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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Every one of 5,924 lines we hold for Dame Angela Eagle, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 54 of 119.
“I do not know about the Minister, but that is not my definition of fairness. I have no doubt that we will be told by the Minister about the additional £1.3 billion over two years announced in September by the Education Secretary. First, that is not new money but rather a sum that has been assumed to be available from unrealistic, so-called efficiency savings and cannibalised from other parts of the budget. Secondly, it will do little to compensate for the £2.8 billion of cuts schools have suffered since 2015. Ask any teacher in my constituency, or any school governor, and they will talk about the cutbacks that schools are already having to make as a result of the real-terms reductions in their budgets at a time of spiralling costs.”
“My right hon. Friend points out the layers of disadvantage that are often not taken into account by the Government’s distributive mechanisms. The proposed new national funding formula is one such mechanism, and it will do nothing to alleviate the crisis in Wirral schools. What is particularly insulting is the Government’s persistent claim that the national funding formula is based on the principle of fairness and the frankly ludicrous claim that schools will see an increase in funding as a result of it. No one believes that there are no flaws in the current system—we all recognise that—but, rather than rectifying them, the new national funding formula simply creates new ones. It shifts an already inadequate sum of money from one area of the country to another, with some of the most deprived areas losing out.”
“I have read some of the right hon. Gentleman’s responses to other debates like this and he spends a great deal of time not responding to the actual questions that have been raised, by telling us in great technical detail about what the national funding formula is meant to do. Will he address some of the issues that I raised about the unfairness of Kingsway Primary School, which has 53% of pupils on free school meals, having a 19% cut in its funding, under the system that he is praising? How can that kind of result possibly be right or fair?”
“The right hon. Gentleman is taking as his baseline this financial year, yet there have been real terms cuts in schools for the last two years, as I thought I had explained, so he is trying to claim that there has been an increase, when in fact he is discounting the cuts that have already happened. He knows that it is not an accurate way of talking about what happened. Why doesn’t he just admit it?”
“The Minister is living in a parallel universe. He says that schools are getting increases. Kingsway Primary School is going to lose £131,306—a 19% fall in what it would have expected—and three teachers. St Mary’s College will lose £223,778—a 3% fall in funding—and four teachers. Fender Primary School, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood), will lose £109,000 on what it could have expected by 2020—that is £452 per pupil—and two teachers. If the Minister insists on calling those “increases”, I do not think that he is fit to be in the job that he is in. Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered education funding in Wirral.”
“Does my hon. Friend agree that there is an urgent need for a pause? In Wallasey, the roll-out will begin halfway through November. Six weeks later, it will be Christmas. The Department for Work and Pensions will not be open on Christmas day, which means that many of my constituents will have to wait until the new year for assistance. That is why our local food bank is looking to collect 15 tonnes of extra food to deal with demand. Does she agree that it is time that the Government listened to Parliament and acted to alleviate such obviously avoidable hardship?”
“I can report to my hon. Friend that I have had exactly the same experience in my constituency, where people are being driven into destitution by the waits for UC. The local food bank, alongside the citizens advice bureau, has estimated that if this full roll-out goes ahead just six weeks before Christmas, leaving everybody destitute for Christmas day, it will have to collect 15 tonnes of extra food to deal with the demand that will be generated by these changes.”
“The Secretary of State must surely realise that the way in which the system is being administered is leaving people penniless and possibly destitute. He must address that point. The Government are rolling all the six benefits into one; if that is then not available to people for six weeks, there are people who cannot afford to survive in that time. The loans, which have to be paid back, are not an adequate response. Will the Secretary of State admit the human suffering that is happening in all our constituencies and deal with that particular point?”
“I have constituents who will be losing their jobs as a result of these extremely worrying announcements. The Minister has said that the Government are standing ready to help, but the future of the plant would certainly be enhanced if the plant were a front runner for a new model. What are the Government doing to ensure that it is?”
“The Leader of the House is saying “working majority” an awful lot in her speech so far, but her working majority—done through the deal with the DUP—does not entitle this Government, to make life easier for them, to gerrymander the Select and Standing Committees. This was the woman who said that Parliament had to be given back control, but the only control she seems to be interested in is the Government’s control of this House, which is a constitutional outrage.”
