Posts
It is great to follow so many passionate and powerful speeches from my own side of the House in this debate. I am perplexed at the situation Ministers have got themselves into, seemingly exposed by the US President on their real agenda on taxation. In the last year, the pandemic has not just shone a light on the deep inequalities in our society; it has driven and deepened those inequalities like never before. Millions of people have been plunged into insecurity while a small number of the very richest have seen their fortunes surge, with 24 new billionaires in the last year, despite everything else that has been going on. Key workers have put their health and lives on the line for the benefit of others to ensure that their neighbours were fed, people were treated when they were sick and society kept moving, while some bosses at companies such as British Gas and British Airways used the pandemic cynically to drive down pay and terms and conditions through shameful fire and rehire tactics, and all the while the Government have stood by and done nothing. While millions were excluded from Government support and then ignored, if you knew Ministers or had donated to the Tory party, there were billions of pounds of public money in lucrative contracts, handed out without competition or transparency.
So if the Finance Bill was an opportunity to fix a rigged system that was failing communities up and down the country, the track record of this Government tells you that they are incapable of taking that opportunity. The decades-long race to the bottom on corporation tax may finally be coming to an end with the proposal to raise the headline rate in 2023, but alongside it measures in this Bill will do more harm than good when it comes to fair taxation and plugging the hole in the nation’s finances. As we have heard, the super deduction is a £25 billion giveaway to big business. TaxWatch calls it “The Amazon Tax-Cut” because it could entirely wipe out the UK corporate tax bill of Amazon UK Services Ltd. The Times reports that it will allow companies to write off investments in swimming pools, interior decoration and Jacuzzis against their tax bills.
Ministers just are not serious about making tech giants pay their fair share of tax. In fact, Ministers are now rowing back on key commitments they made to tax transparency. Since 2016, the UK has had the power to lift the lid on multinational company accounts through country-by-country reporting, but it is clear that the Government have reversed their original commitment to do so. Instead Ministers are now actively blocking the OECD from publishing the data at an international level, signalling what the Tax Justice Network called a dangerous “regression into tax havenry”.
The UK has been moving in the wrong direction, backing secrecy over transparency, tax havens over progressive taxation and multinational corporations over small and medium-sized UK businesses. That is an agenda that no doubt delighted President Trump, but the election of President Biden now means that the US has done an about turn, and it is time Ministers caught up.
The US is now leading on international tax reforms that the UK has been sabotaging for years – tax reforms that would stop multinationals hiding profits overseas and establish a global minimum tax rate of up to 21%. These are reforms that would raise billions from tech giants and stop Amazon, Apple, Google, Alphabet and Facebook from shifting their profits from the country they were made in to tax havens. While every other G7 country has responded positively to President Biden’s plan, the UK Government continue to block the best opportunity in a generation to curb corporate tax abuse.
The Government, no doubt emboldened by the Trump regime, have been on the wrong side of tax transparency and tax reform for a number of years, but the pandemic has exposed the grave cost of an economic system that prioritises the interests of corporate giants over people and local communities, because wealth does not trickle down – it never has. Rather, it is sucked up, away from those who do the work and who contribute to society, and towards those who set the rules, reap the rewards and, all too often, avoid paying their fair share. That should change now.
I am grateful to Mr Speaker for allowing me this Adjournment debate, and I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and to the Minister, whose reply I look forward to. Earlier this month, the details of the upcoming Government consultation on alcohol labelling—part of the obesity strategy—were leaked to the press. It is a long-overdue consultation and a welcome positive step that should lead to consumers being able to make more informed choices about their own health and wellbeing, but thanks to yet another hostile Government leak, the consultation was roundly attacked and misrepresented by tabloids and industry representatives. It sparked the usual outraged backlash against the nannying state and red tape, when that is simply not the case. I thought I would attempt to put the record straight.
To avoid confusion or misrepresentation, I whole-heartedly support our hospitality industry, and I understand the uphill battle it faces and the devastation that lockdowns and restrictions have caused. There is excitement and anticipation across the country about getting out, socialising, having a drink, seeing live music and enjoying life. We have all missed spending time with family and friends, whether that is relaxing and unwinding or going out and partying.
When we consider the role of alcohol in our society, we see that there is a balance to be struck. As with many things in life, there is the good and there is the bad, because we cannot escape the very real harm alcohol inflicts. The evidence, which I will come to, speaks for itself. Tackling alcohol harm is not about punishing drinkers or landlords, or taking the fun out of socialising. However, we have a responsibility—the Government have a responsibility—to hold the alcohol industry to account, and to ensure its fair and proper regulation.
