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Business of the House

I thank the Leader of the House for giving us the future business. I thank her, too, for her observant personal comments last week, which, she will be interested to know, prompted a letter from a lady in Reading who said that she would put these encounters into her weekly diary as ““He-man meets Harman””. I can think of better. There has been a sudden delay in the Political Parties and Elections Bill. Will the right hon. and learned Lady tell the House why that has happened? Given her close personal links with the aristocracy, is she not doubly ashamed by the apparent conduct of her four Labour colleagues in the Lords? May we also have a debate on cash for influence in this House? Does not the House of Lords pale into insignificance, given that, because more than 90 per cent. of the Labour party's battleground funding comes from the trade unions, the party remains a wholly owned subsidiary of an interest group with its own policy agenda? In looking further at the reputation of Parliament, does the Leader of the House not agree that the permanent encampment in Parliament square has become a national embarrassment? It is a total abuse of the legitimate right to protest. Will she make a statement telling us what plans she has to bang heads together in the various Committees of the House to rid ourselves of this grotty eyesore and restore some dignity to the appearance of this iconic seat of democracy? May I salute those Members who attended the Westminster Hall debate on Equitable Life this week? Members of the Opposition parties outnumbered Labour Members by about five to one, which measures the contempt in which the Labour party appears to hold the thousands of responsible, cautious people who saved with Equitable Life— ...We hear shouts of ““Rubbish”” from the other side. Is it not a disgraceful breach of trust that those people have waited so long and received so little? What hope is there for justice and redress through Parliament if the ombudsman's report is so callously ignored? Does the right hon. and learned Lady have enough sense of justice to make her speak up in Cabinet and to allow a full debate on this matter? Will she commit to doing so now? The Government's announcement on mixed-sex wards yesterday was long overdue but totally inadequate. After all, with which member of the Cabinet would the right hon. and learned Lady be willing to share a mixed-sex ward? As a champion of equality, will she now give us a debate on the need to end these wards, so that we can give the House an opportunity to adopt our proposals for getting rid of them and for doubling the number of single rooms in the NHS? The latest forecast from the International Monetary Fund suggests that, contrary to the Government's mantra that the United Kingdom is well prepared to deal with the downturn, the UK is actually facing the worst recession in the world. Can we therefore at last have a debate in Government time to allow the House to express its lack of confidence in the Government's handling of the economy, or is the Leader of the House worried that this is yet another issue that would leave the Prime Minister, as reported yesterday, ““tearful and dewy-eyed””? It would appear that the Prime Minister has lost confidence in his own Cabinet and, it would seem, even in himself. He has complained that his Cabinet members are ducking interviews and leaving him to look like the Minister for the recession, yet today, curiously, we have learned that Labour MPs have been instructed by the Whips not to talk about the economy at all. So who is going to win the parliamentary BAFTAs—the ““Glumdog in Despair”” in Downing street or the Basil Fawltys on the Back Benches shouting, ““Don't mention the recession””? Put simply, when is this country going to get honesty from the Prime Minister about the severity of our plight?