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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“Lives have been needlessly lost, life chances are being squandered and people are suffering, so we must make a different choice. We must choose not the smallest state but an active and empowering state; we must renew our public services, not starve them of resources; and as we seek to recover from this crisis, the state must work in partnership with business to lay the foundations of our future success and prosperity.”
“They have delivered a terrible double whammy: the worst economic crisis in any developed economy and one of the highest per capita death rates in the world. Local authority funding has been halved in the past decade, with a higher percentage of resource taken from poorer areas. That has hampered our response to the pandemic, not least because of the huge cuts that the Government made to public health budgets. They weakened the NHS by ruinous reorganisation, fragmentation and enforced competition. Staff shortages and cuts to intensive care unit beds made our death rate worse. Public services have been hollowed out to make way for expensive outsourcing to cronies and Tory donors. The lack of adequate sick pay is setting back the fight against the virus and causing more avoidable transmission and deaths.”
“Their decision to introduce huge cuts in spending since 2010 is now exposed for what it really was: a cynical, ideological choice, not an economic necessity. The Conservative party took office with a programme of cuts that hit the poorest and most vulnerable hardest, at the same time as it introduced huge tax cuts for top earners. We can now see that cutting the size and effectiveness of the state was folly, causing poverty and destitution to soar. It was a social catastrophe; it weakened this country and left us woefully ill-prepared for the challenges that we are now facing; and it made us far more vulnerable than we need have been. As this country grapples with a global health pandemic and the effects of Brexit combined, the extent of the damage that the Conservatives’ ideological obsessions have caused is plain to see.”
“Since 2010, successive Tory Governments have run a failed experiment with market fundamentalist economic dogma in the UK. They cynically blamed the global financial crisis in 2008 on the last Labour Government’s spending on health and education, and used it as an excuse to shrink the size and capacity of the state. They made an absurd fetish of the deficit, which they elevated above all other considerations as the only imbalance that had to be eliminated. Oddly, since the Conservatives borrowed an eye-watering £400 billion last year to finance the response to covid-19, they seem to have stopped worrying about the deficit. All of a sudden, they now argue that the country can carry such debt burdens, when to do so was apparently utterly ruinous only 12 years ago.”
“What recent steps he has taken with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to improve the enforcement of workplace health and safety laws.”
“Given the emergence of new, more transmissible strains of covid-19, why has the Minister not updated his Department’s workplace guidance with stronger recommendations on ventilation, personal protective equipment and the increasing requirement for effective surface disinfectants to be used, so that everyone can be kept safe at work?”
“The Minister was uncharacteristically coy in answer to the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) about how we will kick on after the top four priority groups have been vaccinated. Will he give us a bit more detail about when he believes all adults over 50 will have received their vaccination? Clearly there are members of his own party who wish to open up faster than that, and with more than 1,000 people a day still dying, we have to ensure that we make the right decisions.”
“SAGE warned about the dangers of the South African strain weeks ago, but the Prime Minister dragged his feet, and he has now decided on a partial quarantine arrangement that SAGE has already warned will be ineffective in preventing further introduction of this variant. Is it not the case that, once again, the Government have acted too little and too late to stop the spread of this new and dangerous variant in the UK?”
“Is the Prime Minister proud that he spent half a billion pounds of public money on the eat out to help out scheme, which it is now estimated increased the spread of the virus by up to 17%?”
“On the day that Office for National Statistics figures show that the UK now has the highest number of covid deaths per million population in the world, and given that currently the isolation assurance service does not check the vast majority of those required to isolate, how can the Home Secretary assure us that enforcement of these new rules will be adequate, and that they will not be more honoured in the breach than the observance?”
“Members in the later stages of the call list should use the seats in the Public Gallery and move into the horseshoe when seats there become available. Members can speak only from the horseshoe. I remind Members that they are strongly encouraged to wear a face covering when they are not speaking.”
“I remind hon. Members that there have been some changes to normal practice in order to support the new call list system and to ensure that social distancing is respected. Members must arrive for the start of debates in Westminster Hall. Members are expected to remain for the winding-up speeches, provided that there is space in the room, which it looks like there is today. Members are asked to respect the one-way system around the room; please exit by the door on the left. Members should sanitise their microphones, using the cleaning materials provided, before they use them, and dispose of those materials as they leave the room. That rule has been more honoured in the breach than in the observance, and I intend to see it observed, if possible, in the current circumstances.”
