I do not know whether I am alone in this, but I am hearing the shadow Secretary of State glibly throw away 80 years of legislation on human rights—human rights that were forged in the aftermath of the Holocaust, of concentration camps, of the horrors of fascism. He stands there and talks glibly abou…
(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment if she will make a statement on the performance of the water sector.
I thank the Minister both for her response and for putting up with me—I am a bit of a broken record on this issue. We are all well aware that water is essential to life itself—to food, industry, nature, housing, energy, and now even the data centres powering the supposed AI revolution—and yet we hav…
I have listened to the Minister, and some of his points were relevant, but this is not just about technicalities and lapses of judgment. This is about a wider, rotten political culture: a 30-year project where proximity to wealth and power is not a means to an end but the end goal. That is what Pete…
This deal with Palantir stinks. It stank before Peter Mandelson was involved, and it stank when those now on the Opposition Benches initiated the NHS and defence contracts. Peter Thiel is an oligarch who despises democracy, and the company has had widespread allegations of human rights abuses made a…
Obviously, people here want to get to the bottom of this, in terms of the accountability of the Prime Minister and other elements in No. 10, and of course they want to get to the bottom of what Peter Mandelson has done. However, the public understand that this is not just about a number of rotten ap…
We on the Labour Benches at least understand the historical consistency:186 years ago the Tories made economic arguments against stopping children being sent up chimneys, and 186 years later they are making the same arguments, about stopping children being put into poverty. Same old Tories, nearly 2…
I am listening to the hon. Gentleman. Conservative Members always seem to portray this as an individual moral failing. That is how they see welfare, when actually it is about a collective insurance against economic risk. That is how we see it. You see it as a moral issue; we see it as an economic on…
After 18 months and an independent inquiry, the Government’s answer is more regulation, not enforcing the law as it is. Not one water company has lost its licence, yet we think that more bureaucracy and more regulation will make a difference. More bureaucracy will not fix our water. I am afraid the …
In Norwich there is a saying: there is a church for every Sunday and a pub for every day of the week. After 14 years of austerity, the numbers are a lot lower. After this Budget, many pub landlords—small and medium-sized businesses—tell me that we are not going far enough, and that many of them will…
The right hon. Member asked who will pay for the national living wage increase in the adult social care sector, but something he omitted—and it is quite telling—is the number of private equity companies that are extracting vast profit from adult social care. He did not mention them. He did not menti…
I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which includes the donations for my work on public ownership of water, crowdfunders and my articles covering some of the topics I will mention today in Byline Times , The Guardian and the New Statesman , which are available…
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I would like to apologise to the House for failing to declare an interest when making spoken contributions on 8 March 2023, 14 November 2023 and 16 June 2025. When I made these contributions, I inadvertently failed to declare an interest: I am the chair of …
CommonsWestminster Hall3 September 20255 contributions
I beg to move,
That this House has considered living standards in the East of England.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse. As I will be discussing nature, water and the far right, I would like to declare interests that meet the relevant test. The first is my role as vi…
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention and for all his work in this area. Council homes are overwhelmingly the solution to this country’s housing problems. There is always space for private housing, for affordable housing and for housing associations, but it is council housing, built in a susta…
I am afraid that the report feels like a missed opportunity for the Government to show the public whose side they are on. It entrenches a privatised model that has already failed economically, environmentally and democratically. With 20% to 50% of bills going on servicing debt, why is public ownersh…
I just want to confirm that my name is Clive, not Cassandra, Lewis—and yet, I feel like the Trojan princess, forever warning of things that will go wrong but being ignored. Will the Minister provide reassurance, given that the Bank of England has repeatedly warned that loosening mortgage lending sta…
I thank the Minister for giving way, and for some of the things that he has said. Everything he has spoken about could be dealt with under criminal law. My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West (Dame Chi Onwurah) mentioned the suffragettes. I think we need to give the conte…
Let me first associate myself with the very good comments of the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Lisa Smart).
I agree with the proscription of the two far-right fascist organisations—I think they should be proscribed—but can we as a House accept that there are those …
When coming to a crunchy question or problem, I always think it is wise to take a step or two back and try to unpick some of the assumptions that underpin the issue—to see the bigger picture, if you like. Not everyone will agree with some of the conclusions that I come to, and that is fine—this is a…
May I associate myself with the comments made across the House about the dire and despicable nature of the Iranian regime? That said, last week the Foreign Secretary told the House that attacks on Iran were not in our national interest. So does he believe that the strikes led by Trump and Netanyahu—…
I thank my hon. Friend for making a fantastic speech, and for securing this debate. It does seem sometimes quite unfashionable in this day and age to look at the discrimination that that community has endured for so many decades, and not to see it as structural racism. In other words, there is a thr…
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) for opening this timely debate—she made a fantastic speech—and hon. Friends for their contributions.
I want to touch on the story that Windrush tells of this country. Stories are important; the stories we tell ourselves de…
Does the hon. Member agree that the problem with the Bill is misdiagnosis? The problem is not nature holding up house building, or local authorities—which have been starved of cash for the last 15 years— holding up housing, but developers that are sitting on 1.4 million homes with planning permissio…
Let me begin by drawing Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
Let us be clear that the collapse of KKR’s rescue deal is not a blip; it is a reckoning—a moment that exposes the complete bankruptcy of the privatised water model. This morning’s interim Cunliff…