The Prime Minister was asked—
Engagements
I am sure that the whole House will wish to join me in paying tribute to the service and sacrifice in Afghanistan of Lance Corporal Graham Shaw and Corporal Liam Riley, both from 3rd Battalion the Yorkshire Regiment, attached to 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards. We think of their families and their loved ones, and we will never forget the sacrifice that they have made and the service that they have given.
This morning I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in this House, I shall be in contact with the Northern Ireland parties later today.
I add my sympathy and condolences to the families of those brave servicemen who have lost their lives in the service of our country.
All our constituents are rightly concerned about transparency, expenses and cleaning up politics. With that in mind, now that it is clear that there was a £50,000 fund solely for the Prime Minister’s use at his headquarters, will he explain why he did not declare this in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests?
I know nothing about what the hon. Gentleman is talking about.
I think that we all have a duty in the debate about law and order to give out all the facts that are relevant. To misrepresent facts that have come from the police and the British crime survey is not to allow us to have a fair debate in this country. The police have said that the use of the figure of 71 per cent. by the Opposition is “extremely misleading”, while the BBC home affairs editor has said:
“The story is of falling and then stable violence for over a decade.”
I think that there is a duty on everybody to report the facts accurately.
I join the Prime Minister in paying tribute to Corporal Liam Riley and Lance Corporal Graham Shaw, who were killed in Helmand on Monday. They were both very brave men. Everyone should be proud of their service and we should all honour their memory.
Is it not becoming clear from the Chilcot inquiry that the Government in general, and the Prime Minister in particular, made a series of bad decisions that meant that our armed forces were not equipped properly when they were sent into harm’s way?
I will welcome the opportunity to speak to the Chilcot inquiry, but the right hon. Gentleman must know that defence spending rose every year, with the fastest rises for 20 years, and that our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan received £14 billion from the contingency reserve to enable the fighting there to take place. Not only did we prepare the Army, Navy and Air Force with proper funding; we also funded every urgent operational requirement that was made. I do not believe that it is in the interests of this House to tell people that they were not properly equipped when funding was provided.
What the Prime Minister has just said is completely at odds with what witness after witness has said to the Chilcot inquiry. Let us listen to what they have said. The former Defence Secretary said that we now have fewer helicopters because of the decisions that the Prime Minister took as Chancellor. The former Chief of the Defence Staff, General Walker, said that
“money …was taken out of the helicopter budget”.
Soldier after soldier has complained about the lack of body armour, vehicles and equipment, and we now know that the service chiefs threatened to resign en masse. Is it not time that the Prime Minister admitted to the mistakes that he made when he was Chancellor?
First, the Conservatives do not even know what their policy is for 2010 on spending on anything. Secondly, I have always taken seriously the need properly to fund our defence forces. In the 2002 spending review, which is the subject of discussion here, the defence estimate was the best for 20 years. The Defence Secretary at the time said it was an excellent settlement that allowed us to modernise the forces. In 2004, the defence management board made its own decisions. Let me remind the right hon. Gentleman that he stood on a platform at the last election to cut defence spending by £1.5 billion.
As ever, this Prime Minister is in complete denial of the facts. He just said that he always took defence seriously. Another former Chief of the Defence Staff, General Guthrie, said that this Prime Minister
“was the most unsympathetic Chancellor of the Exchequer, as far as defence was concerned”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 22 November 2007; Vol. 696, c. 961.]
Just today, in front of the Chilcot inquiry, the former permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, Kevin Tebbit, said that while troops were in Iraq, and while that man was Chancellor of the Exchequer, his budget was subject to “arbitrary” cuts and a “guillotine.” He said that he
“was running…a crisis budget rather than one with sufficient resources”.
Is not the evidence mounting that the Prime Minister ignored the welfare of our armed forces right up until the moment it became politically convenient to do otherwise?
I repeat: the Conservative party went into the last election wanting to cut defence expenditure by £1.5 billion. We continued to increase the defence budget every year and we made every urgent operational requirement that was necessary for Her Majesty's forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. That has included £14 billion of extra expenditure from the reserve. Expenditure on Afghanistan was £600 million a few years ago. It will be £3.5 billion this year. Defence expenditure is rising this year, as it is rising in the next financial year. The right hon. Gentleman cannot portray a picture of defence cuts when defence expenditure has been rising. The only Government who cut defence expenditure recently were the last Conservative Government, who cut it by nearly 30 per cent.