“I warn everybody that there are drop-outs from the call list, so the next person I will call to speak is Kate Osborne. First, I call Tracy Brabin.”
“The Minister is full of reasons, as Treasury Ministers always are, for not accepting amendments or new clauses that people have tabled to solve problems. Does he appreciate the frustration that mortgage prisoners and those who are trying to do something about financial crime feel when they hear Ministers giving us all the technical reasons why things cannot be done but not really proceeding with much alacrity to solve the problems that we raise, albeit not necessarily in the correct format?”
“Does my right hon. Friend agree that the way the Government approached the Brexit negotiation means that there is literally no incentive for the EU to agree equivalence arrangements, because the lack of them means exactly what he just pointed out—jobs and trading formerly done in London migrating to the EU? Does he also agree that, in this new environment, any move by the Government to give the City a competitive edge is likely to lessen the chances of progress on equivalence in the EU, and the market access that comes with it? That is another threat to jobs in the City and to tax revenue for the Exchequer.”
“More needs to be done, and urgently, to crack down on this behaviour.”
“Financial and economic crime is a huge problem, and one that the Government have been far too slow to address. Their own estimates suggest that one in five people in the UK falls victim to fraud every year. There is £6 billion of organised fraud against business, and this is getting worse. The extent of economic crime in the UK, including money laundering, fraud and corruption, led the Intelligence and Security Committee in its report on Russia to note that London is now considered a “laundromat” for corrupt money. As the scale of global corrupt wealth enmeshed in the UK property market becomes visible, we need an urgent step change in the Government’s response, especially on transparency of overseas property ownership, and a tightening up of the company formation process in the UK.”
“There is a feeble non-binding declaration to establish a framework for co-operation on financial regulation, but there is no sign of any rush from the EU to grant the UK equivalence so that the loss of passporting rights can be overcome and continued market access to our financial services sector can be achieved. Perhaps the fact that €6 billion of share trading formerly done in London migrated to Paris and Amsterdam on the first day of post-Brexit trading is encouraging Brussels to drag its feet and hope that much more will follow. Over time, I fear that this Government’s lack of interest in protecting equivalence for financial services is more likely to lose us jobs and revenue than inaugurate the big bang 2.0 that the Chancellor was fantasising about in the Commons earlier this week.”
“I wish to focus on two areas: equivalence with the European Union for our financial services sector and financial crime. I also support the efforts to provide more protection against abuses in the consumer credit market and the mortgage market. As a result of the Government’s decision to pursue a very hard Brexit and the ending of the transition period, UK financial service companies have now lost their passporting rights to EU countries. The Government’s trade and co-operation agreement with the EU in effect sidestepped financial services, putting at risk many jobs in the sector and much tax revenue for the Exchequer. The deal means that there is an agreement for goods, in which the EU has a trade surplus with the UK, but nothing for services, in which the UK has a huge trade surplus with the EU.”
“Does the Chancellor believe that the £22 billion cost of Serco test and trace has been spent in a way that represents the best value for money?”
“The Secretary of State has today announced 23 more areas that will move into tier 4. Three quarters of the country is now in tier 4. How long before he looks at this again and can make other announcements? What further escalation will he be considering if even tier 4 does not bring down these soaring infection rates?”
“Online activity is important to extremists of all kinds in furthering their aims. Fake news—disinformation—is the currency of authoritarian forces, undermining our democracy; and on their business models, currently tech companies profit from that. What action would the Bill take to defend our democratic values if it was on the statute book now? How would it solve this threat?”
“Two injections per person for everyone in the country is going to take an awful long time. The Prime Minister was hoping that it would be done by Easter. Does the Health Secretary share that timetable or will he publish another one? Is he planning to make this vaccine available again next year, since we do not know how long immunity lasts, and covid is likely to be endemic and with us for some time to come?”
