Deputy Speaker, I am delighted to do so. I suppose that, when one gets let off the leash away from debates with three-minute limits, all the words just come tumbling out, but I would not want to take more than my allotted time. I hope the Minister will be able to give us some words of comfort, particularly that he will be taking fast action to establish a beneficial ownership register and bring some transparency to what is going on in respect of financial crime. Finally, I want to mention the issue of the model all too often pursued by some of our financial services, and this is a final philosophical point perhaps. All too often, complexity is seen as an end in itself in our financial services, and as a proxy for competition and a proxy for innovation, when in fact it is merely an excuse for opaque pricing.”
“Will the Health Secretary confirm that he expects next week’s update to contain much more information about the threat that the omicron variant poses in terms of seriousness of illness, so that we can have some insight into that issue, and will he tell us if he does not expect that to be the case? Will he also comment on the fact that more than 25% of Government Members who are in the Chamber today are not wearing masks? What does that do for the compliance of people outside who are meant to wear masks on public transport and in shops?”
“My right hon. Friend is making a strong case indeed for reforming this rotten process. Does she agree that when this House granted the Government the powers under emergency legislation to handle the procurement of important medical supplies, it did not expect for one second this orgy of procurement outrages, this feeding frenzy of money for their friends and donors, and the ransacking of public money to help their own that we have seen?”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. We have just heard the Minister say that there are no minutes of this so-called courtesy call. Can you tell us what we, as Members of the House, can do on learning this through this House, given the astonishing nature of the revelation that the Minister has just made that there have been meetings with no minutes? These are official meetings that involve Government Ministers, and she is unable to locate a copy of what happened at a meeting that clearly took place.”
“I want to express, across the River Mersey, the solidarity of the people of the Wirral with the communities in Liverpool who have had to deal with this issue. Will the Minister tell us a bit more about his views on how we can counter self-radicalisation and on the fact that the security services are particularly worried that it may have been turbocharged during lockdowns, and his views on how a strategy to counter that might be being developed?”
“I thank the Leader of the House for giving way. Today’s debate could be a turning point, and not of the kind that many of us would like to see. Can the Leader of the House tell us how often this House has overturned a report of the Standards Committee with respect to the behaviour of a particular Member?”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The Leader of the House appears to have spent this whole time supporting the amendment and has not actually moved the motion that he was meant to be moving.”
“Please also give each other and members of staff space when seated and when entering and leaving the room.”
“Before we begin, in line with updated guidance issued this morning, I point out that Members are expected to wear face coverings. Current Government guidance is that face coverings should be worn where there is a greater risk of transmission, which is now considered to be the case across the parliamentary estate. Everyone should maintain social distancing as far as possible on the estate, including in Committee proceedings where it is possible to do so without disrupting the conduct of business. The House of Commons Commission has now been advised that the risk of transmission in Committee meetings appears to be greater. I remind Members that they are asked by the House to have a covid lateral flow test twice a week if coming on to the parliamentary estate. This can be done either at the testing centre in the House or at home.”
“Before we begin, and in line with updated guidance issued this morning, let me point out that hon. Members are expected to wear face coverings in line with current Government guidance, which is that they should be worn where there is a greater risk of transmission of covid. That is now considered to be the case across the parliamentary estate. Everyone should also maintain distancing, as far as possible, on the estate, including in Committee proceedings where possible. We have been advised that the risk of transmission in Committee meetings appears to be greater. I remind Members that they are also asked by the House to have a covid lateral flow test twice a week, if coming on to the parliamentary estate. That can be done either at the testing centre in the House, or at home.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for the Public Accounts Committee’s report on the spending of NHS Test and Trace. It is 20% of the NHS budget, yet the money was spent in such a way that how effective it was in meeting the main purpose could not be demonstrated. Taxpayers’ money was treated like an ATM. Does she agree that if we are to spend such money, it needs to be spent wisely and properly?”
“The most vulnerable have been hit the hardest, whether they are the young having their opportunities destroyed by school disruption, the old sacrificed in their tens of thousands in our neglected and underfunded social care system or the millions flung into poverty by the Government’s cruel universal credit cut—not compensated for by changes to the taper announced today, which will help only one in three and leave us with the circumstance whereby millionaires pay a marginal tax rate of 45p while those on poor wages who qualify for universal credit and are able to work pay 55%.”
