YouSaid · the spoken record
Jon Trickett
On the record 2018–2026
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This is everything the corpus holds for Jon Trickett. It is not everything they have said on the record.
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“The Minister will have heard me talking about a person in the City being remunerated £68 million in a single year. Of that, £200,000 was the basic pay, and the rest was bonus. I think the Minister is resting his case on the expansion of basic salaries, but that is not the case for that person. It would take the average person in my constituency 2,260 years on an average salary to achieve what that person achieved in a year. Is that possibly morally justifiable?”
House of Commons8 November 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Is it not clear that the Chancellor’s growth plan only grows one part of the economy: the bankers’ bonuses and the incomes of the richest in our society? If he really wants to cut through the cycle of low pay, poor productivity and low economic growth, should he not be abandoning his ideological commitment to trickle-down economics and finally announce a massive public programme of investment in England and Britain’s regions and nations?”
House of Commons23 September 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Today’s panicking, Trumpian announcement has been brought about by the failure of successive Tory Governments who squandered the opportunity that coal, oil and gas—our indigenous resources—offered to transform our economy into a carbon-free economy. Will the Secretary of State confirm that on his target list for fracking are areas in Yorkshire and elsewhere in the north which are often described as “red wall”, and may I bring to his attention the fact that there is no local consent in those areas for what he is proposing this morning?”
House of Commons22 September 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“This year, I have been in acute care, as have two members of my family; we were in four great Yorkshire acute hospitals. In many encounters with staff, whom I thank deeply for the work they have done, it was clear that they are universally wonderful but that the system is under stress. They were emphasising to me two basic principles of the NHS. The first was that nobody should make a profit from another person’s illness. The second was that the speed of treatment should be directly related to the gravity of the illness and not to the size of someone’s wallet. Will the Secretary of State confirm that she stands by those two principles? Finally, when will those staff get a rise?”
House of Commons22 September 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“7. Whether he has had discussions with Cabinet colleagues on the effectiveness of the Government’s levelling up agenda in increasing social mobility.”
House of Commons14 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“But the Government’s own social mobility mission drew the conclusion that there was no social mobility in Britain, and in the meantime, levelling up is being used as a way of dishing out funds to Tory marginals. The truth is that in politics, the law, sport, the arts and business, working-class people face systemic barriers to personal progress. Has the Minister noticed that the wealth of the few is rooted in the poverty of the many? Does he agree, on behalf of the Government, that we need a root- and-branch transformation of the way our country works so that every single individual can achieve their full potential?”
House of Commons14 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Will the Leader of the House organise a debate in Government time so that we can discuss the pressure on fish and chip shops and all the other small businesses in the country?”
House of Commons14 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am sure you will agree, Mr Speaker, that fish and chips are the great British culinary gift, and that the local fish and chip shop is often the centre of a community. You may not agree that the best fish and chips in the world are made in Yorkshire, but I will concede that the second best are on the other side of the Pennines. Mr Malcolm Tully has run the same fish and chip shop, feeding the same community, for 30 years, having used his miner’s redundancy money to set up the business. However, it is now under threat because of the rising costs of various artefacts that he needs to use, and there are tens of thousands of other small businesses in the same perilous position.”
House of Commons14 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Q11. We now know that every ambulance service in the whole country is in a critical state, but last week, well before the current national heatwave emergency, my constituent Mrs Meacham died after waiting for hours for an ambulance—an excruciating and prolonged delay. Her daughter tells me that the family tragedy was not caused by the staff, but by cutbacks by this Government. In any event, without immediate and drastic action we cannot be sure that there will not be many more Mrs Meachams. Does the PM accept that we are now living through an emergency health crisis? Given the disastrous state he is leaving the NHS in, why is he still in Downing Street?”
House of Commons13 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“They have cheated the children, staff and parents in deprived communities everywhere for the benefit of those who live in the least deprived, most well-off communities. That is not right; it is immoral. Today’s estimates fail dismally to make proper provision for the damage that the Conservatives have done since they took power in 2010.”
House of Commons6 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“However, to take one at random, St Helen’s Primary School in Hemsworth—I know the school, which is in a great community, with lovely parents and vital, vibrant children—has had £746 cut per pupil since the cuts began, and yet 38% of the children are on free school meals. That deprived community is doing its best against a Government who are cutting, cutting and cutting. Why should children in an area such as the one I represent, and in deprived areas up and down the country that are lacking in social mobility, have to face cuts on that scale while children in the Prime Minister’s constituency—a better-off community, with higher levels of attainment than in mine—do not? The truth is that the Government have presided over the most prolonged and savage cuts to education since at least the war.”