“Just briefly to add to the questions from my right hon. Friend, why on earth is there all this faffing about when we are having total equivalence and companies will want the rules to be the same? Is this just another obtuse obsession with sovereignty, which will cost a hell of a lot more money because we will have to have our own bespoke regime that is meant to do exactly the same thing?”
“I praise the Minister for his diplomacy. Having been a Treasury Minister myself, I know that diplomacy is extremely important when he sits in his bivouac. Has he made any assessment of the extra red tape that he is putting on our own financial services sector by insisting, for reasons of sovereignty, on a different but hopefully equivalent route? He and I both know that the minor differences between what is allowed and what is not can turn into weaknesses and reasons for arbitrage and rule breaking if those who regulate are not extremely careful.”
“The powers are necessary to prevent not only exploitation that might pose some systemic risks to the financial system, but catastrophic loss to UK investors due to rogue investors or investments. Regulators are reluctant to use the more draconian end of their powers, and there is little evidence that they actually go there. Is the Minister satisfied that the practical effect of the changes will be that the FCA is determined to use those powers, if need be? It seems to be reluctant to go to the stage of closing firms down. That would be a huge decision that may involve considerable disruption. Is he convinced that the FCA has the resources, the aptitude and the determination to do that if necessary?”
“To what extent does the Economic Secretary think that the FCA’s use of levies to finance that activity is good enough given their volume and the drastic effects of some decisions, especially considering the funding of other regulators? Across the pond—we will increasingly have to look across the Atlantic—regulators are much better resourced than our own. Is he convinced that he has got the balance right for capacity and resources?”
“I am sorry to press the Minister again, but this area is crucial to ensuring that our financial services industry is properly and appropriately regulated. We will be discussing crime, money laundering, and market abuse later today, I think, but the powers arranged against a regulator wanting to take drastic action, particularly in the form of disruption, trouble, lawyers, threats and all that, can mitigate decisive action. With Action Fraud and the failures in some of these areas, we have seen that even when criminal liability and offences are in the mix, rather than just regulatory offences, we do not seem to have developed a system that is as effective as it needs to be.”
“The other thing that worries me is that the risks to those individuals who might be tempted are quite small, when we consider the number of prosecutions, but the rewards, should they get away with it, can be huge. Such a risk-reward assessment does not exactly imply the sort of the deterrence that we all want to protect the integrity of our markets.”
“It makes it look like the state does not worry so much about financial crime—that it does not worry enough to finance the prosecution and policing of it, and that the industry has to somehow pay for its own policing and prosecution. That is an issue. We would all welcome the increase in sentencing from seven to 10 years that clause 30 contains, but is not the real deterrence to be found in much more rigorous enforcement and financing of enforcement, rather than simply increasing the likely sentences if someone is caught? If people feel that there is not much of a chance that they are going to be caught, an increase in sentencing from seven to 10 years is not really much of a deterrent to bad behaviour.”
“It is almost as if some people think, “If you can get away with it, more power to your elbow.” That introduces attitudes and approaches to the rules, regulations and law that are, at the very least, unfortunate and, probably more accurately, dangerous. It is particularly worrisome given the size of our financial services sector and the number of jobs associated with that sector, and the impact if it were to be destabilised by that kind of attitude getting a grip. It is extremely important that, as a jurisdiction, we clamp down on these crimes. Is the Minister as worried as I am? Is he satisfied that this form of levy approach is the right one?”
“My concerns mirror the comments that were made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East and by the SNP spokesperson, the hon. Member for Glasgow Central. Financial crime and fraud are areas of crime that have been under-played and under-resourced for enforcement in recent years. We know about the effects of Action Fraud and its almost minuscule levels of successful prosecutions over the years. It is one of the areas that I feel most worried about as a constituency MP. When constituents come to me with issues of fraud, they have often been given the run-around for many years and I know that, realistically, justice for them is often very far away. Financial crime is somehow regarded as less worrisome than other forms of crime. It seems always to be at the back of the queue in terms of enforcement resources.”
“It seems to me that we never really got a grip, after the big bang, in dealing with that informal networking that goes on, where a lot of the gaps and a lot of the potential insider dealing actually lurks. Perhaps he could give me a little bit more confidence about that.”
