The speech made by Grahame Morris, the Labour MP for Easington, in the House of Commons on 8 November 2022.
I would also like to quote the Prime Minister’s first speech from the steps of 10 Downing Street on 25 October, only a few weeks ago:
“I will unite our country, not with words, but with action…This government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level. Trust is earned. And I will earn yours.”
Well, I am not sure how long those promises have lasted. It is certainly clear that the Prime Minister is avoiding a general election. In truth, he can claim no personal democratic mandate to be Prime Minister. He bases his authority on the Conservative manifesto on which he and his colleagues were elected in 2019:
“the mandate my party earned in 2019 is not the sole property of any one individual, it is a mandate that belongs to and unites all of us.”
By “us”, I think he is referring to members of the Conservative party. He continued:
“And the heart of that mandate is our manifesto.”
The Prime Minister bases his legitimacy on the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto, so may I remind the House of what it said about the triple lock? Many Opposition Members have already said this, but let me do it again for the sake of completeness. It said:
“We will keep the triple lock, the winter fuel payment, the older person’s bus pass and other pensioner benefits”.
The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne) said he was gratified that Labour Members were supporting the Conservative manifesto. Can I tell him that the Conservative party was not alone in making those promises? In fact, 626 hon. and right hon. Members of this House, including myself, were elected on a manifesto commitment to maintain, retain and protect the triple lock. So it is in order for us to make reference to that.
Other colleagues, including the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown), referred to the relative position of the UK. The UK has one of the least generous state pensions in the developed world, as is demonstrated by the OECD figures, which show that the UK spends less on old age pension benefits as a proportion of GDP.
In April, when the Prime Minister broke the Conservative party manifesto pledge, the state pension increased by only 3.1% instead of the 8.3% due under the triple lock. That has cost someone in my constituency on the new full state pension £487 a year. I am sure Conservative Members are going to be concerned. I lived through the days of terrible pensioner poverty and I felt that the last Labour Government went a long way to address that, through not just the basic state pension, but the supplements introduced by Gordon Brown and others.
I would be terribly embarrassed if my Government’s legacy was one of pensioner poverty. However, the groundwork for poverty has been laid by the current Government; those foundations have been laid over the past 12 years. It has left groups such as the WASPI—I know that the Minister and others do not like to hear that term—cohort of working women born in the 1950s and 1960s in desperate hardship through no fault of their own.
Fifty of the UK’s areas most at risk in the cost of food crisis have been identified and not surprisingly the north-east and my constituency are among the worst affected. This year, our communities will see the introduction of “warm spaces” to help those who are unable to heat their homes because of spiralling energy costs. Our Government and the economy are failing to meet the most basic needs—food and warmth. A real-terms cut to the state pension, alongside soaring energy and food costs, will force many more pensioners into poverty. So I urge Conservative Members to do the right thing, back their own manifesto commitment and vote to retain the triple lock.
