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Tag: Geraint Davies

  • Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    The speech made by Geraint Davies, the Labour MP for Swansea West, in the House of Commons on 24 November 2022.

    Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)

    The Welsh Labour Government received £874 million for PPE as its population-proportionate share, but spent only £300 million—about a third of the money given. That suggests, says Cardiff University, that the UK Government could have saved £8 billion, or £300 a household across the UK, had they used public authorities, health authorities and councils instead of private profiteering contractors known to Ministers. Will the Minister look carefully at the Welsh model and, in future, use the public sector rather than private sector cronies known to Ministers such as the former Health and Social Care Secretary, the right hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock), who is out in the jungle making more money for himself?

    Neil O’Brien

    Inevitably, a huge amount of the PPE that is produced in the world is produced by private companies. There is no world in which we could avoid the use of private companies to supply PPE.

  • Geraint Davies – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Energy and Climate Change

    Geraint Davies – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Energy and Climate Change

    The below Parliamentary question was asked by Geraint Davies on 2014-06-18.

    To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what funds have been provided from his departmental expenditure limit for nuclear decommissioning in the 2014-15 financial year.

    Michael Fallon

    The net DEL figure for 2014/15 is £2,298.7m.

    Source: DECC 2014-15 Main Estimate Explanatory Memorandum

  • Geraint Davies – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

    Geraint Davies – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

    The below Parliamentary question was asked by Geraint Davies on 2014-06-18.

    To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what funds have been provided from his departmental expenditure limit to meet the costs of (a) clinical negligence and (b) NHS litigation in this financial year.

    Dr Daniel Poulter

    £1.2 billion has been budgeted by the National Health Service Litigation Authority for the current 2014-15 financial year. £1.1 billion of this is allocated to clinical negligence, by far the most significant proportion of which is funded by members’ contributions, rather than allocated directly from the Department’s expenditure limit.

  • Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech on the National Food Strategy and Food Security

    Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech on the National Food Strategy and Food Security

    The speech made by Geraint Davies, the Labour MP for Swansea West, in the House of Commons on 27 October 2022.

    In 2010, when the Labour Government left office, there were 26,000 people getting food from food banks. By 2021, that had increased a hundredfold to 2.6 million, and that was before the Ukraine war. Now, one in four children and one in five adults—4 million children and 10 million adults—are in food poverty, in the sixth richest country in the world. That is a catastrophe. The number of people who are in food poverty, who cannot afford to eat nutritious food and who are freezing in their house, is much, much higher than it was during the pandemic.

    I am a member of the Co-operative party and the Labour party. We agree with the right to food. The right to life is in the UN charter and the UN convention on human rights, and obviously an intrinsic part of the right to life is the right to food. I support Co-op party initiatives such as Healthy Start vouchers, and it is important that they be rolled out and index-linked to keep up with inflation, but we need much more.

    The co-operative movement was started by the Rochdale pioneers to stop adulterated food. It is about food, and everybody should have the right to daily nutritional food. Winston Churchill famously said that the most important asset of a country is its health; a country’s health is predicated on having enough healthy food, and the reality is that people do not have enough money to buy healthy food after taking account of the housing costs and the heating costs that they face. Amartya Sen, a famous Nobel prize winner, wrote about famines: he was focused on the developing world, but he argued that famines are not about a shortage of food, but about the conjunction of high prices with low wages in particular communities, leading to starvation.

    That is what we are now on the brink of seeing in Britain. High prices are coming in—yes, because of Ukraine, but also from Brexit. The price of imports is going down as the value of sterling has gone down. We have shortages in our own production: a quarter of our fruit is not picked, we have had a mass culling of 40,000 pigs and we do not have enough people to work in abattoirs. We have problems with food production locally and with sterling being further pushed down, which is driving prices up. Some of those problems were avoidable political problems.

    Alongside high prices, we have low wages. Since 2010, we have had very low growth and pay freezes. In the previous 10 years under the Labour party, or certainly in the 10 years to 2008, the economy grew by 40%. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that if that trend in growth had continued, average wages would now be £10,000 higher. The country would be much more resilient to the external shocks that are now causing this catastrophe of localised famine.

