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Tag: 2022

  • Marion Fellows – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    Marion Fellows – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    The speech made by Marion Fellows, the SNP MP for Motherwell and Wishaw, in the House of Commons on 18 July 2022.

    Mr Deputy Speaker, I hope you caught the Prime Minister’s surreal bravura performance, which was rather clouded by the fact he did not realise that his own Government tabled the motion. There was not a cheep about being booted out by his own party, finally, after breaching his own rules on partying while my constituents could not hold their loved one’s hand as they were dying. There was not a cheep about Marcus Rashford shaming this Government into feeding hungry, poor children during the school holidays.

    As Conservative Members brag about this Government getting Brexit done, they forget that they were continually warned about what Brexit would mean for families in Scotland and the rest of the UK—£1,400 a year and a fall in GDP. Well, it has happened, folks. And the latest polling shows that more people think Britain was wrong to vote to leave the EU.

    There was not a cheep about being prepared to flout international law after he changed his mind on signing the Northern Ireland protocol. There was not a cheep about illegally proroguing Parliament.

    Scotland has a different Government and deals with people in an entirely different way. We respect people and we treat them with dignity and respect when they need help. Here, this Westminster Parliament is believed to be sovereign, whereas in Scotland we know that that is not true; in Scotland, the people are sovereign. They elected a Parliament last year with a majority for independence, but this Tory Government are absolutely determined to keep Scotland in the Union. Self-determination apparently does not apply in Scotland. Even the—

    Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)

    Order. I want both Front Benchers to be heard with civility, please. I call Angela Rayner.

  • Stephen Kinnock – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    Stephen Kinnock – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    The speech made by Stephen Kinnock, the Labour MP for Aberavon, in the House of Commons on 18 July 2022.

    The winner of the current leadership contest will be the fourth Conservative Prime Minister since 2016. The Conservatives really have turned government into a game of musical chairs, to the point where the world’s oldest political party is not a credible or coherent organisation at all. It is a coalition of chaos led by a Prime Minister who embodies the vacuum of moral purpose at its heart.

    They say that a fish rots from its head, but let us not forget that every single Conservative Member is complicit. They propped him up and defended the indefensible, so the entire fish is rotten. That is why it makes no difference who wins this leadership contest, and it is why a general election, and a fresh start with a Labour Government is the only viable option for our country.

    We cannot in all good conscience allow this man, a man who put our national security at risk by holding clandestine meetings with a former KGB officer, to carry on squatting in Downing Street over the summer. This zombie Government are set to limp on in parallel with the frankly embarrassing leadership contest, which not even the candidates want to see played out in public. They are dodging scrutiny, and no wonder. They are offering hundreds of billions of pounds in unfunded tax cuts, but nothing for the millions of families who will face a choice between eating and heating this autumn. There is not a word on boosting productivity or driving the modern manufacturing renaissance that our country so desperately needs, and no mention whatsoever of the Conservative party’s backlog Britain, with the Passport Office in meltdown, A&E queues off the scale, courts mired in delays and a broken asylum system costing the taxpayer £4.7 million a day.

    Backlog Britain is not simply the result of the Government’s failure to plan for the end of lockdown. The multiple system failures we now see are the result of 12 years of Tory incompetence and indifference. Growth, investment and productivity have stagnated since 2010, and our public services have been hollowed out, leaving our country profoundly lacking in the resilience we needed to weather the covid storm. The Government’s failure to invest has impacted on our national finances, on workers’ pay packets and on our public services, and it has left our private sector vulnerable to major shocks such as the pandemic, the war and the Prime Minister’s botched Brexit deal.

    We should be in no doubt that authoritarian states such as China and Russia have been waiting in the wings, ready to pounce and to exploit our overexposed and vulnerable assets and supply chains. Labour has a plan to make, buy and sell more in Britain. After 12 years of a stagnating Tory economy, low growth and broken promises, we need a fresh start, not just a change at the top.

  • Barry Gardiner – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    Barry Gardiner – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    The speech made by Barry Gardiner, the Labour MP for Brent North, in the House of Commons on 18 July 2022.

    Former Conservative Cabinet colleagues are publicly accusing each other of economic incompetence, of negligence in preventing fraud and even of being a Liberal Democrat, yet after defenestrating their party leader because they had no confidence in him, Conservative Members have decided to leave the man in place as Prime Minister of this Government. As a result, the public have no confidence in them. That is clear because the Government refuse to call a general election, as they have no confidence that they would win it.