I call Jamie Reed. [Interruption.] Order. I am sure Government Back Benchers want to hear Mr. Reed.
I hope that there is all-party support for the nuclear expenditure that is necessary to give us security in our power. It is 8 minutes past 12 and I understand that the current Conservative party policy is that nuclear power is a last resort. That is not the basis on which one can plan for the future. The Conservatives can change their policies every day. We will remain consistent in support for the energy needs of our country.
I would like to add my own expressions of sympathy and condolence to the families and friends of Corporal Liam Riley and Lance Corporal Graham Shaw from 3rd Battalion the Yorkshire Regiment, who tragically lost their lives serving so bravely in Afghanistan this week.
I would like to return to the issue of defence spending. The Government are about to make a statement on the future defence needs of this country, yet the Prime Minister has already excluded the Trident nuclear missile system from the strategic defence review. How can that review be taken seriously if the most expensive weapons system that we have is to be excluded from it?
One can either take a unilateralist or a multilateralist attitude to defence. We take a multilateralist attitude that we are prepared to work with other countries for nuclear disarmament. We do so on the basis of being prepared to discuss the future of Trident as part of multilateral talks. We are prepared to look at and discuss the scientific evidence for reducing the number of submarines from four to three. The defence review paper will state all these things. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will agree that in a very unsafe and insecure world where countries are acquiring nuclear weapons, breaching the non-proliferation treaty, it is better for us to be part of multilateral discussions to reduce nuclear weapons around the world.
Look at what we have: we have troops in battle without proper equipment and guillotined defence budgets in a world that has changed out of all recognition since the cold war, yet the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition want to spend billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money replacing and renewing a nuclear missile system designed to flatten Moscow at the touch of a button. How are we to face the threats the country faces if Government thinking is so stuck in the past?
I give the right hon. Gentleman credit for being consistent in his policies—something that I cannot say about the Opposition. It is important for us to maintain the resources we are spending in Afghanistan and it is important to understand in our strategic defence review that we are dealing with the problem of global terrorism, which is quite different from what we have experienced before. I assure the right hon. Gentleman that we will look carefully at all the uses of equipment for the future. It is important to recognise that we want to be part of multilateral discussions for the future.
I add that it is not fair to our troops in Afghanistan to give the impression that they are not properly equipped for the job they are doing. We have spent £3.5 billion from the reserve this year and it will be even more next year. The average expenditure per member of our forces is nearly £0.5 million to ensure that they are properly equipped. More helicopters have gone into Afghanistan over the last few months, as have more vehicles. Special attention is being given to counter-terrorism and dealing with the threat of improvised explosive devices. It is completely wrong to say that our troops are not properly equipped. We are proud of them; they are professional; and they are properly equipped for the job they are doing.
The Scottish Administration have had a record increase in public expenditure as a result of the previous public expenditure review. It is sad that they have not made a priority of education for the young people of Scotland. They will pay a price for that failure at the ballot box. Some of the cuts having to be announced by the Scottish Administration are the result of the wrong and misleading decisions that they have made.
Thirteen years into government and 90 days before a general election, can the Prime Minister tell us what first attracted him to changing the voting system?
No one on the Opposition Benches seems to understand that the politics of the last year has changed for ever the way the public view the House of Commons and our parliamentary institutions or that the status quo cannot last and has to be changed. If the Conservatives want to defend the hereditary principle in the House of Lords, if they want to postpone reform of the House of Lords for more than 10 years and if they want to refuse the people a referendum on the alternative vote, they are making a mistake about what the British people are thinking. My message today is to the British people: we are prepared to change our constitution—and to change it for the better. We are for the alternative vote; the Opposition are for the hereditary vote.
It is back to the bunker time with that line. I do not know whether the Prime Minister pulled the secretary out of the chair before he typed that one, but it was a lot of old rubbish. The Prime Minister talks about the hereditary principle, but there is only one leader in this House who inherited his title. What a lot of rubbish! [Interruption.] It is good of the Chancellor to have a laugh.
The reason why the Prime Minister is in favour of the alternative vote is that it is election time. This is the man who ducked the leadership election and bottled the general election, and now he is trying to fiddle with the electoral system. He must think that the whole country is stupid. Have another go! Why are you doing it?
This is the man who, at Christmas, promised us a policy-a-day blitz to show us the substance of the Conservative party if it were in government. We have had confusion over the married couples allowance, we have had chaos over public spending, we have had exaggerations about crime, and we have had the Conservatives retreating on the hereditary principle and now supporting it for the House of Lords. This is a Conservative party that is in a complete muddle and has no manifesto. The Conservatives do not have the substance to be able to govern the country. They are a shambles.