“Will the Secretary of State confirm that if we leave the European Union without a deal the car plant up the road from my constituency in Ellesmere Port, which currently provides 2,000 full-time jobs and a much wider supply chain, will struggle, because if we leave the customs union and the single market, that adds £125 million a year, and its supply chains are very mixed up all over Europe? Having no deal puts those jobs at risk, and it will be a disaster for my constituents in the automotive industry.”
“Yesterday, parents of pupils at the Kingsway Academy received a text message referring them to the website of the Northern Schools Trust, where they were told that their school would be closing. The Northern Schools Trust says that the school is not financially viable. Its sudden closure leaves a black hole of a quarter of a million pounds in the local authority’s financing, and there is great disruption across the area. Is that any way to run a school system?”
“Last week, rumours circulated in Wallasey that Kingsway Academy, which is in Leasowe in my constituency, was going to close. We have now managed to establish that there are plans to close it, perhaps by the end of July. This will throw our whole education system in Wallasey into disarray, and there are 400 pupils whose future is currently completely obscure. We do not know where they are going to be, and parents of new pupils do not know whether they should buy uniforms for the school. The school is part of a multi-academy trust that has not communicated any of this at all. May we have a debate on public accountability among multi-academy trusts? If this had been a local authority school, there would have been a two-year consultation period instead of this chaos.”
“I welcome the Minister’s statement that the Government are determined to ensure that employees get their employment rights. Why, then, did the Government introduce the huge fees for access to employment tribunals? Will they now abolish those fees?”
“Working from a baseline, we can build a genuinely successful deal with the best chance of safeguarding jobs and building prosperity for the future.”
“The Supreme Court rightly interpreted the constitutional reality and disabused her of that vanity. She then asked voters to give her a free hand to drive though her own personal hard Brexit, and the British people disabused her of that vanity. Two things must now happen. First, we need a cross-party council, comprising expertise and experience, to advise the Government on how to progress. Scrutiny benefits from a plurality of opinion. Good decisions require managed dissent. Secondly, the Brexit council should work out what a baseline acceptable deal would be and put that in place. That deal might look something like the Norwegian model—that is, to agree to Britain entering the European economic area. We could then work out which incremental elements we need to get a deal to strengthen that base.”
“The Prime Minister’s highly divisive personal pet project—introducing new grammar schools—is not referred to, nor is the possibility of allowing a free vote on fox hunting any time soon. The dementia tax proposals have gone, as have the police cuts. The election result destroyed any mandate for an extreme Brexit. Parties holding extreme positions on Brexit—whether the UK Independence party or the Liberal Democrats—were rejected emphatically. For the first time in decades, the Tories and Labour together received 80% of the votes. There is no appetite for the hard Brexit that the Prime Minister has tried to pursue since the referendum. She interpreted the decision in the referendum as giving the Government alone the power to decide how to proceed.”
“10 is beginning to resemble the Mary Celeste. Anyone who doubts the truth of the Prime Minister’s predicament need only peruse the weekend’s front pages to see the unseemly jockeying for position that has already begun in this most weak and wobbly of Administrations. The programme is defined more by what has been missed out than by what it actually contains. The Leader of the Opposition pointed out in his speech that the Tory election manifesto has disappeared in its entirety from the party’s website. That gives us an insight into the real motivation for the Government introducing a new right to be forgotten in the data protection Bill. There is no mention in the Queen’s Speech of the triple lock on pensions or the abolition of winter fuel payments.”
“This Queen’s Speech is not a plan for a Government at the height of their powers with a refreshed mandate. It is a legislative programme for a Government in a holding pattern, led by an isolated and humiliated Prime Minister who has been shorn of her authority after a bruising encounter with the electorate in an election that she chose to call three years early. She flunked the test spectacularly, hobbling her premiership, and weakening rather than strengthening her hand in the EU negotiations in the process. Far from gaining the landslide victory that the polls indicated would be hers when she called the election, the Prime Minister has managed to turn a Tory majority into a hung Parliament. Her much vaunted deal with the DUP has only just been concluded in the nick of time, 18 days after the general election. Meanwhile, No.”
“As the leader of a party that is responsible for seven years of austerity, which has cut 56% of the cash available to my local authority in the past seven years, and has spent its time talking about regulation as a bad thing, is the right hon. Lady now going to apologise to the country for the state of local government, when the richest borough in London could not cope with this emergency, while at the same time, it was giving money back to its council tax payers?”