House of Commons6 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“When we look at levels of educational attainment, we see that one in five people get to national vocational qualification level 4. The national figure is twice that, and the levels of attainment in Uxbridge, the Prime Minister’s constituency, are 250% higher than those in my constituency. Given the levels of deprivation and attainment that I mentioned, we would think that Wakefield Council would get more money, rather than less, in the distribution of school funding, but that is not the case. The cuts to schools in the Prime Minister’s Uxbridge constituency amounted to £276 a child. In my constituency, they amounted to £514, which is almost twice as much. How can that be right? I will put on my Facebook page an analysis of the cuts in our area to every school.”
House of Commons6 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It goes on to state that the national funding formula simply repeats all those problems, providing increases of 8% to 9% for the least deprived schools and 5% for the most deprived, and that the pupil premium has failed to keep pace with inflation. In dry language, the quote in the House of Commons Library briefing states that these patterns of funding “run counter” to the Government’s so-called central objective of levelling up poorer areas. We have a Prime Minister and an Administration who regularly talk about levelling up, but they have to will the means to achieve a levelling-up programme. That is not happening. Let me illustrate the impact on an area such as the one I represent. I am one of four MPs from the Wakefield district, and Wakefield Council is the 54th most deprived council area in the country.”
House of Commons6 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Let me turn briefly to schools and the main point that I want to develop. Do not take my word for it; the House of Commons Library briefing for today’s debate quotes the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It is quite shocking, but in its placid, bureaucratic language the IFS states: “Deprived schools have seen larger cuts over the last decade. The most deprived secondary schools saw a 14% real-terms fall in spending per pupil” over the 10 years up to 2020, compared to a 9% cut for the least deprived schools. So the most deprived schools have had a 14% cut and the least deprived schools have had a 9% cut.”
House of Commons6 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“There will probably not be many people in the House with my background. I left school with no qualifications, but eventually I ended up doing a first and then a second degree. What was the stepping stone for me, having left school with no qualifications? It was further education—a college that took an interest in me after I failed, effectively, or was failed by the school system. There are millions of people in the same position who would like to do more, whether they have left school, changed profession or simply want to catch up. However, under this Government’s austerity programme, FE funding has been cut by two thirds. That stepping stone has almost been removed. Many people in my patch and throughout the country simply do not have access to a college as I did when I was a younger man.”
House of Commons6 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Over the term of this Government, from 2010, the amount of funding per child has fallen, and it is still falling. What was the impact of those cuts? I do not want to talk about university funding, because that is largely done in a different way, through student borrowing and so on. There are, broadly, three sectors: early years, schools and further education. There is an increase in provision for early years, but the truth is that the cuts have been savage. The first months and years of a person’s life absolutely determine how much progress they will make in educational attainment, but the cuts have cut deep. Childcare costs are soaring, and many families simply cannot afford their childcare needs. Even since 12 months ago, there are 4,000 fewer childcare providers in place. Let me skip schools for a second and go on to FE.”
House of Commons6 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Before I talk about a distributional analysis of how we spend our money, it is worth restating that I do not take the view—very few people would—that each person’s attainment is determined purely by the amount of money we spend. The way we deliver education must of course be continually developed, analysed and fully understood. Without adequate funding, however, the rest of it must fail. The truth is that the amount of funding we are discussing today will determine the number of staff working in education, and their morale. If the number of staff is in decline and their morale low, that will cast a shadow through every classroom in the country. I think there is some evidence that that is the case, although we have brilliant teachers, staff, children and parents.”
House of Commons6 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The ossified stratification of our society is an ancient British problem. That suggests that not every human being is achieving their full potential. To that extent, their education has to be judged as not working properly, unless we take the view—I do not think many in this House do—that the children of the wealthiest are somehow more genetically endowed than the children of the poorest. If we took that view, we could say that the stratification reflected the genetic inheritance of each child, but that is clearly not the case. The truth is that millions of people’s potential is not being realised because our education system is not working properly.”