Alcohol harm is rising, and it has been for many years, however we want to count it. Alcohol is now linked to 80 deaths a day in the UK, many of them of the young, while alcohol-specific deaths are at their highest rates since records began, and the treatment and funding for alcohol addiction are in absolute crisis, yet there appears to be no sense of urgency from Government. Alcohol is responsible for more years of working life lost than the 10 most frequent cancers combined. Before covid, alcohol took up 37% of ambulance time and a quarter of A&E time. For the police, it is even higher, with more than half of police time spent on alcohol-related incidents. All of this comes at a high financial cost, too. Alcohol harm is estimated to cost the UK taxpayer upwards of £27 billion each year.
We know that those in the most deprived communities are disproportionately affected. Despite drinking less on average, they are up to 60% more likely to die from alcohol than more affluent groups. In Liverpool—just one city—there are more than 14,000 alcohol-related hospital admissions every year, and 535 new cases of alcohol-related cancer as well. Alcohol harm and addiction are destroying lives, livelihoods, communities and families.
To return to the matter of today’s debate—alcohol labelling—I would like to ask those listening to remember the last time they looked at a bottle of orange juice. They may remember a number in red detailing the sugar content, a number for how many calories are in the drink, and a whole table with further information on nutritional content. Now picture a bottle of alcohol—wine perhaps. Do they remember seeing any such information about the ingredients, calories or nutritional values? Was there any information about the impact of alcohol on health, or any guidelines for consumption? If I can make a guess, the answer is most likely to be no, or maybe “on some bottles”. That is because none of this information is legally required on alcohol labels. Alcohol products are a conspicuous outlier among consumables. They are exempt from other food and drink labelling requirements, and the only information that is legally required is the volume of the liquid, its strength in ABV—alcohol by volume—and whether any of the 14 most common allergens are present.
In July 2020, the Government unveiled the new obesity strategy. On the subject of labelling, the Health Secretary said:
“it’s only fair that you are given the right information about the food you’re eating to help people to make good decisions.”
He is absolutely right, and what he says is as true for alcoholic drinks as it is for anything else. It is surely bizarre that if we buy a bottle of juice, we get a range of calorie, ingredient and nutritional information, yet if we buy a juice and vodka ready-to-drink product, we will usually not get any of the same information. Similarly, alcohol-free beer and wine must display calorie and nutritional information, yet alcoholic beer and wine does not have to.
Covid-19 has reminded us all of the need to take seriously the impact of diet and lifestyle on our physical and mental health. As we know that alcohol damages health and causes harm, it is inexplicable that alcohol products face less regulation than fruit juices and fizzy drinks, so the Government’s consultation is timely and important.
I want to press the Minister to go further with the consultation than calories, nutritional information and ingredients; it must consider health information as well. The majority of the public agree and want to know what is in their drinks. Opinion polling conducted for the Alcohol Health Alliance shows that 74% of people Toggle showing location ofColumn 334want ingredients on alcohol labels, 62% want nutritional information, including calorie content, and 70% want health warnings.
There is a strong case for displaying calorie information on alcohol labels. For those who drink, alcohol accounts for nearly 10% of their daily calorie intake. Around 3.4 million adults consume an additional day’s worth of calories each week, yet 80% of the public are unaware of the calorie content of the most common alcoholic drinks.
Alcohol harm is also poorly understood by drinkers. Only one in five people know the drinking guidelines, and only one in 10 can identify cancer as a health consequence of alcohol. We have warnings on cigarettes that tobacco can cause cancer, so why is similar information missing from alcohol?
I would like to quote one person with lived experience, who described the lack of health information to me like this:
“I knew little of how many recommended units per week, I knew nothing about the nutritional value, I could tell you how many calories were in a Mars Bar but not the glass of Merlot I was drinking. I knew nothing about the long-term health implications. If I buy a pack of cigarettes I am told they are highly addictive and I am told with every pack what health implication there could be. They are now behind a shutter in the shop – but alcohol? Nothing. I near lost my life to alcohol and the lack of information and regulation makes no sense to me”.
Alcohol labels are an effective tool to change that situation. A study in Canada showed that consumers exposed to health warnings on labels were three times more likely to be aware of the drinking guidelines and were also more likely to know about the link between alcohol and cancer.