“That is partially a result of grim circumstance, which is beyond the control of any Government, as we have heard today—the pandemic and the challenge of the transition to net zero—but it is also the result of the Government’s serious mistakes and self-inflicted wounds. The botched Brexit deal has caused chaos at the borders, soaring prices and shortages, and the Government’s deadly complacency about the virus has resulted in one of the biggest economic hits and one of the largest per capita death tolls in the developed world—failure piled upon failure.”
“As always, it is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood), who I agreed with for the first time ever yesterday. That is something I enjoyed, however fleetingly. After listening to the Chancellor today, I think arrogance is up, complacency is up and delusion is up. Certainly, in my constituency of Wallasey and in the country as a whole, the cost of living is up, taxes are up, poverty is up and hardship is up. That is the background against which the Chancellor delivered his speech. The combined Budget and spending review comes at a pivotal time for the country.”
“But when he is burnishing his leadership credentials with Tory MPs, he becomes the sadistic Mr Hyde, posing as a true low-tax, small-state Thatcherite, waxing lyrical about his “sacred responsibility to…balance the books”, because to do otherwise would be “immoral”—he is hoping that they will not notice that he has presided over the largest increase in the size of the state in peacetime and the biggest tax rises in 25 years. That comes the year after he borrowed an eye-watering £350 billion in a single year to pay for his covid response. The fraud, the waste and the graft to Tory donors have been an ever-present feature of the bonanza of state mis-spending that he has presided over. In fact, it has been the very definition of “immoral”.”
“To the country at large, he is that nice Dr Jekyll, brandishing his public spending largesse in a blizzard of pre-Budget leaks, increasing the national living wage and announcing the end of the public sector pay freeze—he is hoping that we will not notice that it was he who froze pay last year, on top of a decade of previous Tory pay freezes that have seen real living standards fall more than at any time since the Napoleonic wars.”
“An end to the public sector pay freeze will not compensate unless it offers real increases in wages, which, taking inflation into account, have only just returned to their 2009 level. Let’s face it: whatever it says in the Chancellor’s latest propaganda press release, any pay increase below inflation is actually a pay cut on top of years of hardship, so we will have to await the detail. A fair recovery would start with a Chancellor who had the humility to be honest about why these blunders have been made. Unfortunately, we do not have such a Chancellor; we have a Jekyll and Hyde Chancellor, with his eyes firmly on his own advancement and with a slick PR operation to match his vaunting ambition—a Chancellor whose persona depends a bit on his audience.”
“Underlying some of our difficulties are the problems of Brexit and the fact that the Government did not prepare for the trade disruption caused by their hard Brexit deal, which threw fishing, farming and peace in Northern Ireland to the wolves in pursuit of their own peculiar obsessions. They did not prepare for the supply chain problems caused by the shortage of HGV drivers, the vacancies in social care and the staff shortages in the NHS. This is a Government who have been unwilling to offer short-term temporary relief to those who are suffering the growing cost-of-living crisis, as energy prices have rocketed and as inflation soars towards 5% this winter. Fuel and food prices are rising fast, and people are feeling the pinch.”
“While I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that benefit tapers have been a long-running problem for many Governments to solve, we know that the 63% fall in the Department for Work and Pensions’ costs has come about not because everybody is in work, but because benefits are some of the lowest in the developed world, causing huge hardship and poverty. The right hon. Gentleman needs to recognise that as well. This is a Government who love power but are bored with the hard work of governing. They disdained to anticipate the problems their ideological obsession with a hard Brexit has created, choosing to believe their own propaganda instead, but the red book shows that, as a result, trade with the EU is sharply down and projected to reduce living standards by 4%, which is twice the OBR estimate of the cost of the covid pandemic.”
“This is a cynical Budget of smoke and mirrors, aimed more at burnishing the Chancellor’s leadership credentials than at fixing the country’s growing challenges. As the challenges pile up like leaked Government announcements, it is becoming plainer by the day that this Chancellor is not going to be the one who meets them—and Britain will be the poorer for it.”
