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The Economy and Welfare Reform

It is a great pleasure to follow the latest of 10—I think it was 10—maiden speeches in today’s debate. The speeches have given me renewed faith in the vibrancy of our political culture, because of the obvious talents of the people who have spoken today—I will not list them all—and have given me a few holiday ideas for those weekend breaks to which we all aspire, even if we do not manage to take them. I shall go to my map of Great Britain and plan to visit many constituencies after listening to their Members of Parliament waxing lyrical about them. Of course, I am still of the opinion that Wallasey is the centre of the universe. For all Labour MPs who served in opposition as well as in government in this place, there can be no greater thrill than to speak in a Queen’s Speech debate from this sided of the Chamber. To be doing so at the beginning of an unprecedented third term in office for a Labour Government is even more gratifying. In the depths of the Thatcherite wilderness years, when I began my own personal political odyssey, that would have been utterly unthinkable—but here we are. Labour’s achievement is mighty and, some would say, very long overdue. After a tough election, in which we have lost some good and talented colleagues, we find ourselves in a position that none of our predecessors enjoyed—not Attlee, not Bevan, not Bevin, not Wilson, not Healey and not Callaghan: we find ourselves in government for a third term. We have a precious opportunity that we must not waste. We have earned the chance to embed the changes that we have begun to implement in the very fabric of our society for the long term. We have earned the opportunity to transform our society profoundly for the better and we have earned the chance to lay solid foundations that will make this century in Britain a Labour century. I also believe that in the 21st century, the problems that the world will face—climate change, instability and poverty, terrorism—can be solved only by multilateral collective international action and not by market fundamentalism, laissez-faire economic dogma or by retreating from the European Union into isolationism. We must build on the economic stability that has been such a feature of our success to date. This is necessary if we are to make more progress towards our goal of greater social justice. The current Chancellor’s achievement here is as unprecedented as our third term in office. He has made a massive contribution to our continued political success and to our real and lasting achievements. We must build on our progress on poverty elimination, both at home and abroad, if we are to tackle the shameful legacy that we inherited from the Tory years. This condemned millions in our own country to the stunted life chances and narrowed opportunities and unfairness that come with poverty. It did nothing to tackle the scandal of billions of our fellow human beings dying in a world of plenty for want of the basics required to sustain human life. Finally, we must build on our progress on fairness and equality. No society that hopes to thrive in our increasingly competitive world can afford to tolerate bigotry and discrimination in its ranks. We have made some progress here, but much remains to be done. This Queen’s Speech contains many good and worthy pieces of legislation that will improve our country when they make their way on to the statute book, and I wish to highlight a few. The Consumer Credit Bill makes a welcome, fast return to Labour’s programme after it was shamefully blocked by Opposition parties in the dying days of the last Parliament. I had the honour of serving on the Treasury Select Committee in the last Parliament, and aspire to do so again in this one. The House will be aware of the work done by the Treasury Committee on credit cards and the financial services industry generally. Some consistent themes emerged from our inquiries and the Bill addresses some of the most important. The first is extortionate credit agreements; many Members will remember the court case of London North Securities v. Meadows, in which an original debt of £5,000 had ballooned into an astonishing £384,000—all legal under the old legislation, but unfair now. The Bill will also deal with transparency in costs and credit terms, including penalty fees, which are often levied on those least able to pay, at levels disproportionate to the debt that they have taken on. It will also deal with financial exclusion and access to dispute resolution. Currently, 2 million households in Britain have no real access to financial services and pay much more to get access to credit in a much more vulnerable position than many of us would tolerate. The extra protection from loan sharks and charlatans who prey on the desperate is long overdue, as is a crackdown on the more dubious practices of some of our mainstream companies. The time when people with low borrowing limits can be forced into spiralling debt by hidden and unavoidable penalty charges and then menaced by constant harassment to pay what they cannot pay is, I hope, drawing to a close. On poverty in the UK, great strides have been made by this Government. The 60 per cent. fall in unemployment in my constituency has helped, as have tax credits and the provision of child care costs. That has given many women with children their first real practical opportunity to go to work. My time on the doorstep in recent election brought home to me how much these policies are appreciated by women, and it is no coincidence that proportionately more women than men voted Labour in the 2005 election. Indeed, MORI has calculated that if all voters had voted as women did, the Labour majority would be not 66 but 90. I believe that we need to build on the progress that we have made there. In the past eight years, Labour has raised 1.9 million pensioners out of the absolute poverty in which the Tories left them. At the same time, we have helped 1 million children out of absolute poverty in our own country. If we are to achieve our aim of eliminating child and pensioner poverty, we need an intensification of our drive in these areas. Abroad, Britain is leading the battle to reshape the agenda on poverty elimination and to strive to achieve the United Nations millennium development goals. The European Union agreement reached yesterday is a tribute to the work of both our Chancellor and Prime Minister, and to the success that they have achieved in shaping the G8 and EU agenda during our presidencies this year. I hope that the Prime Minister’s 40,000-mile trek will deliver the engagement of the United States of America, despite some kicking and screaming, in this campaign, and perhaps even ensure that it joins the ““Make poverty history”” campaign, alongside everybody else. I welcome the quick reintroduction of the Equality Bill in the Queen’s Speech. This is a worthy measure that consolidates some of the good work under way to reinforce the protections that we give our citizens against discrimination. I hope that it speeds its way on to the statute book, but I believe that it needs to be followed equally swiftly by a single equalities measure that will simplify, harmonise and extend the law and protections in this area. With the gender and race pay gaps still persisting, and even growing in some sectors, we need to do more. We need to do more because there is no general positive duty to promote equality. We need to do more to extend protection from discrimination in the provision of goods and services to our citizens on the grounds of age, belief and sexual orientation. This is not special treatment; it is legislating for respect and fairness, which are the definition of what a Labour Government do. Respect has been much in the news lately, but I believe that it is a two-way process. Proper respect empowers. It does not humiliate or degrade, or stigmatise or caricature entire generations. Real respect means the creation of a good society that respects people’s rights and dignity at work, incorporates fairness and opportunity for all our people, and ensures that everyone is respected as they are and that we hear every voice in our political democracy. I believe that we need a more sophisticated debate about respect and about what is happening in the commercialised, media-driven and advertising-dominated culture that is destroying it. We have a third term in Government. We even have a little Red Book to guide us on our way. It is rather less declamatory than another one of which I have had experience, but it is just as exciting. This will be a challenging and exciting period for Labour Members, and we are looking forward to it with determination and commitment.