House of Commons6 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Education ought to help each person to achieve their full potential in life, and that raises the question of what our society offers to people. The British promise is that each generation can expect the next generation to do slightly better than them, and the one after that to do slightly better; and that if people work hard and play by the rules, they can expect to do well in our society. We sometimes call that social mobility. I note that we are about to move responsibility for social mobility back to the Cabinet Office. I do not object to that, but the truth is that education, as I describe it, plays a central role in delivering social mobility, or it ought to do so. Yet the Tory Government’s own Social Mobility Commission concluded that inequality now extends from birth through to work, and that our class structures are ossified.”
House of Commons6 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a privilege to follow the contribution from the Chair of the Education Committee, the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon). His words were brave, but one suspects a degree of worry in some of the things he said about the direction of policy, especially on the funding of the Department. I welcome the new regime under the new Secretary of State for Education, the right hon. Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan). We shall see which direction she takes the Department in. We are discussing why we spend billions of pounds on education, and it is worth beginning my contribution on that thought. Our society puts so much money into education to try to achieve several different objectives, but I just want to focus on one.”
House of Commons6 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“That is because the decision makers are so remote from life as it is lived by the people I represent. I represent middle England, right in the middle of the country—people who work hard, play by the rules, pay their taxes, and yet are being left behind. I leave this final thought with the Minister: can she convincingly say to the young people of my area, like Zac, that the status quo, with all its structural problems, can really offer the change that south-east Wakefield requires? I do not believe so.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The cost of living is skyrocketing and public services are becoming overstretched. Within this national context, it is perhaps unsurprising that areas like mine have been held back for so long. Although the idea of levelling-up money is to be welcomed—we will bid for it and I will engage with it—we need to recognise that nothing less than a full-scale economic system change and proper devolution of power will do, so that people who make decisions can understand their impact on local people. That does not happen now. Long ago, I came to the conclusion that the economic, cultural, political and social distances between decision makers here in the capital and areas such as south-east Wakefield are so vast as to ensure that there will be no progress towards social justice in our area without radical change.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“South-east Wakefield has issues that require active government, not the small government that the Chancellor is always rabbiting on about. That is also the case in many other communities across the country, especially in the wake of the covid pandemic, but the issues I have described show how chronic and acute the problems are in south-east Wakefield. That ought to lead us to pose a bigger question: can the current neoliberal economic model and the ossified, over-centralised state frameworks really deliver social justice? I do not believe they can. Levels of inequality are now verging on the obscene in parts of our country. The richest people in society have increased their wealth by £700 billion since the crash, yet for people in my constituency, wages and salaries are declining or stagnating.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We need an active Government who will: secure investment; increase productivity; address the problems of geographic mobility as a result of the cuts to public transport; restore the service cuts, particularly in schools, which I feel passionate about; and invest in broadband. We need a Government who will offer real opportunities to local business leaders who want to root themselves back in the community, who recognise the value of a loyal and hard-working workforce, and who want to give people a chance to restore the kind of life they had before the mines were closed all those years ago. All those steps could and would improve opportunity in our area. I just hope the Government are listening, although sometimes I doubt they are. Let me finish on a bigger question.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We all know that the economy is changing before our eyes and a new industrial revolution is well on its way, with more to come with artificial intelligence and all the other prospects available to us, but connectivity to the internet, which is so important to building a lively cultural and economic life in a constituency, is restricted in the south-east of Wakefield. The broadband speeds are among the worst in the whole country. Three quarters of communities in my area are in the worst 30% of areas for broadband connectivity. The average download speed in Hemsworth is 52 Mbps, but in the Prime Minister’s constituency it is twice as high at 107 Mbps. It is not acceptable that communities should be left behind in this way by public transport, cuts and the other things I have described. Wherever we look, we are being held back.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Minister may say, “Well, there is £20 million in levelling-up funds,” but that £20 million, which would be welcome, is being funded by the very cuts suffered by the public services in our area. It is not as though this is new money; it is money that has been recycled from cuts. The cuts to school funding in our area are particularly painful. My constituency has lost almost £400 per pupil. When the social mobility tsar says to kids in my area, “Just take a few steps, but don’t dream of going to university,” the truth is that only small steps are possible because of cuts to schools. I take exception and offence to the advice given to people like Zac. My final point is about digital exclusion.