    The 6.6 million people waiting for treatment in the NHS have no confidence in this Government. The parents of the 350,000 children on that waiting list have no confidence in them. The 50,000 imaginary nurses currently housed in the 40 presumably non-existent hospitals have no confidence in them either. The taxpayers paying the highest level of tax for 70 years and facing the highest inflation in 40 years have no confidence that this Government have the ability to tackle the record £2 trillion of debt, the highest peacetime debt the UK has ever seen.

    The victims of crime who have watched crime rise by 18% while prosecutions fall have no confidence in this Government. The people awaiting their passports because of the chaos in the Home Office have no confidence that they will be able to travel abroad for either business or a family holiday. The refugees who have a well-founded fear of persecution in Syria or Afghanistan have no confidence that they will not be deported to a country where they have no family and no connection. Women and girls have no confidence that this Government, with their inability to properly tackle sexual predation in their own ranks, will deal with the violence against them. Minority communities who experience racial profiling and have been outraged as police shared racist photos among themselves have no confidence that this Government will press for real reform.

    The families and friends of the 72 who died in Grenfell Tower have no confidence that, five years on, this Government have acted to make others safe. The 2 million families depending on food banks to feed their children have no confidence that this Government understand what it means to see their children go to bed hungry. The 5.5 million public sector workers whose real-terms wages have stagnated and declined in the past 12 years have no confidence that they can continue to pay their rent, with 9% inflation eroding their pay still further. A blind eye has been turned to jobs for sexual favours, to ministerial bullying, to crony contracts and to wine time Fridays—although people did ask “WTF?”—yet this Prime Minister wants to stay on as caretaker. Ponder that word. Is there any word in the entire English language that describes this Prime Minister less than “caretaker”? He is a reckless narcissist, and nobody inside or outside this Chamber should have confidence in his Government.

  • Matt Western – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    Matt Western – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    The speech made by Matt Western, the Labour MP for Warwick and Leamington, in the House of Commons on 18 July 2022.

    Lord Hague was right, David Cameron was right, and in June 2019 Max Hastings said:

    “I was Boris Johnson’s boss: he is utterly unfit to be prime minister.”

    Now we have a Prime Minister squatting in No. 10 or partying at Chequers. If he needs help with moving, Gary’s Removals or Cleavers in my constituency are available. He is a Prime Minister who 10 days ago scrambled around trying to keep his premiership from sinking, but he rearranged his deckchair Cabinet, desperate to not go down as the worst Prime Minister in history.

    The Government still claim that they got the big calls right, but they are rewriting history. They sought to change the rules over Owen Paterson. They disposed of PPE without replacing it, ahead of what was to be the pandemic, then they blew £37 billion on the test and trace scheme and lost £4 billion to fraud. They bodged the Brexit deal, which has led to a 4% hit to the UK economy. They claimed that they were the lead nation in supporting Ukraine, but when Crimea was invaded in 2014 they refused to provide or sell weapons to that country, preferring instead to normalise relations with Russia. Now, with the economy in crisis, we have one in 15 suffering with covid, we have ambulance services and social care in crisis and we have the worst inflation in the G7 and the worst growth anywhere in the G20 except Russia.

    Now we have the Conservative party leadership contest, which is seemingly a triennial navel-gazing event. The public will not forgive this. We had it in 2016, in 2019 and now in 2022. This is like the three-year itch. I hate to disabuse this Government of their belief that they are irresistible to the public, but after Wakefield, after Chesham and Amersham, after North Shropshire and after Tiverton and Honiton, the public have stated, loud and clear, that they feel misled by this Government, who have lost the public trust. Two weeks ago, a YouGov survey found that, irrespective of the new leader, 57% of the public wanted a general election; 27% said that they were against that and 17% did not know. I fear that Conservative Members are not listening to the public. They are out of touch. They should give way to public opinion and give way to a general election. The public have no confidence in this Government, and I am on the side of the public as usual.

  • Janet Daby – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    Janet Daby – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    The speech made by Janet Daby, the Labour MP for Lewisham East, in the House of Commons on 18 July 2022.

    I have no confidence in the Prime Minister and this Government. My inbox is filled with emails from constituents telling me how the current Prime Minister and his Government are not fit to lead our country. Conservative Members seem to have amnesia; they seem to have forgotten that they recently had a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister. They also recently had an exodus of Ministers resigning from the Prime Minister’s Cabinet. They are now in the middle of a contest to choose the third leader that the Tory Government will have had in the four years that I have been in this place.

