This week’s business questions was probably the last one before this session of parliament ends. The House will be ‘proroguing’ – breaking up until the Queen’s speech – next week, nearly a week earlier than the government originally planned.
I began today’s business questions by asking the leader of the house to arrange for a statement from William Hague on the horrific kidnap of nearly 300 schoolgirls in Nigeria. It is right that the United Kingdom offers support to help locate and rescue these young women.
I moved on to talk about the proposed takeover of AstraZeneca by Pfizer. On Tuesday the business secretary told the house that he will not ‘rule out intervention’ on Pfizer’s attempted takeover of AstraZeneca which may threaten UK jobs in the strategically important pharmaceutical sector. But the prime minister seems to be a cheerleader for it. At prime minister’s questions yesterday he failed to tell the house whether he would work with the opposition to deliver a public interest test. This would only need secondary legislation, so I asked the leader of the house to finally give us an answer.
Coalition chaos on AstraZeneca is just the tip of the iceberg according to a report published yesterday from the Institute for Government. It has warned that the government is in danger of seizing up altogether as the election approaches. There are now credible complaints that civil service impartiality is being compromised by the partisan and inappropriate demands for policy advice coming from warring coalition parties. So I asked Andrew Lansley to tell us if he supports the Institute for Government’s sensible calls for the publication of civil service engagement rules for this final year so that we can have both clarity and oversight of the government’s behaviour.
This government’s habit of believing that policy delivery ends with sending out the press release just gets worse. In November 2011 the DWP said that ‘over one million people will be claiming universal credit by April 2014’. But when April 2014 arrived we had less than 4,000 on a pale imitation of its promised new regime. In July 2007 the leader of the house said in a press release that there would be no ‘top-down reorganisations’ of the NHS but three years later, what do we have? A disastrous and expensive top-down reorganisation of the NHS. And this week we’ve learned that the much-trumpeted NHS Better Care Fund has been delayed after a Whitehall review declared that it would not work, would not help balance the budget, and would not bring about its promised revolution in patient care.
There are now just two weeks to go until the local and European elections. The Conservative party has been frantically trying to paint the leader of the opposition as a mixture of Karl Marx and Hugo Chavez. The United Kingdom Independence party has been hiring eastern Europeans to deliver its anti-immigration leaflets. And the deputy prime minister appears to have resorted to backing a report which calls for the legalisation of cannabis. I suppose mind-altering drugs are the only thing that might persuade people to vote for him.
At his campaign launch on Monday Nick was reduced to pleading with his activists to shout from the rooftops about Liberal Democrat achievements. I think they might be safer on the roof than they would be on the doorstep.
And what about those Liberal Democrat achievements? He promised to scrap tuition fees, but he trebled them. He promised he wouldn’t raise VAT, but he raised it. He promised fair taxes, but he gave tax breaks to millionaires while everyone else pays more.
This week scientists have discovered a new dinosaur with a very long nose, and they have named it Pinnochio Rex. I think maybe they should have just called it Nick.
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Angela Eagle is member of parliament for Wallasey, shadow leader of the House of Commons and writes the weekly Business of Parliament column for Progress. She tweets @AngelaEagle
We need to be clear on what is the public interest in the matter of Pfizer’s bid to buy AZ.
It is not just that AZ is in the “strategically important” pharmaceutical sector, as Angela says.
Yes of course, AZ is important to any strategy to develop skilled jobs in this country.
Yes of course, the UK’s research strengths in biomedicine need to be leveraged into innovation via big players like AZ, GSK and Novartis. We can’t leave it just to small start-ups that are inevitably one-trick ponies (hence at very high risk of going bust) and that are starved of investment (owing to the collapse in investment banking).
What really makes the pharma sector important is that it can serve a clear and present public good: it can address our need for new and better medicines.
To lose this capability or to weaken it puts our national health at risk by reducing our ability to encourage the development of the medicines that we think we need. Decisions about what medicines to develop would be made elsewhere. This might be the US or Japan where we have little influence over decision-making. It might be elsewhere in the EU where we have far more influence. But the best place to make these strategic decisions is here in the UK via our excellent universities and our NHS.
It’s my health and your health that makes pharma so strategically important.
You have a crushing sense of humour Angela!