Contribution
I am not going to let this moment pass—I am sure no colleague would wish me to—without again reminding everyone present that this week marks the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 bombings. On 7 July 2005, 52 people were killed in four separate attacks and 700 more were injured, many of them grievously. I know that the whole House will want to join me in mourning the victims of these dreadful crimes and in sending all our best wishes to their families and loved ones.
While we are on the subject of anniversaries, the House will need no reminding that 2025 is 760 years since Simon de Montfort convened the first representative Parliament. Perhaps even more significantly, this year marks 800 years since the year 1225, when the charter we now know as Magna Carta was agreed as a statute and, indeed, became the first of all our statutes. To that extent, it is 1225 and not 1215 that should be recognised as the birth date of Magna Carta. [Interruption.] I am pleased to hear that wide array of support from the House—thank you. I thought it was an important point to put on the record.
For the Government, of course, the past week marks an anniversary of a somewhat less glorious and happy kind: their first full year in office. As a House, it falls to us to ask how the Government have done. It would be right to focus in the first place on their shockingly negligent and abusive treatment of our Northern Ireland veterans, but that is the topic of a Westminster Hall debate next Monday, so let us focus on wider issues.
Labour pledged to deliver the highest economic growth in the G7. In reality, UK growth has failed even to beat the G7 average. Labour promised to meet NHS waiting list targets for 92% of patients, but the current figure stands at 59.8%—just one percentage point better than a year ago. Labour vowed to smash the boats and the boat gangs, yet small boat migrant numbers are up by almost 50% compared with this time last year. Perhaps we can forget the pledges.
How, then, is the UK economy actually doing? Well, we know that the Office for Budget Responsibility has cut its growth forecast to just 1%, inflation is higher than a year ago and unemployment stands at its highest for four years. So diminished is the Government’s standing in international markets that the Institute for Fiscal Studies recently pointed out that the UK now faces higher borrowing costs than almost all comparable countries. It is two full percentage points higher than Germany and higher even than Greece and Italy.
I am afraid to say that the Government have stored up more pain to come. The junior doctors have now voted in favour of further strikes through the autumn and into the new year. They had a 22% increase last year, the House will recall, and they are now looking to their Labour brothers and sisters for a scarcely believable further 29%. That is before we include their pensions. The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has, as the wildly overrated Aneurin Bevan said in 1948, “stuffed their mouths with gold”, and they are already coming back for more.
What has the media reaction been to all this? Internationally, The Economist described the Prime Minister’s first year as “wasted”. Time called it “a catalogue of errors”. The normally sympathetic New York Times commented that Britain’s Prime Minister is
“fading away before our eyes”.
Even supportive British newspapers have not been able to disguise their dismay. The Financial Times has bewailed Labour’s “drift”, and The Guardian its “lack of vision”—not my words, but those of some of the most respected newspapers in the world.
Finally, what do the poor, suffering public make of all this? We know what a laser focus those in 10 Downing Street keep on the polls, and it will not have escaped their notice that the Prime Minister’s approval rating is now at -35. No Government in recent times have ever lost public support after an election faster than this one. How mortified the Prime Minister must be to be wrenched back almost weekly from the perfumed chanceries of Europe to the grimmer realities of domestic politics.
We need not dwell on the pieties and pomposities of Labour’s pronouncements about stability and trust before the July 2024 election. These are the facts, they speak for themselves, and they say only this: must do better—a lot better.