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Minister may have something about High Speed 2 in her briefing notes, but the eastern leg—through Yorkshire, up to Leeds—has been cut, although I think £100 million has been left to see whether we can build an inter-urban link between Sheffield and Leeds. The fact is that HS2 would drive a corridor as wide as two motorways through my constituency, but provide no stations or halts there. We would have all the pain, but none of the gain. HS2 is not a solution. We need proper interconnectivity, and I am sure many other Members would say the same about their constituencies. In areas with declining social mobility and increasing deprivation, public transport is imperative. That brings me to a further point about the cuts as a result of austerity. Since 2015, Wakefield Council has suffered cuts of £57 million in real terms.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“From May this year, Northern Rail has cut services, including the links to Sheffield and Leeds, where there are jobs. The same has happened with buses. I guess all of us who represent rural areas know that the bus services are in decline—in my area, severe decline. Seven routes with weekend timetables have been cut and 29 routes with weekday timetables have been affected. On top of that—perhaps because of it—transport spending in Yorkshire is a third of that spent per head in London. If we compare the £906 per head spent in London to the £300-odd in Yorkshire, that means we need £86 billion overall to be on par with London. How will we get geographic mobility, and the connected social mobility, if so many people do not have cars and public transport is reduced as I have described?”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I relate that back to the lack of investment in productivity. We are falling further behind. We can see the problems in our area, both chronic and acute, and we desperately need investment. That brings me to my third point: the need to be mobile in an area where the place of work is no longer the local village. I represent 23 former colliery villages, and the work used to be located in each village. Now that work has gone, people have to travel some distance to get to decent employment, but the problem is that a quarter of people in my constituency do not have access to a car, and public transport—including rail and bus routes—is being cut back. I deliberately placed my office in a station, so people who do not have a car can get there, but the train service is being cut to that very station.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“In Yorkshire and the Humber, gross value added per worker is just over £21,000, whereas in London it is £48,000, so the productivity per head in Yorkshire as a whole—it is slightly worse in my constituency—is £27,000 a year less than for workers in London, and that is because of lack of investment. Without investment, work will be less productive, and if the productivity of each worker is lower, we can therefore expect wages to be lower. Average pay in Hemsworth is £495 a week. In the Prime Minister’s constituency, it is £728 a week. On average, the workers in Hemsworth in my constituency are paid £12,000 a year less than those in the Prime Minister’s constituency. What is worse is that earnings in Hemsworth have grown by 6% since 2010. In the UK, that growth in wages was 22%—almost four times more.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Many leaders of those companies have a social conscience and want to bring social mobility back to life, give local people more opportunities and reverse the trends in deprivation, but they desperately need help and support. I hope the council will put in bids for levelling-up funds that could help locally. If we are successful, it is to be welcomed, but if we are going to give the kids in Wakefield a chance, we need the Government to address the issues that are interconnected with deprivation and a lack of social mobility. I want briefly to touch on four or five of those issues. The first is productivity. These day, we measure productivity per head by something called GVA—gross value added.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“My area is becoming more deprived as this Tory Government have gone on, not less. For example, we are now the 111th most deprived of the English constituencies. In 2015, we were the 130th, so we have declined by 19 positions. That is probably not surprising given that deprivation is growing, and it relates to the lack of social mobility in our area. I pay tribute to the people in my area. They work hard; they were the miners who powered and lit our country, and did all the things necessary in the worst conditions imaginable at work. They are wonderful people. I guess we all think that about our own constituents, but in my case it is the truth. There are many companies in my area, some led by ex-miners, that want to help. They are exemplary, and rooted in the local community.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Indeed, last week she said that we should stop fixating on getting poor children to university—an extraordinary thing to say—and encourage them instead to celebrate “smaller steps” up the ladder. That is just not good enough. Is that the best that the Government’s appointee can say to Zac and his friends? “Don’t aim high, Zac. Take a few small steps. That is maybe all you can expect.” What does such advice mean in practice? It means that a child born into a certain group in my constituency or elsewhere will likely die in the same social group that they, their parents and grandparents were part of. The ability to move up the ladder is negligible in an area like mine, and the situation is getting worse. Social mobility and deprivation levels are interconnected.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I think that is why the idea of levelling up has been developed, and why the Government have appointed a Social Mobility Commission and now a social mobility tsar. If the Government cannot offer assistance to a constituency like mine, we know that the model they are using does not work. What is curious about the commission is that the whole lot of them resigned back in 2020, as Members may remember. The commission said that inequality in Britain is “now entrenched from birth to work.” Certainly, that is a description of the area I represent. The new social mobility tsar, Katharine Birbalsingh, has said that working-class kids should maybe not aim so high.