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Business of the House

We welcome the new career that the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) is developing as a tipster. It will be interesting to see how well the horses that she has commended to the House actually perform. The hon. Lady raised—yet again—the subject of the Health and Social Care Bill. It is interesting: we have had three Opposition day debates on the Bill, and I still have not the faintest idea what the Opposition's policy is on health. Nor, apparently, does the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown). He turned up the other day to support the amendment tabled by a Back-Bench Liberal Democrat, but disappeared when the time came to vote on the Labour party's own motion. Perhaps he had not realised that the negotiations with the Liberal Democrats had ended, some two years ago, in failure. Perhaps he, and indeed the hon. Lady, should heed the wise words of his former Transport Secretary Lord Adonis, who wrote today:"““Labour will get back into government by having a better plan for the future, not by opposing changes which are working well.””" [Interruption.] Lord Adonis clearly thinks that they are working well. The hon. Lady asked about the risk register. As she knows, we are awaiting the detailed judgment of the tribunal before deciding what further action the Government might take. The police are operationally independent of politicians, and rightly so. The Home Secretary will be at the Dispatch Box on Monday, when she will be happy to answer questions. As the hon. Lady may have noticed, the Chancellor will be making a Budget statement on Wednesday. I think that the best thing to do is to put on one side the speculation in the papers about what he may or may not do, and then come along on Wednesday and listen to the real thing. The hon. Lady mentioned child benefit. Is it fair for someone earning £20,000 a year to pay, through his or her taxes, for the child benefit of someone earning five times as much? That is the question that she needs to address. As for growth, she will be aware that the International Monetary Fund has pointed out that growth in this country this year is three times that in France and twice that in Germany. Finally, the hon. Lady always obsesses about the relationship between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, but when even The Guardian reports, as it does today, that Labour is in ““turmoil””, we know something must be going very badly wrong with the Opposition, and when another report uncovers that morale at Labour HQ is"““even worse than the dark days under Brown””," we have to wonder how bad it has to get before the hon. Lady stops worrying about the coalition and starts to focus more on the chaos in her own party.