    The Government need to act, and act quickly. They need to think carefully about how to manage the upcoming new Budget. I know everybody thinks the national insurance abolition idea is great on the face of it, but the reality is that it will give £7.60 back to the lowest 10% and more than £1,000 back to the richest 10%. At a time when half of people on universal credit are in food poverty, we need to think very carefully about how we sustain our people and about what is right and what is effective for our nation.

    We have talked about the quality of our food, but the truth is that people in poverty are often obese because they have to resort to low-nutrition, high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar products that keep them going for a long time but are not particularly good for them. That is storing up a time bomb for the NHS of obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and strokes. Health inequality is a real problem for us. Famously, in a 2014 study of many countries over many years, the OECD found a relationship between inequality and growth, namely that less inequality means higher growth and a bigger cake.

    Health inequality is also linked to income inequality. I look forward to the White Paper, but we need to be serious. We need to feed our people to get a productive economy and a fair economy that we can all be proud of. I am from Wales, and I am very pleased about the initiatives in Wales that are providing universal free breakfasts and are now rolling out universal free lunches. For all children—for all the adults who sign their children up—that will be free in Wales. Henry Dimbleby, whose strategy I very much welcome, has welcomed that. When questioned by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, on which I serve, about universal credit and levels of payment to make food affordable, he said:

    “That is beyond my pay grade.”

    But it is not beyond the Government’s pay grade to realise what the issues are. If children have affordable, nutritious food, their performance is better, their life chances are better, future tax revenues are better and NHS costs are lower. From UK plc’s point of view it makes a lot of sense, quite apart from being morally right.

    I spoke only this week to an online audience of student unions across Wales. That was one group, of course, and I am not saying that they are the only group, but as hon. Members might expect, they face high rents, they live in houses in multiple occupation and their food costs and energy costs have gone up. A large proportion of them have something like £10 a week or less to live on after paying for utilities. They cannot afford their student learning materials. More than 90% of them face mental health problems. There is a cost of living crisis, and they also face an uncertain future in the jobs market and the mortgage market. We need to think very carefully about that.

    Finally, I turn to food security. Having invaded the Crimea, Russia is now producing 15% more food. We should think about our food security. The cost of fertiliser has gone up, and we are reliant on too much. Our home production should be organic. We need spatial planning. We need a proper plan so that we do not end up with another wave of austerity that costs 300,000 lives. Instead, we should focus on the opportunity to provide all our people with decent food. We need a healthy and productive economy that is more equal and fairer, and a stronger, greener future for all, but I fear that that will only come with a Labour Government.

  • Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech on the Government’s “Plan for Growth”

    Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech on the Government’s “Plan for Growth”

    The speech made by Geraint Davies, the Labour MP for Swansea West, in the House of Commons on 19 October 2022.

    The mini Budget has obviously been a complete disaster and catastrophe, and that is what the motion is about. There was the unfunded tax cuts for the rich—whether the 45p rate, bankers’ bonuses or corporation tax—and letting the fossil fuel companies with their excess profits off the hook. It was unfair and unforecasted, and it led to sterling going down, mortgages going up and debt costs going up—a complete disaster. When the Chancellor stands at the Dispatch Box and says, “Okay, it was all a mistake. We will reverse it. Don’t worry, we’ll grow the economy,” that is completely ludicrous.

    It is possible to grow the economy. Labour grew the economy by 40% in the 10 years to 2008 and used that to double investment in the health service and education and to lift a million children out of poverty and a million pensioners out of poverty. What have we seen in the last 12 years, since 2010? To start with, we had George Osborne’s austerity, where he said that he would sack half a million public servants. The response of the market was that consumer demand went down. We have also not seen any growth or any increases in pay, so the country and the economy had no resilience for the pandemic, wars or outside shocks.

    The truth is, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies said, had the trend rate of growth under Labour continued up to the pandemic, average wages in Britain would have been £10,000 higher, so people would have been stronger to take on the shocks that we have all suffered. That is because of the Tories. It was not all right before the mini Budget—it was already a disaster—and now this is a complete crisis caused by the Tories.