A number of alcohol products voluntarily incorporate unit alcohol content per container, a pregnancy logo or message and active signposting to drinkaware.co.uk. I am grateful to the producers who contacted me ahead of this debate to share updated labels that now include calorie and nutritional information. One of the UK’s biggest pub chains has already taken that step and is providing calorie labelling for all alcoholic drinks on their menus. I am grateful to the Minister for confirming, in answer to my written question, that alcohol sold in licensed venues will also be part of the consultation.
If someone pops into their local supermarket and takes a wander round the booze aisle, it is abundantly clear that there are huge inconsistencies in alcohol packaging. That hit-and-miss approach is just not good enough. It is time to put it right and standardise the approach, as we have done with food labelling. Even on the products that did carry chief medical officer guidelines and nutritional information, there are varying degrees of clarity and visibility.
In their report “Drinking in the dark: How alcohol labelling fails consumers”, Alcohol Change UK and the Alcohol Health Alliance recommend that:
“The UK Government and devolved administrations must give a new or existing independent agency appropriate powers to…enforce what appears on alcohol labels, working in the interests of public health and consumer rights and free from influence and interference from corporate interests.”
I support that recommendation and hope that the Minister will consider it in the consultation, when it gets under way.
Sir Ian Gilmore, a leading figure in Liverpool’s fight against alcohol harm and chair of the Alcohol Health Alliance, said:
“Alcohol labelling in this country is…not fit for purpose if we wish to build a healthier society. The public must be granted the power to make informed decisions about their health by having access to prominent health warnings and information on ingredients, nutrition and alcohol content at the point of purchase. The industry’s reluctance to include this information on their products suggests profits are being put ahead of people’s health.”
Ahead of this debate, I received a letter and information from the Portman Group, the alcohol industry-funded social responsibility body and regulator for alcohol labelling, packaging and promotion in the UK, and I am grateful for that. The Portman Group supports the consultation and its intention to provide consumers with more information on calories, the chief medical officer’s lower-risk guidance and drink-driving. It said that: “we believe this can be done most effectively on a voluntary basis”.
It is encouraging to hear some industry support for the consultation and I look forward to further discussions with it, but with alcohol-specific deaths at their highest on record, it is surely time for a proper review of how the industry is regulated and held to account.
The regulation of alcohol marketing in the UK is fragmented and largely self-regulating. Under the current set-up, the Advertising Standards Authority, funded by the advertising industry, Ofcom and the Portman Group, funded by the alcohol industry, all play a role in regulating marketing, from TV advertising to sponsorship deals to packaging. That is surely ripe for review, to consider how a new model and a new alcohol industry regulator could be made more accountable to the public and be fully independent of the alcohol industry.
I hope that the Minister will use her consultation as an opportunity to mandate wider health information on labels, too. This should, as a minimum, include the CMO’s guidelines, pregnancy warnings, drink-drive warnings and cancer warnings, so that we can make informed personal health choices and collectively seek to reduce alcohol harm.
I accept that alcohol labelling is only one small part of seeking to reduce alcohol harm across society. Any progress on improving labelling should be part of a broader strategy: a national, Government alcohol strategy. The last alcohol strategy was formulated in 2012, and, since then, harms have continued to rise. Over the last decade, we have learnt a lot more about the wider health impacts of alcohol, such as the link between alcohol and cancer. The World Health Organisation is clear that policies on the affordability, availability and promotion of alcohol are the most effective—policies that have also proved effective in reducing smoking.
What can really be said of attempts to reduce the increasing and worsening harms caused by alcohol misuse? Why is it that evidence-based research and policies are being ignored in this way? The Government’s addiction strategy is under way—it was promised in 2020, but we are waiting for it—and we also await the second part of the Dame Carol Black review of drugs. These are very welcome, but now is surely the time for a full-scale review of reducing alcohol harm across society. A focused alcohol strategy would allow a much broader and fuller understanding of the extent of alcohol harm and the measures needed to reduce it.
As it stands today, the UK has the highest number of alcohol-specific deaths on record. Drug and alcohol addiction services have been pushed outside the NHS into cash-strapped local authorities, decimated by funding cuts and fragmented. There are fewer addiction psychiatrists in training than ever. Alcohol is now 74% cheaper than it was in 1987, and in England there are over 300,000 children currently living with at least one adult who drinks at a high-risk level.
