Baroness Hazarika (Lab)

My Lords, one thing that I felt incredibly encouraged by with our new Prime Minister was the fact that he seemed to come here with an outside lens, because he has been away from Westminster for 10 years. When he came into Westminster, he was able to voice a lot of the frustrations that we all share in our lives. We all hear it from our friends and our neighbours. I, as a radio presenter, hear it a lot from my listeners. Lots of people outside just cannot get their head around why we here in Westminster continually, decade after decade, fail to get things done for this country. I think tribalism is holding back much of the success of this country. I really like one of the things that the Prime Minister said, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, alluded, about problem-solving over point-scoring. I am very proud to be associated with these Benches, but I try to look at things with fairness and not be tribal. In that spirit, I begin by saying that I profoundly disagree with people on my own side who dismiss the Russian threat as being nothing but NATO fiction. That is absolutely not the case. These threats are real and they are here. Look at Leipzig Airport just in the last few days. I really hope that we can work across politics to build a national conversation about the threats and about the psychology we might need to face if things escalate, and resilience. We need to think about bringing back the War Book to make sure local authorities are properly prepared. Defence has got to be a priority. Of course, growth must be a priority as well. We can get captured in these torturous, polarised discussions around the economy, where the right say, “Just cut welfare”, and the left say, “Just raise taxes”. We all know that just doing both of those things is not going to give us the result we want. We have to have a more intelligent conversation. We need growth and to help small and medium-sized businesses. I really hope that this new Chancellor in particular will seek to make life a bit better. We have heard this phrase “breathing space”; let us give a bit of breathing space to some of our small businesses around the country. Another reason why I think people feel dismayed with the country right now is that they look around and feel that the social contract is broken, because of what is happening in their communities. There is a lot of anti-social behaviour. It is called low-level crime, but it is not low-level because of the blight that it causes to the lives of so many people. Just look at what has been happening in Middlesbrough; that story is replicated all around the country. Shops have become a war zone for people: I am sure we will be hearing from the noble Lord, Lord Walker, about the excellent work that he does with Iceland; and the noble Lord, Lord Barber, has talked very eloquently about the pressures that shop workers face. A lot of people feel that the country does not work for them because they see it in their high streets and in their everyday world. I want to end on this kind of tonal note. I think we all have a responsibility to try to fix this country. I could be very tribal, and we could all point-score and slag each other off, but we are not going to succeed until we find some common ground. We on the left often get accused of virtue signalling—sometimes that does have some merit and sometimes we do go over the top—but some on the other side can be accused of vice signalling. Be honest: making disabled people poorer is not going to make us a richer, happier society, but we have to get more people who can work into work, as well. This is a very timely debate. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and I look forward to the rest of the contributions.