    Under Labour, in 2010, 26,000 people were using food banks. By 2021, the figure was 2.6 million—100 times the level—and now it is far worse. One in four children, and one in five households, are now in food poverty. What are the Government doing about it? Very little.

    In Wales, where there is a Labour Government, we have free breakfasts in schools and free lunches for which anyone can sign up, because we recognise, as Winston Churchill did, that the health of the nation is its most important asset and keeping people fed is critical. On Monday, the Financial Times said that for every £1 invested in the NHS, we get £4 back in growth. When I put that to the Chancellor, he completely misunderstood the point and started talking about tech businesses or something. This is about having a healthy nation that can work and proper jobs in the NHS.

    In 2014, in a massive study of many countries, the OECD found a direct relationship between inequality and growth: namely, where there is less inequality, there is higher growth. So if the country wants higher growth, why did we have a mini-Budget that was all about giving the super-rich more money and clobbering the poor? Why index benefits to wages instead of prices, which are rocketing? It is completely inept, completely unfair and completely immoral, and it is going on and on.

    The Government talk about productivity. We know from the Office for National Statistics that we would increase productivity if we had more people working online—in particular, older people with caring responsibilities who want a more flexible work-life balance—but we have a Secretary of State at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy who, as I understand it, does not even have a computer and pooh-poohs the idea. He thinks, “You can’t be working if you’re at home.” It is completely inept.

    We should have equal wi-fi offered to everyone by providing wi-fi clouds in towns and on all our trains. When I commute back to Swansea, we are just wasting hours because there is no proper wi-fi. That is because it is not a public service and the private provider cannot be bothered to put it in. It is completely ridiculous.

    We know that austerity, which it has been promised that we will go back to, produced 300,000 excess deaths. We know that trade is down, largely because of a cocked-up Brexit. We know that Conservative MPs voted for the current Prime Minister, who endorsed the mini-Budget that has created an even worse catastrophe. We know that Tory MPs did not support the Chancellor, who is now getting us back to square one. The only reason why we have a certain stability in market confidence is because of knowledge from the polls that there is some prospect of a Labour Government in two years who will put us back on track. What we should do morally, economically and politically is give the people a choice—give them a general election now—so that we can sort out the economy and give power to a party that can and has delivered growth and which will deliver a better, stronger, fairer, greener Britain, and kick this lot out.

  • Geraint Davies – 2022 Tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II

    Geraint Davies – 2022 Tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II

    The tribute made Geraint Davies, the Labour MP for Swansea West, in the House of Commons on 10 September 2022.

    There is nothing more important to a child than their mother. She provides comfort, security and stability amid the worries of the world. She is the person assumed by all of us to go on forever. And so it was with Queen Elizabeth, the mother of our country, our queen of hearts.

    The people across the four nations of the United Kingdom owe so much to Her Majesty the Queen for providing steady continuity through war and peacetime, through the peaks and troughs of change. So we feel a sense of deep grief across our United Kingdom for the loss of our eternal mother. For me personally, I feel a special affection as my own mother was of the same generation and met my father during the war, when he served in the Royal Navy.

    Elizabeth bore the weight of the United Kingdom on her young shoulders from the age of 25, when Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister, for over 70 years of global change. She has been an anchor for Britain in a sea of change through 15 Prime Ministers, 14 US Presidents and seven Popes, supporting the world with the long-term interests of her communities and nations in mind, not the short-term expedients of others. As a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, she had to lead a family often in personal turbulence, in the public view, with a steady hand, carefully balancing the interests of the country with those of her own family.

    I had the privilege of meeting the Queen briefly on behalf of Swansea West on a few occasions since 2010. In those fleeting moments, I could appreciate her wisdom and quiet gravity amid her sunny demeanour whatever the weather. She will remain loved by so many millions for so many things. Her continuity has helped anchor our fundamental values of fairness and democracy amid the undulating changes of political leadership, and the storms and sunshine of global events.

    We shall never forget the Queen, and the people of Wales—and of Swansea West—will always hold her in our hearts for her service and devotion to our country. Our thoughts are of course with her family, wishing them strength at this most difficult time, and the comfort of remembering, with love and affection, the happy times shared together as a family with Elizabeth, who will continue to live in our hearts.