This current trajectory cannot continue and the urgent need for a national alcohol strategy cannot be overstated. In their approach to obesity, the Government have shown a willingness to take bold action to protect the public’s health. The same boldness is now required to tackle alcohol harm. The consultation on the labelling of alcohol products is the first step towards improving transparency and accountability across the alcohol industry, and ensuring an evidence-based approach to reducing alcohol harms. I implore the Minister to get it under way, and I look forward to her response.
This Bill is about the power of the state, and it is also about the rights of citizens. What we have today is a book of amendments, almost each and every one of which would improve the Bill, but unfortunately, it feels to me like a fait accompli by the Government. I am not surprised that the Government are not listening to civil liberties organisations, but I am pretty surprised that they are not even listening to the Intelligence and Security Committee of this House. The way in which the House is being led down the garden path is something worth speaking up against.
I would not be in this House if it was not for my experiences growing up with a dad involved in an industrial dispute for over two years – the experience of workers taking action and the challenges they faced. That was an unofficial dispute, opposing casualisation and insecurity, and it lasted two years. It is relevant because there is a real worry that these powers could be misused. What matters is what is in the Bill. Of course we all want appropriate powers to deal with criminality and the most serious crimes. However, the scope in the Bill for organising criminal conduct by the state is wide open to abuse, and it comes down to a triple-whammy attack on our civil liberties.
First, the Bill permits secret agents of the state to commit any crime to prevent what they consider to be disorder or harm to the economic wellbeing of the UK. Secondly, it does not include the necessary independent judicial oversight, so the agencies concerned will act alone in that decision making. Finally, the Bill does not limit those crimes at all. We have heard that the Human Rights Act will be applied to this legislation, but the Human Rights Act does not create crimes like other legislation does. Rather, it means that a Government can be found in breach of that Act, so the crimes in this Bill are simply not limited.
What would stop an agency deciding that an unofficial dispute constituted disorder or harm to the economy that it was worth taking action against? The Bill is written so badly and broadly that it is effectively a licence to criminally disrupt working people taking action to support themselves, their co-workers and their families, and we have seen this all too often in the past. The Bill paves the way for gross abuses of state power against citizens.
In Liverpool, we have a healthy suspicion of state power, because we have felt its damaging force too often in the past. We have experienced the 30-year fight of the Hillsborough families and survivors for truth and justice. We have had striking workers targeted by state violence, and trade unionists blacklisted and spied on for representing their members, and we are not alone. Campaigners fighting miscarriages of justice across our country, such as Orgreave, the Shrewsbury 24 and now Grenfell Tower, oppose this dangerous Bill.
I fear that my own party is being taken for a ride by this Government, because I will tell you what happens. You start with the idea that legislating for something that operates in the shadows must be a good thing. You then engage in good faith with a morally bankrupt Government arguing for vital safeguards, and once that Government finish stringing you along, you end up in the perverse situation of condoning laws that ride a coach and horses through our nation’s civil liberties and could even be used against the labour movement itself.
I am sent here by my constituents to stand up for their rights, freedoms and well-being, and that is what forces me to vote against the Bill tonight.
It is very difficult to convey the real strength of feeling across Liverpool at the utter failure of this Government on care homes, PPE, and test and trace. Constituent after constituent has come to my office with heartbreaking stories. One was sent to south Wales on a 70-mile journey, two-and-a-half hours in the car with an autistic child, only to find that the test and trace centre had closed for the day because it had run out of tests. The petrol cost them £40 that they simply did not have.
The anger and frustration are not just at the fact that the response is failing, but that it is failing because the Government refused to enable and invest in local authorities and public health teams, and instead chose to pump billions into scandal-ridden Government contractors that have a record of failure after failure. Under the cover of this pandemic, billions of pounds of public money has been handed to faceless corporations, including Tory-linked firms, without competition or transparency, and without democratic accountability – or any accountability to the public, for that matter. It is money that should have been invested in our national health service and that should have left a legacy for the British people by building up the properly funded public services we can all rely on in the future, but instead it was siphoned off.
The most egregious example is the eye-watering £12 billion of public money handed to private companies, including Serco, for this failing test and trace system. The failures of Serco are well documented so I will not repeat them, but when I asked the Government what penalties will apply to private sector companies that fail to meet the terms of their contract, the answer came back and it was clear: none whatsoever. In fact, Serco is being rewarded for its failure with more and more lucrative contracts. The cronyism is well documented as well. Conservative Baroness and business executive Baroness Harding was appointed as the head of Track and Trace. The Serco chief executive officer is the brother of a former Tory MP, and Tory MPs are on the boards of companies winning contracts. If we have a problem with any of this, why not take it up with the Government’s anti-corruption champion – Dido Harding’s husband and a Tory MP? The whole thing stinks. This Government’s incompetence, cronyism and ideological obsession with outsourcing and rip-off privatisation have undermined our NHS and put lives at risk.