“6. What plans the Government have to publish a response to the findings of the European Parliament's Committee on Petitions in December 2014 relating to a petition on the treatment of Cammell Laird strikers in 1984.”
“In 1984, workers at Cammell Laird’s shipyard took official strike action over job losses just as the Thatcher Government were trying to privatise British shipbuilders. They were dismissed, jailed in a category A prison for 30 days, and lost their redundancy and pension rights. The Minister has tried to give us a technical answer today, but will he now undertake to release all the documents relating to the decision to prosecute and to the severity of the sentence so that this clear miscarriage of justice can finally be put right?”
“T3. When I was recently called to do jury service, I got the chance to experience at first hand the current state of our courts. The jury canteen had to close down because it malfunctioned, the ladies’ toilets malfunctioned, the water machine malfunctioned and the computers malfunctioned, meaning that juries could not even be chosen. Despite the fantastic and very patient work of the employees of the court system, the whole thing was a mess, and it was in need of substantial financial investment. The Justice Secretary should not be proud of her record on this matter, so what is she going to do about it?”
“The Leader of the House has given us an image of the Prime Minister being dragged, kicking and screaming, into calling a general election when she did not want one. Can we find time in what is left of this Parliament to have a debate about why she decided to trigger article 50 and then throw the entire planning into doubt by then calling a general election, which will waste at least three months of the precious, short time we have left to get the best deal for Britain?”
“The Economic Secretary has shown real complacency about the huge and building scandal that has been revealed by The Guardian today. Given that our banking sector is very large and that the consequences of its being destabilised by such criminal behaviour are very serious for our economy, does he not realise that his complacent, process-driven answers today are simply not good enough?”
“I have to say that I am finding an increasing discrepancy between the way that the Secretary of State is describing the PIP benefit and the people who are coming to my advice surgeries in tears, having been completely let down by the system. We all want to see a society where we give support to the most vulnerable, and that is who we are talking about here. Will the Secretary of State now undertake to ensure that some of his highest officials come and visit us in our advice surgeries and look at how this system is actually working out on the frontline, because it is not remotely like how he is portraying it today?”
“Of 28 measures in this Budget, the Chancellor has had to come in a humiliating fashion to the House today to cast away the one that actually raised money. He has just told us that £14 billion of tax revenue is at risk because of the way national insurance is encouraging people to become, apparently, self-employed, and encouraging other abuses. He has told us he is not going to deal with that in this Parliament, so what is he going to do to safeguard the tax base in the meantime, while he does his review and belatedly puts into effect the manifesto commitment on which he fought the last election?”
“T5. Given that the Brexit negotiations are about to start, does the Secretary of State agree with his right hon. Friend the Prime Minister that no deal is better than a bad deal?”
“The Prime Minister has said that no deal is better than a bad deal. We all wish her well in getting the best possible deal for the UK, but will she now publish what the effects would be of crashing out of the European Union on World Trade Organisation rules, so that we can have a debate in this country about her assertion that no deal is better than a bad deal?”
“In the Liverpool city region, we are meant to welcome £30 million a year over the next 30 years, which is £900 million. We have lost more than £1 billion in direct funding cuts to our five local authorities. Half a billion pounds in European funding has been granted for the last two rounds, but there is no guarantee of anything in future. Does my right hon. Friend agree that that is a problem for our regional development and funding in trying to grow our economies from the bottom up?”
“Obviously it is important to get the deficit down. The Government said that they would eliminate it by 2015, two years ago, and now the Budget document makes it clear that it may not be eliminated by 2025. Is that the Secretary of State’s definition of success—being 10 years late with a five-year plan?”
“In 2015, they even produced the Tory “tax lock”, a pledge that it has since emerged was manufactured to fill a hole in the general election grid. It was described by the No. 10 adviser who thought it up as “the dumbest economic policy that anyone could make”.”
“In both those areas, though, the Government have been caught out by their cynical electioneering attacks on Labour and their even more cynical election promises to the people. After participating in cross-party talks following the Dilnot report on adult social care and agreeing a joint approach to the challenges we face, in 2010 the Tories cynically produced propaganda posters condemning what they called “Labour’s death tax”. Thus, for short-term, cynical electoral gain, they equally cynically ruled out the changes we need to make as a nation so that social care can be put on a sustainable footing for the future. The Tories did the same with what they called “Labour’s tax on jobs”—proposed changes to national insurance contributions.”
