“There is one simple act that could lift 300,000 children out of poverty this month – scrapping the two-child limit.”
By John McDonnell MP
When the Exit Poll landed in my community, there was a collective sigh of relief that we were ending 14 years of Conservative Government.
My constituency could not take any more. One in three children are living in poverty – some of them in destitution. I have got a housing crisis, even though 4,000 properties are being built in the centre of my constituency. Most of my constituents cannot afford them; those who have scraped the money together and have got leaseholder access to those properties are now being hit by massive increases in service charges, and some of them want to hand the keys back. I have got rents spiralling out of all control, and slum housing reappearing. The back-to-back has been reinvented, where one family will rent the front of a normal house and another family will rent another floor or the back.
Turning to employment, wages have virtually been frozen for the past 14 years. I have Heathrow in my constituency – people would fight to get a job at Heathrow because the wages were so good, but no more. We are running low pay campaigns. Insecure work is endemic – it was Heathrow Ltd that started fire and rehire.
The same could be said about public services. In my area, the NHS is on its knees. I just do not know how the staff have coped. In the teaching profession, the stress is such that we cannot retain teachers. For many areas, social care is almost non-existent, and I meet family members who are caring for other family members, and unpaid carers. It is now almost inevitable that if you are looking after someone in your family, you are living in poverty as a result of the lack of support.
Yes, people voted for change, but we on the Labour Benches have to be realistic and have some humility in our assessment of the election. Only one in five of the population voted for us, and what worries me in my constituency is that our turnout has gone from 70% when I was elected in the 1990s to 51%. We need to be wary of that, and to understand the reasons for it. The recent More in Common poll confirms the scale of disillusionment that there is with politics overall. My fear is that we now have others on the political scene who will feed on that disillusionment. We should guard against the far-right mobilising again, as has happened in Germany, France and Italy.
A Labour Government has to deliver. As for all Governments, the honeymoon will inevitably be short-lived, but I welcome the King’s Speech because it does set out the elements of a programme for rebuilding our country … There are elements [where] much has been drawn from the 2017 and 2019 manifestos – such as on employment rights, the new deal, rail nationalisation, buses, Great British Energy and the national investment fund, which reflects the national investment bank that we put forward.
People want and expect delivery sooner rather than later. I want to focus on four areas of policy on which I am desperate to see change. The first is poverty. Child poverty has to be our priority. There are 14 million people living in poverty, including 4.3 million children, with 1 million in destitution. I never thought that, in my lifetime, we would ever debate destitution again in this House, but destitution there is. I welcome the announcement of the taskforce that will look at poverty overall, but I have to say that setting up a taskforce is one thing, and acting is another.
There is one simple act – and we all know it – that could lift 300,000 children out of poverty this month: scrapping the two-child limit. I was in this House when the Tories introduced it, and it was introduced as part of stigmatising all those on benefits. In my speech I said that “I would swim through vomit to vote against the Bill.” Given some of the speeches from the Tories at the time, I almost had to. It was an appalling form of attack on the poorest in our community. We need to lift that stigma —that impact—but we need to do it quickly.
Yes, set up a taskforce by all means, but we must produce a timetable that within weeks we will scrap the two-child limit.
The argument is whether we can afford it and whether it will be within our fiscal rules. Over the last few weeks, the OBR has lifted or revised its growth figures upwards. The International Monetary Fund has dramatically increased the growth figures upwards. That has nothing to do with the Tories building a new economy or anything like that; it is the natural business cycle, and it is also part and parcel of some companies recognising that a Labour Government were coming. Let us take the benefit of that. It is no longer an offence against the fiscal rule: the resources are there and we can lift those poor children out of poverty with this simple act. So I appeal to my own party—to the Labour Front Bench—to by all means get the taskforce working, but to now commit to scrapping the two-child limit and doing it rapidly.
On employment, the new deal for workers, which we developed when we were in opposition, is now going to be legislated on. I want no more watering down, and at the same time I do not want it delayed by endless consultations. We have consulted at length for five years nearly: it is there and it is ready. We want to scrap fire and rehire and we want to scrap zero-hours contracts, but one of the most important ingredients of that legislation should be the extension of sectoral collective pay bargaining. So far, we have committed to doing that in the social care sector, and I welcome it, because that is where poverty wages really are being paid. However, we now need to start, as we promised before, to extend that across the economy. We can build into the Bill the mechanisms for doing that stage by stage—yes, with discussions and so on, but it can be done effectively. In some areas, sectoral collective bargaining was scrapped only a few years ago, for example in agriculture. One area in which I would like to ensure that we have that is transport, and then we would have no more P&Os.
We need to be honest about the state of our public services, in terms not only of their delivery but of their finances. I did a report last September with Andrew Fisher on the incoming Labour Government’s in-tray. It is calculated that, between 2010 and now, the Conservatives cut £80 billion. No one expects that £80 billion to be discovered overnight, but we need a plan for reinvestment over the length of this Parliament. That means being honest about the debate that we must have about not just this Budget but future Budgets.
People recognise that we will need to find the money. Yes, we will get some from growth, but 1% of growth brings in about £12.5 billion. To achieve 1% of growth is hard work; it requires investment and it takes time. If we can get back up to 2%, fine, but that will take time. In the meantime, we need the resources for our public services, and that means that we have to have an honest debate about taxation and the distribution of wealth in our country. It means, for example, that we need to grasp the nettle of levelling capital gains tax with income tax, making sure that our tax reliefs and the corporate welfare that is going on is effective and not simply subsidising profits. In addition, I believe we must have a discussion at some stage about what we do about wealth distribution overall.
There has been a lot of discussion about reform of public services. I agree with that, but I want reform to be placed in the hands of the frontline staff themselves—the experts in delivering the service—and for them to then work with the recipients of those services, the patients and others, so that there is co-production. The disability movement has developed the theme of “Nothing about us without us”, and that should apply to every sector of public service, so that we work not just with those who deliver the service, but with those who receive it. I also agree with what has been said about unpaid carers and the way in which we treat disabled people who, I am afraid, now live in poverty and were stigmatised under the previous Government. We can come to those debates as we run to the next Budget. My conclusion is carpe diem—seize the moment. We have a large majority. We must beware the danger of the far-right mobilising if we fail, but we must also recognise the potential that we now have.
Finally, I do not know what it was like in other constituencies, but overhanging our whole debate was the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, coming in night after night and seeing more children being slaughtered and war crimes being committed. I do not think we will solve this problem unless we seek an immediate ceasefire that will enable us to have the hostages released. However, I think we can take some immediate steps: stopping the arms sales to Israel, respecting the International Criminal Court and ensuring that we recognise that war crimes should be punished.
Since January, I tried to mobilise the previous Government to accept, as other Governments across the world have been doing, seriously injured children from Gaza so that they could come here for treatment, but not one visa has been issued to a Palestinian child for that purpose. I have written to the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary, and I hope that our Government can welcome those children here so that they can receive the treatment they need, before hopefully they can be returned to a Palestinian state that we recognise and that lives in peace.
- This piece is an abridged and edited version of John McDonnell’s response to the King’s Speech in Parliament. John is a regular columnist for Labour Outlook. Follow John on Twitter here and Facebook here.
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