Even before the pandemic struck, the system of support did not work as it should. There are too many inconsistencies in the support provided to employed and self-employed parents – or biological and adoptive parents, as we heard – causing some to miss out on vital support that is incredibly important at that time in their lives. The existing flaws have been exacerbated by covid-19, leaving many families in hardship and struggling. The Government’s response to the petition and subsequent report acknowledges that we are living through unprecedented times, but it does little more than express satisfaction with maternity and paternity support as it was before. The number of signatories to the petition speaks to the importance of parents’ and children’s wellbeing at this time, and to a real frustration with the inadequacy of the current provisions and the Government’s failure to provide sufficient additional support in the light of the pandemic.
The Petitions Committee’s report explains why the Government’s claim to provide among the most generous maternity support in the world is quite simply untrue, and why it is challenged by UNICEF, as has been mentioned. The report calls on the Government to capture data on the uptake of parental leave, as well as pay, so that any future review of parental leave arrangements can consider the extent to which parents from all groups are able to use their entitlements, and whether to extend leave or provide hardship grants in the light of that evidence. The Minister should take on board that important call. The UK has seen rapid growth in self-employment in recent decades, so it is of great concern that significant disparities exist between employed and self-employed women. Self-employed women already face additional challenges and reduced incomes after having children. If both parents are self-employed, only the mother can claim an allowance and there is no paternity or shared leave for fathers, which means that caring responsibilities fall to the mother. The entitlements available to self-employed women compound rather than address that inequality. Unlike statutory maternity pay, maternity allowance is treated as unearned income and deducted from universal credit, sometimes leaving women up to £5,000 worse off. Can the Minister give any justification for that unfair discrepancy? I call on him to set out how the Government will address it.
That is just one of the many inequalities in entitlement brought about by an inconsistent welfare system, combined with an increase in precarious work. The Government have pursued an agenda of creating a deregulated gig economy, rolling back workers’ rights and fostering insecurity in work, which has left us in the worst possible position as we now face the devastation wreaked on the economy by coronavirus.
Following the announcement by the Prime Minister and the chief medical officer in March that pregnant women are clinically vulnerable, employers that were unable to make the necessary adjustments to ensure workplace safety were required to send them home on full pay, but many pregnant women were unlawfully put on statutory sick pay, which affected their maternity pay and other entitlements. Labour has previously called on the Government to discount covid-related spells on SSP for the period when earnings are used to calculate statutory maternity pay to ensure that pregnant women do not have their maternity pay cut as a result of being on SSP. It is unacceptable that the Government have refused to do that, and I ask the Minister to reconsider.
In fact, the Minister said that the women affected should simply bring an employment tribunal claim against their employer, despite knowing that that is not a realistic option, given the small window of opportunity for doing so and the huge and growing backlog in employment tribunal cases. Citizens Advice says that its advisers are seeing worrying cases of pregnant women who feel that they have been selected for redundancy because they need more stringent health and safety measures, and demand for the organisation’s discrimination advice page has increased fourfold.
I echo the report’s recommendation that the Government should consider extending to six months the period in which pregnant women and new parents can bring claims before the employment tribunal. Last week, the Ministry of Justice published new figures blaming the 31% rise in outstanding employment tribunal cases on an increase in unemployment because of covid-19. It also warned the Government that the decision to end the job retention scheme and replace it with a job support scheme will lead to a further spike at the end of October.
Given that one in four people are already living under regional lockdowns, and that a second national lockdown is a very real possibility, the issues highlighted by the petition, the report and this debate will not go away. It is not acceptable for the Government simply to restate that the support available is generous and sufficient. The evidence submitted to the Petitions Committee inquiry shows that that is not the case. Substantive ministerial action is needed and I call on the Minister to set out what steps the Government intend to take, considering the problems facing pregnant women and new parents that hon. Members have detailed today. It is simply unfair that too many have lost their leave during this period of lockdown, so the Government should look to what action can be taken. The issues raised here will not simply be dealt with in this debate; they require action from the Government.