“Also unmentioned by the Chancellor in his statement yesterday was a 6% real-terms cut in non-pension-related spending on social security, which will hit the most vulnerable the hardest. The pressures of our changing demography make it clear that there must be urgent and radical reform of our system of social care, and in social justice more broadly. The changes to our labour market, which are happening on a global, national and local level, along with the profound implications of rapid technological change, make it imperative that we reform our tax and benefit system to make it fit for the future. We must be willing to look again at the tax base in order to guarantee real security for everyone in our society.”
“We are told that the target for eliminating the deficit, which was originally meant to be achieved in 2015, might now not be accomplished until 2025—a 10-year delay on the original five-year plan. The Budget documents reveal a massive 20% cut in the funding allocated to local government next year, down from £8.2 billion to £6.5 billion. That puts at risk services for the most vulnerable and threatens to rip our social fabric apart. There is an 8% per-head cut in education funding, which will threaten to bankrupt some schools—certainly in my constituency—while the extra funds announced for education are ring-fenced for the Prime Minister’s grammar schools vanity project. Once again, some people are being left behind while a chosen few, in certain chosen areas, get all the advantages.”
“That is going to put us at a continuing long-term disadvantage in a global race in which we are more isolated and at risk than ever before, after the Brexit vote. On investment generally, the OBR forecasts that Brexit and the uncertainties surrounding it are likely to depress private investment going forward, and uncertainty about trade arrangements will hit exports and inward investment, too, offsetting any beneficial trading effect of the depreciation of sterling. This is not a credible platform from which to launch any serious attempt to prepare our economy for the challenges of a post-Brexit world and enable us to secure our prosperity for the future. This is a Budget that continues to hit the poorest the hardest. The Red Book demonstrates that the cuts to public services just go on and on into the future.”
“The Bank of England is right to be worried about it, but it did not trouble our Chancellor enough for him to refer to it at all in his Budget statement. These facts alone show just how much the Prime Minister’s just about managing families are being made to shoulder the burden of a painfully slow recovery from the financial crash, yet there was simply not enough help announced for them yesterday. On infrastructure and investment, the perfunctory re-announcement of the £23 billion in the rather grandly named national productivity investment fund is to be welcomed, although it has been announced many times before. But, at 2.6% of GDP, it remains far lower than the levels of infrastructure investment achieved by the previous Labour Government, and well below the OECD average.”
“To make matters worse, the Government’s flagship promise of a £9 so-called living wage, which in itself was never going to be enough, has been revised down to £8.75. The modest growth in our economy, which is at historic lows, has translated into real earnings stagnation for the vast majority of people. The fact that more than half the 13.5 million people in this country who are now living in poverty are in work is not a problem the Chancellor was troubled enough to mention in his speech, but it is an indictment of his Government’s record, and it is one of the most serious social problems facing Britain today. The Budget papers reveal that consumer debt is once more exceeding its pre-crisis peak; it is this unsecured debt that is driving what modest growth there is in the economy.”
“Perhaps most surprisingly of all, there was no serious mention of Brexit. This was an occasion on which the Chancellor ought to have set out a bold reforming vision for the UK. But he did not. He left the grimmest news unspoken; perhaps he hoped that nobody would notice. On living standards, the Office for Budget Responsibility revealed something that millions of people in this country already know: real pay levels have not yet returned to their pre-2008 peak. The autumn statement revised down the forecast for real earnings by £1,000 by 2020, and the Budget will do nothing to change that. That means that workers are facing 13 wasted years of lost earnings and stagnating pay under this Government.”
“His first Budget did not rise nearly seriously enough to the challenges faced by our country in these times of great volatility and change, which we must now confront together. We needed a wider and bolder vision. We needed radical reform to rebuild our prosperity in a post-Brexit world and a sustainable plan to deal with our ageing population and all the pressure that that brings. We needed a recognition that we must recast our tax and benefit systems to deal with the world to come, rather than the world as it was when Beveridge produced his blueprint for a welfare state, 75 years ago. Instead, we got a Budget that made no mention of the greatest challenges facing us today. There was no mention whatsoever of climate change. There was no mention of rising poverty and inequality, or of public expenditure cuts stretching to the far horizon.”
