Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)

I remain happy to have followed the noble Baroness, Lady Nargund, who reminded us of the blight in our country: the extreme levels of difference in social deprivation from postcode to postcode. This is also an urban-rural issue. If the Prime Minister is to be successful, it will be about not just growth in every postcode but reducing the blight of inequality of opportunity that so many of our communities face. I am glad that the noble Baroness raised that in the debate. I am also glad that the Labour Whips responded positively to a suggestion from these Benches that, when we came back after the Summer Recess, it would be an appropriate time to consider the statements by the new Prime Minister and some of the priorities that he has outlined. We congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, on opening this debate and giving a very good fist to the arguments of the new ministerial team. He is to be commended on doing that so clearly. I reflected yesterday in the Chamber, when we were asking questions to the Leader of the House on the Prime Minister’s Statement, that in the 13 years I have been in this House, there have been seven Prime Ministers with an average tenure of just 21 months. This is an underlying symptom of some of the challenges we have in our political system, which I will refer to in a moment. I join the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, in thanking Sir Keir Starmer for his service. It is a curious aspect of our system in politics in Britain that someone is a terrible politician and a disaster shortly before they resign, then after that they are a great public servant with a very proud record of service. Nevertheless, we thank Keir Starmer for his work, and we wish him well with whatever new role he carries out. Yesterday, I went through the areas in which the first speech of the new Prime Minister was essentially the same as the first speech by Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, but with a little more emotion and heart. I do not disregard emotion and heart in our politics; they are important parts of our government. But both Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham said in their first speeches that “words are not actions”. As my noble friend Lord Storey said, the tests are ahead for this new ministerial team, and we will all judge actions. In many of those areas, we are willing to work with the Government and the new ministerial team, and we are eager to see some actions. One of the early things that the new Prime Minister could do is to respond positively to the very clear appeal by my noble friend Lady Benjamin to finally restore justice to the community of victims whom I had the privilege of meeting with her. It is a scar on our country that the new Prime Minister can erase. We have now had an opportunity to look at the first areas on which Mr Burnham said he wants to be judged: political reform and economic growth, with fewer costs in doing business. We share those priorities. These Benches are hungry for considerable political and constitutional reform—not for its own sake, but because, as I said, our system is failing. I suggest the great dividing lines in politics of our age, and the future, are less the rather sterile one of whether the economic policies of the 1970s were better or worse than 40 years later, as the Prime Minister has said. Instead, they are about tolerance and social cohesion, defence of institutions and the rule of law, protecting diversity and gender equality, and about those other forces, which are incredibly well funded and well organised, which are seeking to restrict, separate and blame communities for failings. These Benches and our Liberal International sister parties know that this division is global, not just here at home in the UK. It is why we work so closely with our sister parties, who are the Governments of Canada, Ukraine and Taiwan and are in the front line of these dividing lines in politics. Our system of politics in this country is simply not resilient enough. Reform UK, for example, believes it is appropriate for a political system to receive influxes of untraceable crypto money but not appropriate for leaders of parties to be accountable for donations they receive. This is cancerous in our system. Elon Musk supporting Restore and the dark area of social media in which it is all too easy for foreign interference to corrupt our system need to be closed down. We will work with the Government to ensure that reforms to strengthen our system are in place. But, as my noble friend Lord Pack said yesterday and today, we have not yet seen that the Government want to go far enough and we look forward to the legislative proposals. We want to work constructively to ensure that all those loopholes are closed. Another area in which, regrettably, there seems to be a dividing line is on the climate crisis. There should be no dividing line on this because, as my noble friend Lord Russell so soberingly outlined, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, indicated so eloquently, there needs to be consensus that this is a crisis of our age that needs to be tackled. We have a mainstream political party that seems to prevent anyone standing for it who believes that net zero needs to be tackled. These are statutory targets. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, spoke eloquently on climate; we share his views. But one element that was disappointing in the first announcement by the new Prime Minister was that the cap on bus fares—unquestionably popular and, indeed, needed—was paid for by a cut in international climate finance. We therefore have a situation in which the first decision by the new Prime Minister was to cap bus fares in Britain and cut support for the poorest countries to replace filthy, polluting diesel buses in their cities. We will not be a trusted global partner if we make decisions such as this. Yesterday, I asked the Leader what the new Prime Minister’s proposals were for electoral reform, and she responded that there was no mandate for that. There was very clearly not a mandate for the Labour Government cutting official development assistance to the lowest ever levels. That, I hope, can be restored by the new Prime Minister. I also make an appeal that on the international stage, where we are of course supporting Ukraine and are a trusted partner around the world, the new Prime Minister will be a leader on the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet, for which the UK is the United Nations penholder: Sudan. The second area the Prime Minister said in his recent Financial Times interview he wanted was growth, and we support that. He said he wanted percentage points growth. The latest OECD growth forecast puts the UK equal third in the G7, at 0.9%. That is not a sufficient sustainable level of growth to balance our spending and debt pressures, which we have heard about in the debate. The noble Lord, Lord Pitt-Watson, referred on Tuesday to trade deals being part of the Government’s growth strategy, but post-Brexit trade deals barely reach more than a third of 1% growth after 15 years, and the Government’s recent reset approach on SPS and other areas, welcome though it is, also represents, on the Government’s own estimate, a third of 1%. My noble friend Lord Newby appealed to the Government to think more ambitiously about our relationship with Europe. It is very disappointing that the new Prime Minister did not take that opportunity to ditch the red lines, which are a straitjacket on our growth with our European partners. Finally, we will work with the Government on other areas. We have already seen, as my noble friend Lady Sheehan said, some welcome moves on tackling the blight of waste and on supporting the hospitality sector. We will want to see the Government working on water industry accountability but we need clarity on what their intentions are for Thames Water. I hope that the Minister will be able to just circumvent all this and say that he will support my noble friend Lady Sheehan’s Private Member’s Bill, which will go a long way towards that—and, while we are at it, he can support my noble friend Lord Oates’s Private Member’s Bill on youth justice too. That would be a very good signal of the new Government’s intent. Over the summer we welcomed very much the Prime Minister reaching out to Ed Davey on care—that was mentioned yesterday. If there are signs that there is a new type of politics for the remainder of this Parliament, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, indicated, working on a cross-party basis to move towards some degree of consensus on social care is necessary. We know that decisions which may be difficult will have to be made, and they will be sustainable only if they are built on consensus. Ed Davey and these Benches want to play our part. We welcome the approach of the new Prime Minister in these areas. We will be pushing for further, faster reforms to our political system and our European relationship for growth. We want to improve lives and make the reforms sustainable—and we hope that the Prime Minister will last longer than the average tenure of 21 months to deliver that.