Why do we not go over some of the history? The last Liberal leader who got suckered into this was, of course, Paddy Ashdown. He wrote this in his diary about Tony Blair:
“Time after time after time, he’d say ‘Yeah Paddy, I agree, but I can’t get it past Gordon.’”
He went on to say:
“Gordon was the “primary block.”
Does not real improvement mean cutting the size of the House of Commons, cutting Ministers’ pay, and complete transparency on expenses, but is not the one thing that we should not change the ability, at a general election in Britain, to get rid of a tired, incompetent, useless and divided Government?
There would be no change under the Conservatives—no change at all. The right hon. Gentleman is supporting the hereditary principle in the House of Lords. He is supporting the—[Interruption.]
Order. I apologise for interrupting the Prime Minister, but we must have some quiet. I want to hear the answer, and I hope that others want to hear the answer as well.
The right hon. Gentleman’s answer is about no change. It is the politics of no change at all. He supports the hereditary principle in the House of Lords. He supports no reform of the House of Lords for a decade. He supports no referendum to allow the electorate to have a chance. This is a party that has fundamentally not changed at all. The Conservatives are the same as they always were. We will vote for the alternative vote; they are still voting for the hereditary vote.
In the context of the Prime Minister’s response to the parliamentary institution, is he aware that tomorrow Sir Thomas Legg will publish his full review of MPs’ allowances? Building on the creation of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority and the Kelly recommendations—all of them the initiatives of the Prime Minister—can we put the sad and sorry saga of MPs’ expenses behind us, and rebuild this institution called the House of Commons?
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We must reform the system of expenses, and we must follow through with the Kelly and, now, the Kennedy reforms under IPSA. But I have to tell the House that we must do more than that. If I have a message for the whole country it is that it is not enough simply to change the expenses system; we must change the way in which we govern ourselves in this House of Commons and in the House of Lords.
I come back to the essential questions. If the Conservatives are not prepared to face up to major change in the constitution, the public will see that the Conservative party has not changed one bit.
I have to report to the House that defence spending was rising every year during that period. It was rising in real terms, and no one has doubted that every aspect of Iraq and Afghanistan was funded. I repeat that it was the Conservative party that went into the last election wanting to cut defence expenditure.
I am sure that Members throughout the House will applaud the care and support given by the Royal British Legion to those who are serving and have served in our armed forces. The Royal British Legion is asking Members of Parliament and those wishing to be elected to the House to do our bit and keep the faith with our brave heroes. May I invite my right hon. Friend to sign the Royal British Legion pledge in support of our armed forces family?
I would be delighted to, and the Defence Secretary has already done so. I pay tribute to the outstanding work of the Royal British Legion and welcome its continued support to our armed forces and veterans. The Government support our service personnel and their families, and our services Command Paper was an attempt to show how we do so right across the services. The Green Paper published today by the Secretary of State for Defence reiterates our commitment to doing this.
I am sure I should call an emergency Cabinet meeting to look into the situation involving the No. 41 bus. I shall look into what the hon. Gentleman has said, and write to him.
Does the Prime Minister agree that anyone who wishes to be taken seriously on defence has got to be prepared to commit, unequivocally and without reservations, to the aircraft carriers? Does he also agree that there is a party difference here, in that the aircraft carriers and the Royal Navy are safe with Labour, but they would be sunk with the Conservatives?
There is no stronger defender of the case for the aircraft carriers than the Member for the constituency in which some of them are to be built. We are committed to the aircraft carriers. The future policy of the Navy is being organised around them, and I hope all parties will support the aircraft carriers.
What I regret most is the Conservatives’ failure to support us as we were trying to take this country through recession with more apprenticeships, more people going to university and college, and every school leaver guaranteed the chance of a job or training. All these things were resisted by the Conservative party.
Does my right hon. Friend agree that investing in apprenticeships is an important way of investing in recovery? Does he therefore share my despair at the action of Tory South Ribble borough council in abandoning its apprenticeships scheme, and will he urge it to reconsider that and thereby show for once that the Tories are interested in young people and their futures?