    Finally, for Swansea West, I recall how on 14 May 1946 Elizabeth, at the tender age of 20, attended a recital of poetry at Wigmore Hall with her mother, Queen Elizabeth, and sister, Princess Margaret. There Dylan Thomas, Wales’s greatest poet—born in Uplands in my constituency of Swansea West—read “Fern Hill”. The last verse reads:

    “Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

    Up to the swallow-thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

    In the moon that is always rising,

    Nor that riding to sleep

    I should hear him fly with the high fields

    And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

    Oh, as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

    Time held me green and dying

    Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

    Diolch yn fawr, Elizabeth. Rest in peace. God save the King, and the Prince and Princess of Wales.

  • Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech on Energy Price Capping

    Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech on Energy Price Capping

    The speech made by Geraint Davies, the Labour MP for Swansea West, in the House of Commons on 8 September 2022.

    When people talk about famines, they think of food shortages, but in fact famines are a combination of higher prices and lower wages. We are approaching famine conditions in Britain because after 12 years of UK austerity, with cuts in services, frozen wages and the devaluation of the pound, our people are much weaker facing the tsunami of price rises that we have seen from Putin’s brutal war.

    The response from the oil companies, of course, is that their operating costs are just the same but their prices go up. They make windfall profits. They have picked the pockets of British people, and we demand our money back. There is a sort of windfall tax at the moment; as has been said, it should be continued at international rates so that people do not face yet another £500 coming out of their household budgets. Millions of people are in desperate poverty and simply cannot afford that.

    The Prime Minister rightly talks about growth, but what she needs to remember is that the OECD has found that there is less growth if there is greater inequality. At the same time, she talks about giving back national insurance so the bottom 10% get an extra £7.60 and the top 10% get £1,800. In other words, she will increase inequality by putting more burdens on households, giving the rich more in tax giveaways, including national insurance, and not taxing the excess and unjustified profits of big corporations.

    The OECD has also found that growth is very much linked to the education of the poorest. The Government’s ambition is simply to get education spending up to 2010 levels by 2024, but they will not even achieve that because of inflation. Coretta King famously said that poverty is a child without an education. We have seen education standards falling throughout the pandemic, particularly for the poorest, so we need to invest. Meanwhile, the Government are provoking a trade war with the EU over the protocol, Bank of England rates are likely to go up, and they are provoking strikes with the trade union movement.

    What we want is growth. What we saw with the Labour party in the 10 years to 2008 was 40% growth in the economy that allowed us to double investment in education and in health. Had trend growth continued at Labour Government levels, the average income in Britain would have been £10,000 higher, so there would have been more resilience to the external shocks of the pandemic and the energy crisis. We need to think about that, and we need to invest in hydrogen instead of fracking and in renewables instead of more and more oil.

  • 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.

  • Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech on the Resignation of Lord Geidt

    Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech on the Resignation of Lord Geidt

    The speech made by Geraint Davies, the Labour MP for Swansea West, in the House of Commons on 21 June 2022.

    Two ethics advisers gone, two months gone—and all the Paymaster General can offer us is a review. No one needs an ethics adviser more than the current Prime Minister. I studied maths, philosophy and economics at university and am therefore intrigued by how many times the Prime Minister is economical with the truth. Ethics is about right and wrong. It is about truth and falsehood. We heard in partygate about a Prime Minister who made the rules and broke the rules. He said that he did not understand the rules and that he did not know how they applied. We do not know whether he was guilty, innocent or drunk.

    The situation is that we simply cannot trust the Prime Minister. That is the view of the great majority of MPs. Only 211 Tories voted with confidence in him, so more than two thirds of the nation’s MPs have no confidence in the current Prime Minister for what he has done.

    Talking of ethics and philosophy, Kant’s categorical imperative—I know Members will be thinking of this—states

    “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can… will that it become a universal law.”

    In other words, if you are going to have a party, everyone should party, and if they should not, you should not. It is not that complicated. According to Aristotle,

    “We are what we repeatedly do.”