“To some extent, this is illustrated by the fact that the enhanced sentence was in a 2015 report but we are only just legislating for it now. Five years later, we are still only talking about a sentence that is highly unlikely ever to be used, based on the past record—the Minister just quoted it himself. I wonder whether he might increase the confidence that some of us have that this is being tackled in a coherent way—we will get on to some of this later—by talking about the fragmented supervisory system and what he is doing to help bring that together so that the fragmented regulation of this whole area can actually be done more coherently, so that we can get enforcement on abuse. We all know that, prior to the big bang in the City, this was all done informally anyway, by gentleman in their clubs.”
“Dr Huq, I have ranged a bit wider than the terms of clause 31, but I think that it is the start of a fightback on money laundering regulations. Even though it represents a tiny, tiny little step, the Government have yet to persuade me that they want to get a grip of the situation and intend to do so through the Bill.”
“It involves estate agents, lawyers and accountants who are facilitators—wittingly or unwittingly—to all these activities. We had better get a grip: the more this kind of money is present, the worse and dirtier it makes our structures and systems and the more cynical it makes our constituents. It makes all of us less likely to follow the rule of law and agree that the right thing should be done. It changes the balance that people calculate between the risks of doing something wrong and the rewards of not being caught. None of that helps the rule of law; none of it helps honesty; and none of it helps those of our constituents who strive their whole lives to do the right thing and yet see others profit massively from scams and reprehensible behaviour—criminal behaviour, in a lot of cases.”
“Our public sector is losing money through other scams, which bleeds away the resources available to us to do the other things we need to, especially when these resources are scarce. This issue can sometimes look very technical—it is about overseas investors and is only little clause 31. But it is not only about corrupt laundromats, Russian reports and corruption on a scale we can only think about. It is also about some of our well-known high street banks indulging in such activity and covering it up somehow, because having the business is so profitable for them—and, again, the risks of being caught and fined are outweighed by the profits that can be made by turning a blind eye. It involves all of the major banking and investment institutions.”
“On victims of fraud, criminals have successfully stolen £1.2 billion from individuals through banking fraud; in an earlier debate, the Minister was talking about his own frustrations with trying to get a grip of that issue. That figure on scams comes from 2018. It is also estimated that £5.9 billion a year is defrauded from businesses in the public sector. The issue is not just about oligarchs running their money around the world and laundering it into property and other things. It is not just about mafiosi or corrupt political leaders doing the same, although all that is happening. This involves your constituents, Dr Huq, and my constituents, who are losing money through banking scams.”
“Morgan allowed a company to move more than one billion through a London account without knowing who owned it. I could go on. It seems that clause 31 is a tiny little attempt to stop an abuse, given that the abuse going on is of that scale. There is also the husband of a woman who donated £1.7 million to the UK’s Conservative party, secretly funded by a Russian oligarch with close ties to President Putin. Again, I could go on. I hope that the Minister is going to at least give us some view about what is going on here and whether clause 31 is the be-all and end-all of what the Government intend to put in place to deal with this issue.”
“We seem to have got ourselves into a situation where the banking structures just produce suspicious activity reports in massive numbers—three quarters of a million of them in a year, I think. Among those, the real ones are perhaps hidden, but the regulators are trying to get through them all and do very little. At the same time, we know that when the FinCEN papers were actually leaked, that involved, between 2000 and 2017, the transfer of close to $2 trillion of transactions, which were included in these suspicious activity reports. Many transactions laundered money through our systems—many from overseas, in terms of what we are dealing with in clause 4. HSBC allowed fraudsters to move millions of dollars of stolen money around the world even though they knew it was a scam. J.P.”
“We are reassured about the point that the Minister is trying to make with clause 31, but given that our country has been described as a laundromat for money laundering, perhaps the Government could have used this Bill as a suitable legislative opportunity to make other changes to the money laundering legislation that this clause amends. Perhaps the Minister could explain why that action has not been taken and give us an idea of what will follow. He has already referred to a reform of the suspicious activity reports regime. Why is that not included in this Bill, given that an analysis of it has found that over 80% of the reports are from banks, and very few from other places where there might be suspicious activity, such as property ownership in the UK? As we know, that is how money can be laundered.”