As we start a new decade and look towards a new era of Britain outside the EU, the big question for us all in this Parliament is what type of country do we want to be on the world stage? Who will our allies and partners be in the months and years to come? Who will we side with? Will we side with human rights abusers, bully-boy Presidents, warmongers and those who seek to wreck our environment, or will we be on the side of international law and human rights, promoting peace and diplomacy? Will we stand alongside people across the globe who are fighting for a more just world, to end global poverty, inequality, conflict and climate catastrophe?
In recent years, I am afraid that this Government have too often put this country on the wrong side of that divide, selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, building friendships with controversial nationalists such as Viktor Orbán, conducting trade talks with the US to sell off our NHS, funding the fossil fuel industry overseas through export finance and UK aid, and failing to condemn President Trump’s dangerous foreign policy decisions – instead inviting him for state visits, with little to say about his Muslim ban, detaining child migrants, threats of nuclear Armageddon, and military interventionism by tweet. Let us remember that it is this US President who turned his back on the Kurds after they fought ISIS in Syria; cut United Nations Relief and Works Agency funding, which supports 5.5 million Palestinian refugees; and is withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement. If we want a stable world, Britain’s leaders must be brave enough to stand up to the reckless actions and rhetoric of all world leaders, whoever they are. If we want lasting peace in the world, we must use diplomacy and speak up for international law. Real strength is standing up for those values.
It was the last Labour Government who established the independent Department for International Development back in 1997. Under this Prime Minister, it seems that barely a week goes by without rumours of DFID shutting, merging, shrinking, folding or being denied its own Secretary of State. Those concerned with the fight against global poverty have spent too much precious time trying to get a simple answer to a simple question, so let me ask it: are this Government committed to an independent Department for International Development with its own Secretary of State and maintaining the UK’s 0.7% commitment on overseas aid? It would be great to get an answer to that question tonight.
As one of the richest countries in the world, there should be no question about our playing a role in fighting the biggest global challenges of our time: unprecedented inequality, with 26 individuals owning the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of humanity; rising global hunger, with 800 million people not having enough food to eat; forced displacement on an unimaginable scale; conflicts with no end in sight; and a catastrophic climate crisis. If we are going to tackle those challenges, there is a lot that Britain needs to do differently on the world stage, from ensuring fairer trade deals, clamping down on global tax-dodging, preventing countries from falling into debt crises and reshaping our relations with countries in the global south so that they are no longer based on the extraction of resources and exploitation of people. Putting those structural issues aside, keeping DFID would be the smallest gesture we can make.
In the Queen’s Speech, we heard about plans to carry out an integrated security, defence and foreign policy review, which will
“reassess the nation’s place in the world, covering….defence to diplomacy and development.”
Can the Minister enlighten us as to when this review will happen, and crucially, will he assure us that a broad range of stakeholders will be involved in the review, including civil society organisations in the UK and those overseas who are impacted by the UK’s international policies?
The UK will host COP26 in Glasgow later this year. It will be a pivotal moment in the fight for climate justice. We welcome the Government’s commitment to binding targets to net zero, and of course we want the Government to go further. These targets mean nothing unless the UK takes swift action now, and there are just 10 short months left until the summit. We must remember that this is not a problem for the future; people across the global south are already suffering the reality of the climate catastrophe. The UK must make serious progress on transforming our own economy and bringing emissions down right away if, as host, we are to lead and persuade others to follow. What exactly will the Government do in the coming months to prove that Britain is serious about cutting emissions, and what exactly will the Prime Minister be doing right away to bring the small subset of obstructive leaders, including President Trump, on board with the world’s climate agreement?
At some point, this House and perhaps a future Government will have to accept that the dominant economic system is broken – a world where 90% of global resources are controlled by a wealthy few, where $1 trillion a year are lost to the global south through illicit financial flows, where global corporations violate human rights and wreck our environment with impunity. The crisis of global poverty and grotesque inequality will not be solved until political leaders find the will to act.
Let me end on a note of caution. Britain’s role in the world has changed enormously in the last 50 years. We were once an empire and now, thankfully, we are not. We can and we must continue to show global leadership, but we must do that by standing true to our values of human rights, diplomacy, international law and social justice, and we must do it through international co-operation and partnership, working within and defending and strengthening international institutions, such as the United Nations, that Britain was at the heart of establishing after the second world war. The coming years are a time to reflect on and reshape Britain’s place and role in the world, not a time for bombast, jingoistic imperialism or, indeed, short-sighted nationalism. The Labour party will always promote real internationalism through co-operation and solidarity.