    So what does that make the Prime Minister? At virtually every Prime Minister’s Question Time, he gets up and says that there are half a million more people in jobs than there were before the pandemic—although the Office for National Statistics says that there are 512,000 fewer people in jobs—because he inadvertently forgets to include the self-employed. Was that, in fact, an inadvertent mistake, or was it a piece of choreographed rhetoric to lead people up the garden path? There is a long list of things of this kind which undermine our democracy, this place, and politics in Britain.

    Of course, ethics is about outcomes as well. People say, “Haven’t we done well on covid?”, but 170,000 people are dead thanks to the policies here, which led to the highest death rate in Europe. People say that the economy is all right, although ours was the worst recovery in the G7, and about 8 million people are hungry and in food insecurity. There is not really any accountability, other than the democratic process. We have just seen the Government provoke an unnecessary rail strike by demanding cuts in wages and jobs. There are alternatives to this. Germany, for instance, is saying that it will give everyone a public transport ticket for a month for €9 to boost the economy and jobs, rather than picking fights.

    We have parliamentary privilege here, which means that there are limitations on what the courts can do when we breach the rules. The dampening and watering down of the rules here is therefore problematic, as is, of course, the attack on the judiciary itself. The all-party parliamentary group for democracy and the constitution published a report commissioned by the Rowntree Foundation and prepared by the Institute for Constitutional and Democratic Research. We found that there had been a sustained attack on the courts by Ministers through the media. That is undermining and chilling even the Supreme Court, which has reversed seven of its decisions in the last two years. This was, of course, getting back at the judges, because they had made various decisions about giving us the right to vote on the Brexit deal. They made the Prime Minister return when he tried to abandon democracy.

    What we are seeing is the weakening of internal laws governing the behaviour of politicians here, and, at the same time, an attack on the courts themselves. Meanwhile, there is an attack on international law. The withdrawal from the Northern Ireland protocol undermines our reputation abroad: it means that people such as the Americans do not want to have trade agreements with us. There is an attack on our democratic values and rights, such as the right to peaceful protest. There is an attack on human rights, as we are seeing in Rwanda, and an attempt to pick a fight with the European Court of Human Rights itself, a forerunner to withdrawal from the European convention on human rights—which, of course, was set up by Winston Churchill.

    In the round, what we are seeing is a Prime Minister corroding and eroding the rules that govern our behaviour and our ethics, alongside an attempt to disengage from controls that may be applied and to which all countries and all people elsewhere are subject. So we cannot be trusted. “Values” of this sort feed into the hands of people such as Putin, who hate the democracy, human rights and rule of law that we are now undermining.

    Lord Geidt has said that the Prime Minister has made a mockery of the ministerial code. He has said that we have broken international laws in the form of World Trade Organisation rules. We urgently need a replacement. No doubt some people will suggest that Lord Ashcroft might be the person whom we need. After all, he revealed David Cameron’s relationship with a pig, did he not, and indeed revealed the current Prime Minister’s relationship with the lover whom he offered a £100,000 job. [Laughter.] People may find these things funny, but they are of course true.

    We do need to uphold higher standards here, and, in particular, the Prime Minister should and does not. It is imperative that we get a replacement, and it is imperative that in the interim, at least, we introduce some sort of system. That is what this motion aims to do, and I fully support it.

  • Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech on Achieving Economic Growth

    Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech on Achieving Economic Growth

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

    It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Julie Marson). Today, we listened again to the Prime Minister telling us that we had a strong economy, yet when Labour left office only 26,000 people a year were going to food banks and now there are 2.6 million—100 times as many. We heard that 500,000 more people are in work than before the covid pandemic, but according to the ONS there are 444,000 fewer people in work—the Prime Minister conveniently missed out the self-employed. He said, “We are the low-tax party,” but taxes are now at a 50-year high and the Chancellor increased taxes by £40 billion last year. The tax share of GDP is at a level not seen since Attlee, when we were coming out of the second world war and we needed to charge such taxes.

    Inflation is at a 40-year high. There is a departmental freeze on spending, so there are savage cuts across the board. [Interruption.] I see the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg)—the Minister for Brexit opportunities and Government inefficiency—chattering away, living up to his title in the delivery of inefficiency. The truth is that inflation, ironically, is helping the Government’s revenues. They have a four-year freeze on personal allowances and tax thresholds, which means a creeping increase in tax as people sink into tax thresholds and allowances go down in real terms. They are planning a cynical attempt to drop tax before the next election in 2024 or 2025. That will be gobbled up by that inflationary clawback. People will think that they are getting a tax cut, but will lose twice the amount.