“I suspect you have just wiped out most of my speech, Dr Huq. We want to hear from the Minister about the adequacy of having just this clause, and not a lot else, to deal with the issue in this portmanteau Bill. In the debate on clause 30, we heard that it had taken the Treasury five years to increase from seven to 10 years the potential sentence for market abuse. The Treasury Committee’s 2019 report—I am now a member of that Committee—was excoriating about the scale of the problem, with between tens of billions and potentially £100 billion lost. As we have discussed in relation to other parts of the Bill, we know that small weaknesses in the defences can be ruthlessly targeted and become much bigger if they are not closed off.”
“Does my hon. Friend agree that when it comes to debt and interest payments incurred—the price of having that debt—the concept of an unfair contract is far too lax on those who lend the money and far too harsh on those whose circumstances often, as the hon. Lady just mentioned, mean that they have to borrow?”
“That demonstrates how easy it is to spend money to acquire things, and to get into debt. It is now instantaneous. With the shift to online, one does not even have to physically be in shops to buy things; one is two clicks away from having this kind of problem. If ever there were something that made it easier for people to get into trouble, it is the speed and effectiveness with which they can click on things and spend money. We talk about that with regard to gambling, but buying goods can also be addictive. People are propagandised the whole time about how success comes with having goods, and that one has to have the right trainers and the right brands.”
“I suppose in a minority of cases that might be true, but in the majority of cases, in my experience—certainly in my advice surgery—it is not. People get on a slippery slope. We live in a consumer-oriented society where those who wish to sell us things, and the financial services companies that wish to provide us with the wherewithal to buy them immediately, are very sophisticated. We are in a culture very different from the one I grew up in. I will now reveal how old I am: when I was growing up, one had to put money away and pay for goods gradually before one could get them. Now there are all sorts of electronic currencies that can be used. On Black Friday, I was shopping for deals from my room, but—uniquely—had no positive results because everything was out of stock.”
“Friend is suggesting in her amendment means someone has gone a considerable distance: first, admitting there is a problem, and secondly, seeking help and trying to see what can be done to alleviate the problem. I also feel that when people get into debt in this manner, they are uniquely judged by those looking on. The taboo is reinforced by the judgmental nature of onlookers who think, “I would never get into debt like that,” or, “How on earth have they done that?” There are caricatures of how people who get into debt behave that are almost designed to blame them for their debts, suggesting that somehow they are incoherent with money, that they cannot manage, that they have inadequacies, or that they have gone on spending sprees all over the place and not thought about the future.”
“I wish to spend a short amount of time congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow on the focus and experience she brings to this very important topic. As she said, debt is one of those taboo subjects. People feel ashamed if they have got into debt and tend not to discuss it—sometimes within their own relationships, let alone with other people—because it is a source of shame. To some extent, it is a bit like the people who fall for scams or fraud. It is a uniquely difficult thing because if someone has got themselves into that situation, it makes them feel ashamed of their behaviour or that they have fallen for something. They feel isolated and unable to discuss it and go to get assistance. To some extent, even getting to what my hon.”
“Absolutely. It is about success and belonging, and that is the kind of culture that the very sophisticated advertisers that push this kind of thing go for. They also advertise to children, so there is the pester element of it. Kids used to want the latest Cabbage Patch Kid; I do not know what it will be this year, but whatever it is will be extremely expensive and beyond the means of quite a lot of people.”
“If we can do that and foster more upfront and open discussions about how such situations happen, and if people can stop feeling so ashamed about it and so alone, we may find that there are better, more effective ways of tackling debt and preventing the necessity for the breathing space issue.”
“Of course I will, Mr Davies. The amendment is about having breathing space when one has got into this situation. I accept your guidance, obviously; I was merely trying to set out how people can get into a situation of requiring breathing space, how judgmental people can be about debt, and how different the culture is now about getting into debt. It is so much easier to do it—just two clicks away. To introduce breathing space and some of the issues that we will get on to in terms of trying to get people out of debt, we need to shed the taboos so that people can ask for help. We need to think about how we can put more warnings in between the two clicks it takes to spend. We also need, as a society, to stop being quite so judgmental about the situations that people find themselves in.”