“It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak), whose constituency is in my home county, Yorkshire. The last time I was in his neck of the woods, it was not to go to a pub—as many of my hon. Friends seem to have done—but to fight the by-election that his predecessor fought and won. I remember wandering forlornly through a village in the constituency, door-knocking with my much-missed colleague, Mo Mowlam. We did the entire village and found not a single Labour voter, so I think the hon. Gentleman is probably fairly safely ensconced in Richmond (Yorks), pending an electoral earthquake—although, of course, they do happen. I was disappointed by the Chancellor’s statement yesterday.”
“He cannot tax-lock himself out of all his options and end up having to plug the gap in social care by taxing the self-employed. The Government have been hoist by their own cynical petard. We are willing to work with the Government on both the challenges that I have mentioned—social care and how to arrest the alarming rise in self-employment, which brings precariousness for far too many people. Self-employment is often just apparent self-employment, and it is quite often very low paid and precarious. We need to ensure that the self-employed are properly protected and have proper access to the protections that employees take for granted.”
“Exactly. My hon. Friend will agree that, with their cynical use of short-term advantage and the way they have electioneered on it, their pledges and the way they have campaigned, the Conservatives have actually made it much harder for us to make the reforms that we as a society need to make to our tax and benefit system and our social care system. That is the ultimate in irresponsibility. Yesterday, the Chancellor tore up the tax lock. He can dance on the head of a pin and claim that the lock did not apply to class 4 national insurance contributions all he likes, but that was not on the side of the bus and no one will believe a Tory election promise ever again. The Chancellor has learned a tough lesson: if he wants to be for the just about managing, he needs all the tools of government available to him.”
“I agree. We saw a cynical dash from the Conservatives to make short-term promises to get elected, and we saw them campaign even more cynically on those promises in the hope that when they had to be broken nobody would notice. But the Government’s actions are making it much harder for us to have cross-party support on anything, and they have also made it very difficult for anyone to believe any single one of their manifesto pledges again. The Government have increased distrust of politics. That is the legacy of their behaviour on social reform and tax reform, which are vital if we are to prosper in the future.”
“That is a grubby way to behave, and it is in breach of the Conservatives’ election manifesto. That is not the way in which the Chancellor should have made this change. He may learn, but in this Budget all we got was green Hammond rotten eggs.”
“That may be the generous interpretation, but there are other interpretations that involve the cynicism I have talked about. This is the issue: if the Government really wanted to make a reasonable reform to the tax system and national insurance contributions to take away the current tax incentive for people to self-incorporate or real employers to force people into becoming apparently self-employed, they would not have made such a reform. They would have said, “We’re going to introduce these new benefits for the self-employed and take away the tax advantages and disadvantages of being self-employed, and finally we will bring forward a much more stable tax base and tax system.” That could be supported, but it looks like the Government have changed national insurance contributions to fill a fiscal hole in social policy.”
“Just to reassure the hon. Gentleman, I suspect that I would have been even more offended if he had agreed more with me than with his hon. Friend.”
“Does my hon. Friend also recognise that the cuts to benefits, particularly to housing benefit, will have a huge effect on extra care? Large numbers of people are very happy, well looked after and protected in those arrangements, but they cannot pay for them if housing benefit goes. Moving those people into nursing care will cost far more a week. That is another ticking time bomb.”
“The Liverpool City Region is on the right side of the country to trade with the rest of the world; its history is as a port and an outward-looking trading part of the country. This development is a tiny step in the right direction. When we hopefully manage to get our new metro Mayor Steve Rotheram elected in May, we will have a great local champion who can help us to make progress. I am interested in what further assurances the Minister can give, apart from this very modest allocation of money that has been announced to date, so that we can help to plan and develop our own future in the Liverpool City Region.”
“Notwithstanding this tiny step in the right direction, what guarantees can the Minister give that his Government understand the importance of continuing to support locally based economic regeneration and development in the areas of the north where there are scant numbers, if any, of Conservative MPs and which tend not to get access to gentlemen’s agreements, sweetheart deals and the things making the news at the moment? In the time that we have left, which is quite a lot, will the Minister reassure us about future funding, which will enable our local authorities and communities to do what they do best—come together to help grow economic opportunity and development from our local region up? We have fantastic positives in our area that we can develop from.”