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Some people call it the British promise, and we often now call it social mobility. With an increasingly centralised Government focused around Whitehall and the Cities of Westminster and London, it is no longer the case that this British promise of a better life will be delivered for areas such as south-east Wakefield. Areas like mine are being held back. I want to show why, and speak about how and what we might do to think about changing the life chances of people I represent. My constituency is among the least socially mobile in the whole of England. There are 533 constituencies in England and mine is the fourth worst for social mobility; we are the 529th out of 533 seats. The Government have acknowledged the wider problem.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Having carefully read much of the Government’s information about levelling up, I have come to the conclusion that there is something missing. If we are going to talk about levelling up, what the country needs is some kind of analytical tool to guide us and by which we can measure the success or failure of the Government in achieving greater equality of economic opportunity for areas such as south-east Wakefield. I believe there is such an analytical tool, lying easily to hand, that the country should use. These days, we call it social mobility. It used to be assumed that the next generation—the Zacs of this world—would get a better life than our generation. I think that is probably what brought most of us into politics: the idea that we could improve the way the country and the world operate.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Prompted in part by Government rhetoric about levelling up, I want to show how areas such as the one I represent are desperately in need of a new deal. Let me first tell Members about a conversation I had the other day with a young man named Zac Gaskell, 12 years old. He came along to see me with his dad Lee. Zac is an elected member of the Youth Parliament for our area. It was a great privilege to meet him. I asked him how he had come to be elected and what was in his manifesto. He said, “Well, the most important thing is that people in power need to listen to the voices of young people. After all, we—young people—are the future.” I agree with him; I am sure we all do. The truth is that opportunities for young people in south-east Wakefield are severely limited. The situation is becoming dire.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I beg to move, That this House has considered increasing equality of economic opportunities in south east Wakefield. It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Gary. I thank the House authorities for allowing me to raise a very important matter that relates to my constituency. I am aware of a certain event in another part of Wakefield on Thursday. Members will no doubt be listening carefully to ensure I avoid mentioning such matters, and I undertake to do so. I am most concerned to raise issues affecting the part of my constituency that I have described as south-east Wakefield. It is more or less, but not entirely, coterminous with the constituency of Hemsworth, which I have represented for over 26 years now.”
House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Look, the truth is that the whole process of transition is either stalled or in reverse. We know that there are powerful interest groups in Downing Street saying that climate change is of secondary importance. What is striking is that, when we look at ministerial diaries, we see that Ministers have met representatives of fossil fuel companies nine times more frequently than companies representing renewables. Is it not clear that this Government are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industries and have in effect been captured by those corporations, which explains the asymmetric way in which the Government are operating in relation to the transition?”
House of Commons15 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“There is also an argument about inequality, tackling poverty and all those issues, but the central question is how to deal with the long-term fiscal crisis. I will make one final point before I sit down. The Conservative party will not resolve this. Why do I say that? Tory donors who are among the top 250 richest people in our country have donated to that party £57 million. We all know that whoever pays the piper calls the tune. The Tories are not going to resolve the problem; they are part of the issue. There has to be a debate about these long-term problems, and a wealth tax is part of the solution.”
House of Commons14 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I have a further point to make on that, and it has already been made. For some reason, we tax income from work much more than income from wealth. That is wrong, imbalanced, asymmetric and should end. There is scope to do that. I published a paper about a year ago, which is now in the Library, about wealth and a wealth tax. We looked at several different ways of taxing wealth, and there are many. We worked out the median of a reasonably balanced wealth tax, taking account of behavioural changes, because wealthy people will change how they behave. We thought we could raise about £100 billion a year. The document is in the Library for people to look at. That is the central argument that needs to be made. Of course, there is an ethical argument about whether one human can be worth millions of pounds more than another.”
House of Commons14 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We must do something about that, if we want to continue with public services and tackle inequality. Where is the money going to come from? I do not think for one second that we want to increase VAT in any event, but particularly given the cost of living crisis. Nor do I propose an increase in council tax. Income tax is in long-term decline for the reasons I have given. Therefore, there is only one other place to go, which is to tax wealth. Two of my hon. Friends talked of a one-off tax on wealth. I am not convinced that that is the right way to do it. First, a very large amount of money, a proportion of individual wealth, would have to be raised on a one-off basis to make a significant contribution. In any event, there is a long-term fiscal crisis, for the reasons I have described. Therefore, we need a regular tax on capital.”