It is difficult to know what the Tory party policy is on anything at the moment, and such is the lack of clarity that certainly for 2010 I could not guarantee that any apprenticeships that my hon. Friend wishes to support would be supported by the Tory party. We have trebled the number of apprenticeships; there are 250,000 of them now. We want to give every young person the chance to get an apprenticeship, if they have the qualifications to do so. Throughout the recession, we have been trying to maintain apprenticeships so that young people have the qualifications for the jobs of the future. There is only one party opposing that and opposing the expenditure on education, training and employment, and that is the Conservative party.
The figures show that defence expenditure was rising every year in real terms, and that they were the biggest rises for 20 years. The figures also show that every single urgent operational requirement that the Ministry of Defence asked of us for Iraq and Afghanistan has been met. I am afraid it is the Opposition who are having difficulty with figures at the moment.
My right hon. Friend has come under severe attack for not cutting the deficit fast enough or hard enough, but those who made those calls in this House seem to agree with him now. Does he think that that is what is meant by the statement that it is “a year for change” on the airbrushed Conservative poster?
It is a year for the Conservatives changing their mind every week about every single policy that they put forward. Two weeks ago, the Leader of the Opposition said that it would be “moral cowardice” not to tear up the Budget for 2010. The shadow Business Secretary then said that there would be “calamitous consequences” if that were to happen. Now the shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury is boasting that he does
“not have a detailed plan”.
In other words, not only do the people not know where the Conservative party stands, but the Conservative party does not know where it stands.
I understand the concern when any jobs are lost; it is a personal tragedy for those people who have, in many cases, given their lives to one company, which is unable to continue to employ them. I shall arrange for these meetings that the hon. Gentleman asks for to take place. I can assure him that every teenager who has been unemployed for six months now has the guarantee that they will get work or training, and that the services available to those who are unemployed are better than they have ever been. The result of that is that 300,000 people are leaving the unemployment register every month, and that employment is at a higher level and unemployment a lower level than people expected months ago.
Even though the claimant count is 48 per cent. down in my constituency, it is nevertheless a great disappointment to hear of Bowater going into administration. Will my right hon. Friend do what he can to ensure that the parent company’s actions are investigated—it seems to be playing fast and loose with the British work force—and that the work force affected and the supply chain are given every possible support?
I know that the regional development agency stands ready to help my hon. Friend’s constituents and the company that is in difficulty. This is clearly a difficult time for the work force. The administrators have said that in this case they will keep the business trading while they explore all options, which include looking for a buyer for the business. I can assure him that all the local agencies, including the rapid response teams at the jobcentre, will be available to help those workers in his constituency who are affected.
The hon. Gentleman raises a very serious matter in great detail. That recommendation is obviously very important for the future of the blood transfusion service. I shall look at it very carefully and get back to him.
The one thing that the Conservatives have stuck to through this month of muddle and division is their policy on inheritance tax. Like their policy on hereditary peers, it will give the richest people in our society the greatest amount of additional wealth. That could be at the expense of schools, it could be at the expense of the health service and it could also be at the expense of defence. I think people should know that the Conservative party’s first priority, above all others, is to reduce inheritance tax for those who are perfectly able to take care of themselves. We are for the many, they are for the few.
I have to say to the hon. Gentleman that the evidence is that in his region there are 12 new hospitals and 37,000 more NHS staff. We have doubled expenditure on the national health service so that everyone in our country will benefit and we are giving personal guarantees to every citizen of this country that they will receive cancer treatment within two weeks, that they will be in a position to get an operation within 18 weeks, that they will get regular check-ups and, at the same time, that they will be able to see a doctor at weekends or in the evening. The party that has resisted giving rights to every citizen is the Conservative party.
There should be no discrimination against widows and no discrimination against those who have been abandoned by their partners. That is why we have a system of individual taxation and special allowances for widows. I would hesitate to say that the proposal for a married couple’s or married man’s allowance would be fair to widows or to people who had been abandoned by their partners.
The purpose of all our measures in the recession is to help industry and business out of recession. Some 300,000 businesses have been helped in all constituencies across the country. The difference between us is that the Conservatives opposed all our measures and we took the action to get us out of recession. We are taking action to keep us out of recession, while the Conservatives do not have a clue what they would do in 2010.
Does the Prime Minister welcome the proposals announced last week for licensing and planning concerning houses in multiple occupation? Will he urge local authorities with a high concentration of HMOs, such as Southampton, to make early use of the powers that they will gain?
I know my hon. Friend has taken this issue up on many occasions and that it is an important issue when dealing with cities such as Southampton, where there are houses in multiple occupation. I can assure him that we will be urging councils such as those in his area to take up these proposals with speed.