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Adjournment (Summer Recess)

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Anne Milton), who commented on something that the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Michael Jabez Foster) said earlier. I must say that I sympathise with him in having to face these difficult headlines at a time when so much money is being put into the health service, yet none of it appears to be producing the desired effect. Of course, his accident and emergency unit is under threat because the cost of providing such a unit has risen as a result of, among other things, implementing the European working time directive and not putting enough money into the health service locally to cover doing so. I do have a word of congratulation for the national health service and for the Government, however. They have taken account of the special circumstances of the Isle of Wight in providing a united primary care trust and national health acute trust, which will be launched very shortly. I am grateful to them for taking account of my constituents’ feelings on that issue, and I wish that they would take equal account of their feelings on the shortage of dentists on the island. Some 24,000 people are still awaiting allocation to an NHS dentist, but even when they have been allocated, in two years’ time half my constituents will still be without an NHS dentist. So there are some congratulations, and some pleas for the Minister to pass on to his colleagues in the Department of Health. I want to mention two other local issues, the first of which is pet cemeteries. Members may recall that during the first Prime Minister’s questions after the last general election, I raised with the Prime Minister the closure of a pet cemetery on the Isle of Wight as a result of licensing fees set by the Environment Agency, which was licensing it under the European landfill directive. I am pleased to say that the Prime Minister and other Ministers intervened. They all whizzed round, the Environment Agency got involved and it sent someone to visit the pet cemetery. Many months ago, I was assured that a decision had been reached and that everything in the garden was going to be rosy. In the past week, however, I received a written answer from the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw), saying that the situation had not quite been sorted out yet, but that he hoped something would be done shortly. Well, he now has until early September not to be pestered by me by means of written questions. I hope that the next time I ask him a question, he will be able to assure me that the situation has been sorted out. The final local issue that I want to raise is concessionary fares for public transport users. I know that the Government recently introduced significant concessions for elderly people using public transport. In the run-up to the election, they introduced free local bus travel after 9.30 am, and since the election they have introduced free national local bus travel—as it were—after that time. I am pleased to say that my local authority, of which we took control in 2005 after 20 years of Liberal Democrat control, has extended that free concessionary fare so that it applies 24 hours a day, and extended it to the trains. Furthermore, it has implemented a 50p flat-rate fare for people aged under 19 who are in full-time education, so that they can travel anywhere on the island, by train or bus, for that fare. Those are great achievements, but my real concern is that the Government seem to think that there is only one mode of public transport: the bus. I visited the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) when she was a transport Minister, and I invited her to think about whether there should be concessions on water-borne transport, as well as on buses. She said that it was not up to her, and that the Chancellor had thought about that issue. It is clear that the Chancellor does not know that there are such things as ferries, despite living in Scotland, so no money was available in the first tranche of concessionary fares for users of ferries. Sad to say, the Chancellor did not get the message from the Department for Transport in time for the introduction of the wider range of concessionary fares, so there are still no such fares for elderly people travelling by ferry, apart from those provided through the benevolence of the ferry operators. Will the Government consider whether it is fair that one can have free or concessionary travel on a bus, but not on equally important journeys to hospital, the shops, school, university or work if one happens to need to travel by ferry? I hope that the Minister will pass that on. Several other hon. Members have raised my final issue, so I shall abbreviate what I intended to say. I feel most profoundly that the Minister for the Middle East sounds as if he cares about what is happening in both Israel and Lebanon. He spoke like a Minister who cared, not a Minister who was speaking in code or who sounded like the speaking clock. We have spoken of the troubles and how they were caused, and I do not wish to go into that because we have said enough about it today. I regret profoundly, however, that the United Kingdom has lost its role as honest broker in the middle east—a role that it had redeveloped since the Suez crisis 50 years ago—largely as a result of the Prime Minister behaving like Mr. Bush’s poodle and as a result of his frankly ridiculous stories about why we should invade Iraq, stories that, I am pleased to say, some Opposition Members did not believe. We are now in the terrible position of apparently simply parroting the words of Mr. Bush. Last week the Minister for the Middle East said that we should not simply call for a ceasefire. On Sunday, Condoleezza Rice said that we should be calling for a ceasefire, so yesterday the Prime Minister said that we should call for a ceasefire. That is behaving more like a parrot than a Prime Minister and leader of a serious nation. My greatest concern is the hostility to this country that has arisen across the Arab world and, in particular, among the 1.6 million Muslims in this country. It is profoundly distressing to see people on the streets of this country defending either of the participants in a foreign war. We should not have foreign wars fought out, even figuratively speaking, on the streets of this country by adherents on either side. If people come to this country, they should expect to support what is in the best interests of the United Kingdom and its people, not what is in the best interests of the countries from which they came or the religions to which they belong. I hope that the Minister will take back to the Prime Minister the need to show more balance in the treatment of both sides in the terrible events in the middle east.