Member

What I bring back to the House after 10 years away is a clear diagnosis of what has gone wrong. Let me lay it out clearly. From the 1980s, this country took a series of wrong turns. Political power was centralised, economic power privatised and the country deindustrialised. Austerity followed, hollowing out councils and depriving them of the agency to act to reverse any of it, and then Brexit compounded the damage, ushering in a decade of low growth and stalled regeneration. Change begins with honesty, and I am not hearing much of it this afternoon. Unless we are blunt about what went wrong, we will not turn things around. Far from ‘taking back control’, the combination of those policies took control out of the hands of communities up and down Britain.