I began Business of the House Questions this morning by reminding the Commons that tomorrow is International Women’s Day. It is disappointing that the government has chosen to celebrate this by proposing to remove the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s general equality duty from the statute book, having already slashed 70 per cent of their funding. The government has undermined the EHRC to such an extent that the UN has warned it may lose its current A list status as an independent body.
I followed on by telling the house that I have finally managed to discover something reliable about this government … The regularity of their U-turns. Three weeks ago I observed that we have a U-turn every 29 days, following Michael Gove’s embarrassing climbdown on GCSEs. I predicted that the next one was due on 8 March, a non-sitting Friday. Therefore this morning I thanked the speaker, John Bercow, for granting my request that this U-turn be brought forward to a sitting day, by agreeing to Labour’s urgent question on the NHS competition regulations – which the government withdrew ignominiously on Tuesday. It may have arrived like clockwork, but this U-turn took: a quarter of a million names on a petition, thousands of doctors protesting and outrage across the House before the government saw sense and realised that the British public will not tolerate our NHS being privatised.
I continued Business of the House Questions by highlighting the downgraded-part-time chancellor’s warped priorities. He’s spent his week in Europe defending bankers’ bonuses.
He’s gathered his allies around him ready for the fight – and he’s ended up in a minority of one. No one seems to respect the chancellor any more. Furthermore, yesterday the business secretary made a pre-emptive strike on the prime minister’s big economy speech by agreeing with the opposition that we need a Plan B and the governor of the Bank of England has accused the chancellor of holding back the economy by not splitting up RBS. But most damningly he’s lost the respect of the British public. They see him ignoring the suffering of hard-working families while he signs off six figure tax cuts to 13,000 millionaires.
I finished by noting that while the chancellor is acting as a shop steward for the rich, another union is growing in strength …The National Union of Ministers. They are united in their determination to dump further cuts to their departments somewhere else. It seems the defence secretary has emerged as the new Arthur Scargill and from reports of his ‘slapdown’ of Phillip Hammond, the chief secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander is emerging as the new Margaret Thatcher. I ended by asking Andrew Lansley: is the union confident enough in their numbers to win a strike ballot?
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Angela Eagle is MP for Wallasey, shadow leader of the House of Commons and writes the weekly Business of Parliament column for Progress. She tweets @AngelaEagle