“There are some modest funding allocations that seek credit for restoring a minority of the huge cuts that have been inflicted in the past 11 years of this Tory Government —indeed, the Chancellor has openly boasted, over and over again, about taking spending back to 2010 levels. Having destroyed 1,000 of Labour’s Sure Start centres, this Government now expect credit for creating a pale imitation of them in just 75 places, 11 years later. Having cut skills funding by 50% since 2010, this Government now expect credit for restoring 42% of it, 11 years later. Having underfunded education for years, this Government now expect credit for restoring funding to levels that they inherited from Labour in 2010.”
“No. Does this Budget meet the formidable long-term structural challenges before us? In the short term, does it tackle the cost-of-living crisis now looming for millions this winter? No, it does not. Projections of 1.3% growth by the end of this Parliament are nothing particular to be proud of. The Treasury-inspired blizzard of media propaganda announcing £30 billion of apparent spending commitments means that the Budget is really an afterthought. Closer inspection reveals many reheated announcements of previous Government press releases with one thing in common: despite being announced over and over again, few of them have ever actually been delivered.”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting this urgent question. It has taken me nearly 30 years, but I now find that I agree with the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) in his question. This is serious. As an Opposition, we cannot look in detail at the slew—the blizzard—of Budget announcements that have been going on week after week, because we do not have the OBR report and we do not have the detail. This is treating parliamentary democracy with utter contempt and the Minister should be completely ashamed of himself. He should have come to this House and apologised. His boss should have come to this House and apologised.”
“Before we begin, I encourage Members to wear masks when they are not speaking. This is in line with current Government guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission. Please also give each other and members of staff space when seated, and when entering and leaving the Chamber.”
“Order. Before I call Miriam to continue, Members ought to realise that when they say “you” they are referring to the Chair. Can we please try to get the formalities right? I know that it is less important on Zoom, but we are now back.”
“Before we begin, I encourage Members to wear masks when they are not speaking, in line with current Government guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission. Please give each other and members of staff space when seated and when entering and leaving the Chamber.”
“My hon. Friend is making a very good speech. Does she share my worries that in 2017 the Home Office published guidance that demonstrated that they were prepared to return LGBTQ+ people to Afghanistan and regarded that as safe for them, as long as they did not do anything to “attract…public outrage”?”
“What are the Government going to do to rescue those who are in peril in Afghanistan because of their sexual orientation? Will the Minister confirm that no one currently in the UK as an asylum seeker will be sent back to that perilous situation? Will she give us details of how Afghan LGBTQ people are going to be rescued from the perilous situation in which they find themselves after the Taliban takeover?”
“I will not take up my full time. I will share it out so that colleagues who are dealing with this important issue will have time to contribute. I hope the Minister is going to give us some answers. We have had access to Ministers about Afghan resettlement generally, but we have had no real details, and very few of us have managed to get the people we tried to get out of Afghanistan during the airlift out. We see here with LGBTQ+ Afghan refugees, who are at mortal risk, that it is very difficult for them to get out of the country in a safe way or to exist in the country in a safe way. The Prime Minister said we should judge the Taliban by their actions. The death penalty for those who are LGBT, particularly gay men, has been confirmed.”
“In my constituency, £10.5 million will disappear from the spending capacity in our local economy when more than 10,000 people and working families lose access to this benefit. Does my hon. Friend agree that that will have a tremendously bad effect on local spending power?”
“I thank the Secretary of State for giving way. Will she explain to the House why, if everything is reasonable and as it should be, her six predecessor Conservative Secretaries of State for the Department for Work and Pensions have all come out against this cut?”
“The pandemic uplift has acted as a vital buffer, and now even this is being taken away. To govern is to choose; the Conservatives have chosen hardship over hope, and poverty over support. As they sip their champagne and hobnob with their millionaire supporters at their conference, we will never let them forget that.”
“So egregious is this cut to UC that six of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions’ Tory predecessors have spoken out against it, yet she has pronounced herself “happy” that it is going ahead, and yesterday she was being either disingenuous or ignorant when she claimed that just a couple of hours of extra work would make up for the cut. We know that is not true, and we know that while 40% of those on the benefit are in work, some claimants cannot work for various reasons ranging from illness to child caring responsibilities. In Wallasey 36% of people claiming UC are in employment, and nationally one in six working households cannot make ends meet already. The last decade of benefits cuts has left working families worse off than they were 10 years ago.”