    The Prime Minister is a significant risk to our country, as we have seen time and again. It was wrong that he put the former Deputy Chief Whip in such an important position of responsibility and authority when he knew that he had displayed sexually harmful behaviour towards others. Since the PM has been in office, he has gone from one scandal to the next, just like in a soap opera, but Parliament is not a soap opera, nor should it be reduced to one.

    The Prime Minister is a safeguarding risk, but he is also a national security risk. His careless words as Foreign Secretary led to evidence being given against Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe that led to her spending five years incarcerated. Anoosheh Ashoori, my constituent, spent four years in prison in Iran. The Government should have repaid the debt to Iran a lot sooner, which could have brought them home even sooner. Then there was the private meeting that the Prime Minister had with the ex-KGB agent Alexander Lebedev in Italy. What was that about?

    These are a few of the many incidents that have been inappropriate, dangerous, disgraceful and lawbreaking. The Prime Minister unlawfully prorogued Parliament. He did not lock down fast enough at the beginning of the pandemic, which could have saved lives. His former adviser even said that the Prime Minister resisted the autumn lockdown in 2020 because he thought only over-80s die of covid. How ridiculous and insulting is that?

    Millions in taxpayers’ money was lost as Ministers signed off deals for PPE that was not used. The Government’s test and trace system failed to cut infection levels, despite being funded by £37 billion of taxpayers’ money. The then Chancellor wrote off £11.8 billion in public funds. There was the U-turn on keeping overseas aid spending at 0.7%; the refurbishment of the Downing Street flat and the questions about who paid for the £840-a-roll wallpaper; the Tory Ministers being allowed to help a Tory donor to avoid paying a new tax on his housing development; the Owen Paterson scandal, where the Prime Minister tried to change the standards rules to save his friend; and, of course, partygate. It is clear that this Government are not up to the job of governing our country, and the only solution is a general election.

  • Margaret Greenwood – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    Margaret Greenwood – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    The speech made by Margaret Greenwood, the Labour MP for Wirral West, in the House of Commons on 18 July 2022.

    This is a Government in whom I can have absolutely no confidence. This morning, I attended a meeting with members of the Criminal Bar Association and listened to junior criminal barristers talking about the deplorable state of the criminal justice system. It is an extraordinary state of affairs that under this Government, barristers are on strike over pay and our legal system is crumbling. They do incredibly important work—the majority of it funded by legal aid—yet the median income of junior criminal barristers in their first three years is £12,200, which is below the minimum wage. As a result, we are seeing an exodus from the profession. Between March 2021 and March 2022, more than 1,000 trials were postponed at the last minute because no barristers were available to prosecute or defend the case. That has had serious consequences for victims, witnesses and defendants in what were already very stressful situations.

    The Criminal Bar Association has been clear that without fee increases sufficient to stem flight from the profession and promote recruitment, the systemic failure that the criminal justice system is experiencing will become endemic, rendering the reduction and elimination of the unacceptably high backlog unachievable. I ask the Government to engage with the Criminal Bar Association as a matter of urgency. The Government are due to lay a statutory instrument within days that would increase fees, but it would apply only to new cases, leaving 58,000 cases stuck in the backlog that would not benefit from any increase.

    Now for the Government’s handling of the civil service and their pursuit of the small state. They plan to cut 91,000 jobs from the civil service within three years, which will damage the economy and the delivery of public services. In the north-west, it could mean the loss of more than 11,000 jobs; on Merseyside, more than 3,500 jobs; in Wirral, more than 400 jobs. As the Public and Commercial Services Union has highlighted:

    “Making cuts will only make things worse, make waiting lists longer for those seeking passports and driving licences, make telephone queues longer for those with tax enquiries.”

    As we experience an unprecedented heatwave that represents a threat to life, the Prime Minister has skipped an emergency Cobra meeting and stayed in the luxury of Chequers for a party, yet again putting parties before his responsibilities—another in the long line of insults from this Prime Minister to the people of the United Kingdom. This Government are allowing crucial institutions to fall into chaos, are planning to slash funding from overstretched Departments and are propping up a discredited Prime Minister who is unfit for public office. I have absolutely no confidence in this Government.

  • Alison Thewliss – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    Alison Thewliss – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    The speech made by Alison Thewliss, the SNP MP for Glasgow Central, in the House of Commons on 18 July 2022.

    In Scotland, 2022 is the Year of Stories, so it is nice that Conservative Members have come in today with their contribution to fiction and rewriting history. The Prime Minister and his Government, the Ministers who support him, sit in a parallel universe of self-delusion. This is the kind of situation that happens in failed states with an autocrat in power and no written constitution.