House of Commons14 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“That is the central problem with which we need to wrestle, if we intend to tackle the fiscal crisis that state services are now facing. There are four sources of tax. There is income tax, which is more or less half of all tax raised. There is tax on consumption, which is VAT. There is tax on household property, the council tax. There is tax on capital. The tax on capital is one twelfth of the amount raised from income taxes, and is imbalanced as a consequence. It is even worse than that. If the amount of money going into the salaries and wages of the 33 million working people in our country is correct—it is, because a graph shows it clearly—the capacity of income tax, which is the largest amount of tax we raise, will be limited and in long-term secular decline.”
House of Commons14 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) on securing this important debate. I will not reproduce figures already mentioned, but there has been an explosion of wealth, certainly since the banking crash, and before that, alongside a growth in poverty. The two things are interconnected, because the growth in wealth is a function of the increase in poverty. It reminds me of Victor Hugo’s statement: “The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.” That is the truth of the matter, but it is not simply about poverty. It is also about remuneration for middle and upper-income earners as well as lower-income earners. The truth is that there is a long-term secular decline in the proportion of GDP that goes into wages and salaries.”
House of Commons14 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“In the last parliamentary Session we passed some horrendously authoritarian legislation, and now, in today’s Queen’s Speech, more is being proposed. Let me end by saying this. Authoritarianism will never resolve the problems of a breakdown in consent in a society about which people feel profoundly uneasy because of the way in which it treats them.”
House of Commons10 May 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Why is our fiscal system designed like that? We could raise more money to begin to create that Marshall aid plan. All these things are possible, but first the House must face the truth: this is a profoundly divided society, a restless and angry society which wants change. In a society where divisions are running so deep, it is not surprising that the levels of consent and consensus which a democratic country requires in order to be governed are breaking down. Dissent is emerging because of the lack of social justice, which I have tried to explain from the viewpoint of my constituents. What is the Government’s response? Is it to try to create a more socially just society? No, it is not; it is to try to crack down on that dissent.”
House of Commons10 May 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“There is only one answer to this, and that is a Marshall aid plan on the scale of what was provided after the end of the second world war. That is what is needed if we are to begin to tackle the underlying problem; anything else is merely rhetoric designed to persuade people to give the Tories one more chance. Before anyone jumps up to say that we cannot pay for it—although I see that no one is doing so—let me point out that this is one of the richest countries in the world. But where is that wealth? It is not in areas across the north, or indeed elsewhere. It is in the hands of a very small group of people and a tiny group of corporations. It is time to introduce a wealth tax. Why is it, by the way, that money earned from wealth or property is taxed less than money earned from work? Why do we privilege wealth and capital over labour?”
House of Commons10 May 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“If we calculate how much money we need to level up my constituency with the Prime Minister’s, the amount is astonishing. Paying people in my area the same as people in the Prime Minister’s would require a fifth of £1 billion a year; getting halfway there would cost us a staggering £100 million a year. What do the Government offer? They offer a Chancellor who never hesitates to boast about how he is a “small state” kind of guy, when what is required is active intervention in the market to begin to change the levels of deprivation and poverty and the difficulties that are the source of so many problems such as the breakdown of cohesion and the anger that we see in politics today. It would cost £200 million a year to pay people in my constituency what people earn down in the Prime Minister’s.”
House of Commons10 May 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“What the Queen’s Speech pretends is that the state can take an active role in levelling up, offering social mobility and a route out of poverty for people in constituencies such as mine—but that is not what is being offered, is it? What we are being offered is more marketisation, more cuts and more austerity, with planning laws swept away to deliver more marketisation and then deregulation—all the defects that have created the problems that have left so many communities behind. That is what is on offer in this Queen’s Speech. I am sure that in the quiet of their own homes, Ministers’ consciences may tell them that we have a problem. The key workers in the NHS and elsewhere who kept this country going through the pandemic have been abandoned on low pay, with pay rises that are wholly unacceptable, while price rises are accelerating.”
House of Commons10 May 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“When inequality and the lack of social mobility are put together, what do we have? We have a class structure, the old British disease: ossified, unchanging and built on a system that enriches a few and leaves so many millions behind. What does the Government’s programme offer? I say that it offers more of the poison that created the situation that we are now in, but pretends that it is a solution. What created the situation was Tory economic policies, austerity, neoliberal economics and market triumphalism. All those things are at the root of the problems that face communities such as mine and those across the north of England and elsewhere.”
House of Commons10 May 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