    Is there an alternative? The answer, of course, is yes, and the evidence is that in the 10 years to 2008, when Labour was in power, the economy grew by 40%. We did not just give the proceeds away; we used them to double investment in the health service, double investment in education and bring millions of young people and pensioners out of poverty. We bequeathed a debt-to-GDP ratio of 45%; it is now 90%, so the share of debt has doubled. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that, if our trend of growth had continued, people would be £11,000 better off than they are today. They would be much more resilient to the global shocks that we have all seen, including Ukraine and covid.

    There has been catastrophic mismanagement since 2010. It started with Osborne’s austerity, which simply did not work: it just drove down growth, because people were expecting that they might be one of the 400,000 people he said he was going to sack. We then had the stupidity of hard Brexit, when we decided that we would all be outside the single market. There is no move now for product realignment or a minimum amount of worker movement to allow lower-cost market access, which is what businesses want, so a third of businesses that have been exporting to the EU now say that they will not do it at all.

    We have a low-growth, high-cuts, high-tax, wage-cutting Government—a complete failure. I appreciate that a windfall tax is not the complete answer, but let us understand what a windfall tax is. The oil companies worked on a marginal profit that was quite healthy; then, all of a sudden, Putin invaded and there was an escalation in the price and a massive profit over the cost of production that the companies did not do anything to deserve. That is Putin’s profit, and people here deserve it to help them through the hard times that we are going through because we are imposing sanctions. Sanctions, of course, take time; the IMF says that sanctions will cut the Russian economy by 8.5%, but they will not stop a Russian tank. The war needs to be won to sort the situation out, but that is another story.

    We certainly need to increase productivity, but the reality is that the Chancellor’s ambition is to bring investment per child in education by 2024 up to Labour’s 2010 levels. Our young people need to be invested in now.

    There is talk of everyone having to go back to the office. Indeed, the Minister—that man sitting on the Front Bench—has said, “We have all got to go back to work in the traditional way.” However, a study by the Office for National Statistics shows that there would be a considerable increase in productivity and a delay in retirements if people were allowed to work from home. In particular, women, carers and people looking after families could work flexibly. Furthermore, people being at home for one day in five would take 20% of the traffic and 80% of the congestion off the roads, so we would spend less on roads and it would be carbon-friendly.

    This whole approach to productivity, green investment, and cognisance of those matters, is completely ridiculous. Macron, along with Italy and Germany, has asked why we cannot take a more collaborative approach to trade with Britain—and, indeed, bring in Ukraine, because it shares the same values. All we are doing is starting a trade war on the back of the very sensible arrangement that Ireland should be in the single market to protect it. That is what the Government agreed and that is what should continue to operate.

    Apart from the economic catastrophe, to which there is a clear solution, I fear that there are attacks on the fundamental rights of democracy. The Queen’s Speech contains all this stuff about reducing the power of an independent judiciary. Obviously the Government are very angry with Miller because the judiciary in that case gave us a vote on the Brexit deal, and they are very angry with the judiciary for allowing democracy to be reconvened after the Prime Minister had tried to abandon it for a long period. The composition of the Supreme Court has been changed and seven of its key decisions have been reversed. It has been intimidated by the media, and by Ministers sitting there slagging it off—particularly, the Lord Chancellor who is supposed to defend it. The average tenure of a Lord Chancellor is now one and a half years; it used to be four years. The Lord Chancellor used to be a senior judge, or a member of the judiciary who was respected, rather than someone who just wants to proceed to the next ministerial position. Our independent judiciary is under attack, our rights are under attack, and our democracy is under attack.

    I respect what the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mhairi Black) said about the rolling authoritarianism that we see in the contexts of poverty, the economy, and the democracy that we fundamentally are. We are better than this. We deserve better than this. We do not want low growth, large cuts and low wages; we want high growth, and a fairer and stronger economy in the future. Let us roll forward and deliver that—with a Labour Government.