    It is impossible to have confidence in this Tory Government because they do not even have confidence in themselves. Resignations proved that they do not want the Prime Minister and it is ludicrous to pretend today that they ever did—although perhaps that is why Conservative Members were so rowdy earlier. Having seen some of the leadership candidates coming forward, they are feeling a bit of regret, guilt and remorse. The problem with those leadership candidates is that they were all loyal to the Prime Minister. They stood up to defend him and they now claim that somehow, magically, they had absolutely nothing to do with him and the failures of this woeful Tory Government.

    The Government’s failures are legion, whether we are talking about PPE contracts, the people excluded from support schemes, the failure to support businesses through the cost of living crisis, or the Home Office’s ludicrous incompetence, as I know from all manner of constituents I see in my surgeries on a Friday. The Government are completely neglecting the COP26 legacy, just as we see the climate crisis on our doorstep here in Parliament.

    There is also the denial of democracy. The Prime Minister said earlier that he stands up for freedom and democracy, but that could not be less true. My Glasgow Central constituents look to this place and see nothing that Westminster can offer them. In Scotland, democracy did not stop on 18 September 2014. The right to self-determination is not a one-time thing. It is the right of the people to decide how they want to be governed, and the people of Scotland will have that right again.

  • Richard Burgon – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    Richard Burgon – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    The speech made by Richard Burgon, the Labour MP for Leeds East, in the House of Commons on 18 July 2022.

    Three minutes is not enough to sum up or express the misery, suffering and hardship caused to people in my constituency and across this country by this rotten Government. Of course I have no confidence in the Government, and of course my constituents have no confidence in the Government. They saw through the Prime Minister from the very start, and millions and millions more people are seeing through the Prime Minister. Just think of all the suffering that has been caused in the last 12 years of this Government to those who have had the bedroom tax inflicted on them and those who have been humiliated with the indignity of the appalling unfair fitness to work tests, where they are signed off as if they were fit to work when they are not. Think of the people deported from this country during the Windrush scandal. Think of all the people who died unnecessarily because of covid. The Government brag about their covid response, but I think it is some kind of sick joke. We were told once that 20,000 covid deaths would be a “good” outcome. There have now been more than 200,000 deaths. If we had had the same rate as Germany, Japan, Canada or Australia, tens of thousands of people would still be alive, but the truth is that to the Government, that does not seem to matter.

    The Government have attacked hard-won civil liberties and hard-won democratic rights. There has been anti-trade union bile and more anti-trade union legislation, making it harder and harder for trade unions to take strike action legally. We have the Government’s draconian attacks on the right to peaceful protest. They have also pushed forward a voter suppression strategy through the introduction of voter ID.

    It is good riddance to this disgraceful, law-breaking Prime Minister, but the truth is that it is not one politician or one Prime Minister who has created the situation in our country where there are more food banks than branches of McDonald’s. It is not one Prime Minister who has created the hostile environment for migrants and for those who people presume are migrants. It is the whole rotten system. The truth is that, over the past 12 years, we have seen what the reality of Conservative Government means to people in our country. The reason that Conservative Members decided to get rid of him is that they want to push forward with even more unpopular policies, pushing down living standards and letting the billionaires and the oil and gas giants off the hook. They merely want to find somebody who has the political capital to push forward that abhorrent policy, and that is why we need a general election.

  • Caroline Lucas – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    Caroline Lucas – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    The speech made by Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, in the House of Commons on 18 July 2022.

    The motion is right in one respect. The debate we need to have was never just about one lawbreaking, Parliament-proroguing, office-abusing Prime Minister; it was always about this tawdry, toxic Government as a whole.

    Every single MP on the Government Benches who stood by the current Prime Minister while he dissembled and denigrated his way through two and half years is implicated in his offences. Every one of them who stood by while the partying happened, while the attempts to cover up bullying in the Home Office happened and while the rules were being changed to protect their mates while sexual harassment was being brushed under the carpet, is complicit. Did those who finally resigned really only just realise that the Prime Minister was serially incapable of honesty, of integrity, of decency? Of course not. They have been a Government with no respect for standards in public life, no respect for the law and no respect for the British public.

    Like all of us, I stand here to represent my constituents. Frankly, the Government do not have the right even to ask my constituents to have confidence in them. That they seek to do so tonight only underscores their abject failure to even begin to understand what integrity means. That is why we need not just a change of leader, but a change of Government and an immediate general election.

