I began Business Questions this week by responding to yesterday’s top line figures on jobs. Whilst we welcome any fall in unemployment, for millions of families up and down this country there is a grim reality lurking beneath the headlines.
More and more people are unable to get the hours they need at work to pay the bills, real wages have fallen by record levels, five million people are being paid less than the living wage and this shortfall in wages is being made up by hundreds of millions of extra spending on tax credits.
This low wage economy is not just bad for hard working people but bad for the public finances too and it is time for the government to face up to the low wage that they have created.
We are celebrating a number of important anniversaries in parliament this year, including this week with the 750th anniversary of the De Montfort Parliament.
Simon de Montfort was a rebel leader who held the king hostage and governed in his place. It is no wonder he is an inspiration to so many Conservative MPs.
The prime minister has also been brushing up on his history this week to avoid a repeat of his failure on prime time American television to know what ‘Magna Carta’ actually meant. But I am afraid he bestowed an even worse embarrassment on the nation this week by insisting the president calls him ‘bro’.
Yesterday he failed a test on the radio to see if was as cool as Barack Obama – I think we could have all told him what the outcome of that one would be. He did say that he enjoys a Nando’s, hardly surprising as we all know the prime minister is partial to chicken.
Meanwhile the deputy prime minister has this week proposed his own constitutional change – he has decided he would like to scrap Prime Ministers Questions. Apparently it is just ‘not a good use of his time’ and he would rather be ‘out of the Westminster bubble’. He keeps fleeing Westminster, so I thought I had better look at what he has been up to in his constituency.
I have come across a leaflet by the Sheffield Hallam Liberal Democrats. Alongside the obligatory dodgy bar chart, the leaflet strangely contains two photographs of the leader of the Labour party and absolutely none of the local MP who happens to be the deputy prime minister. In fact I cannot see him mentioned anywhere at all.
And – the oddest part yet – it claims that the leader of Labour party ‘wants you to vote Conservative’.
We all know that the person who has been voting Conservative for five years is Nick Clegg.
———————————-
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
———————————-