    I do not have time to go through all the different reasons for not having confidence in the Government, but let me mention just two. Today’s debate is happening while the country is in the grip of the kind of deadly weather event that so many of us have been warning about for so long and which will only get worse in the future. Yet the Government are planning to green-light new extraction of oil and gas reserves from the North sea knowing it will make no difference to consumer bills or energy security, but a world of difference to an already overheating planet. That approach is not just immoral but criminally negligent.

    On democracy, it would be easy to dismiss the Government as simply the incompetents they are, but that would be wrong. The populist style of politics they have inflicted on this country is deeply dangerous. They risk a frightening descent into what the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mhairi Black) bravely and correctly called out in May: fascism. As she said back then, fascism does not always arrive wearing jackboots. It can come knocking more subtly than that. Students of fascism have helpfully suggested some of its signs: disinformation, misogyny, disdain for intellectuals, social conformity, suppression of trade unions, threats to human rights, the creation of hate groups and abuse by them, the rise of militarisation and, of course, racism, which is at the heart of fascism. Do any of those sound familiar?

    There is a pattern here if only we are prepared to see it. We like to tell ourselves that we live in a mature democracy, yet this populist Government have deliberately set out to weaken the very institutions that define a liberal democracy. They have set out to make it easier for them to cling to power, whether they enjoy the confidence of the electorate or not. So no, Mr Deputy Speaker, I do not have confidence in this Government. That the Prime Minister’s political career has ended in failure and disgrace is thoroughly deserved. Anyone voting for the motion tonight deserves the same fate.

  • Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    The speech made by Geraint Davies, the Labour MP for Swansea West, in the House of Commons on 18 July 2022.

    I have no confidence in this Government. I know that a few people say, “Oh, the zombie Prime Minister made a few errors because he didn’t know he was at the party, he didn’t know it was a party, he didn’t know if he was drinking at the time and he didn’t know the law even though he wrote the law, so we should let him off—but he got the big issues right.” I put it to the House that he did not get the big issues right.

    Take covid: 200,000 people dead—the highest number in Europe. That is a complete disaster. People say, “We got the vaccine out.” Well, we had the vaccine. The Prime Minister claims, “If we had been in the European Medicines Agency, we wouldn’t have been able to roll it out.” That is not true; we would have. He keeps repeating that untruth again and again.

    Billions have been lost in procurement over this whole episode. How do we know? Well, Wales was given £1 billion to deliver test, track and trace, and it spent only £0.5 billion, because it delivered that service through public health and local authorities, instead of through people putting their hand in the till and taking the money, as happened when the local landlord of the former Health Secretary, the right hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock), got a contract. It is absolutely ridiculous!

    What about the economy, which is supposed to be doing well? We just heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms) that the Prime Minister consistently stands at the Dispatch Box and says, “There’s half a million more people in jobs,” or whatever he says that week, when he knows that those are only the payroll figures, which do not include the self-employed. If we asked the Official for National Statistics, we would learn that there are something like half a million fewer people in jobs. The Prime Minister is intentionally, in my view, giving the wrong impression of the economy. We have the slowest recovery in the G7, the slowest projected growth and the highest inflation. It is a disaster. Then we are told, “He’s got Brexit done,” but 25% of the fruit is not being picked and we are not butchering the meat. Some 40,000 pigs have been culled, yet the price of ham is up by 27%. Is that a success?

    What about trade? Trade is down 15%. What about those trade deals? If we had got the Japanese trade deal through the EU, we would have made £1 billion more in GDP. What about efficiency? Passports—you’ve got to wait 12 weeks. Driving licences? All the civil servants were pushed into Brexit management—botched Brexit—and now the Government are going to cut 90,000 civil servants. That is going to go well, isn’t it, if you are in a queue?

    Then there is the Northern Ireland protocol. We are pulling out of the single market, so business will fail, we will mess up the peace process and we will break international law. Talking of which, what about Rwanda? Israel did not want to send its refugees to Rwanda. Why? Because they were being tortured, raped and killed, yet we are. And, oh, the solution to that is to pull out of the European convention on human rights, which Churchill put together. Our fundamental values of democracy, freedom and human rights are being ripped up at a time when China is abusing democracy in Hong Kong and the human rights of the Uyghurs, and confronting Taiwan. Russia is moving in and we are abandoning the right to protest, playing into Putin’s hands. Even the windfall tax is being given back to the oil producers.

    The fact is that the Labour Government produced 40% growth in 10 years and doubled spending on health and education. We need another Labour Government to invest in growth for a better future.