It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Dame Cheryl Gillan). I very much sympathise with her points about identity cards, given that, we are told, about 11 million people may not have passports or driving licences. It is important that these people can participate in democracy.
I sympathise with many of the points the right hon. Lady makes about HS2. From a Swansea perspective, it takes three hours by train to get from London, two hours to get to Manchester—it will be one hour after HS2—and four hours to Edinburgh. Why do people have to travel more frequently and further when we have the internet? Why do we not spend some money on building regional economies?
At one point, I was leader of Croydon Council and pioneered a 26 km long tramlink, linking Beckenham, Croydon and Wimbledon. It cost £200 million, half of which was paid by the private sector. For HS2’s £80 billion, we could do 800 of those schemes, clustering regional economies. I have to ask whether, strategically, it is a good idea to enable people to live further and further from London, so that they can go back and forth to work. In our infrastructure review, we should look at the matter across the piece.
I will briefly mention, as other Members have, Paul Flynn, who was a good friend and a great man. He was a man of great warmth, integrity, humour and distinction, and he is a sad loss for the House and particularly for colleagues across Wales.
The Queen started her speech today as all good speeches really start—with a joke: “My Government’s priority is to leave the EU by 31 October 2019”, but it does not look at all likely that that is going to happen. It is an interesting contrast to her opening words in the 2017 Queen’s Speech, when she said that the priority was
“to secure the best possible deal as the country leaves the European Union…working with…the devolved Administrations, business and others to build…consensus”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 21 June 2017; Vol. 783, c. 5.]
That idea has been swept away and we are now rushing towards this deadline—to get Brexit done, do or die. But in our hearts we all know that we cannot just get Brexit done. It will be a series of painful negotiations with deals down the way.
The next part of the Queen’s Speech was on the commitment to financial stability, so it is a strange irony that many of the hedge funds that supported the Prime Minister’s leadership have been betting on no deal.
The next part of the speech was on fiscal responsibility. Government debt is now 90% of the size of the economy. When Labour left government, it was half that figure. After years of austerity crushing the poorest, we are now being told that there is loads of money in the magic money tree for the Prime Minister to spend on all sorts of things. The fact is that the current Government have failed to grow the economy. To be fair, that is largely due to Brexit and the waiting period. However, it is not just the uncertainty of Brexit that is contributing to this economic situation; it is also the reality of Brexit, which will shrink our economy by a further 10%.
The expression “get Brexit done” is very appealing to people because they are sick and tired of talking about Brexit. They want to “get Brexit over with”—so do I, but my contention is that people have now seen what Brexit is likely to be like and they want to have a final say. People who voted leave in my constituency said that they voted for more money, more control and more jobs, but they are now seeing that they will have less money, whether that is through the divorce bill or the shrinking economy. There will also be fewer jobs, whether that is through car companies pulling out of Bridgend, Tata Steel making cuts because of Brexit or Airbus pulling out of the area. There will be less control; people cannot control the laws in Europe that will ultimately affect us, and they want to have a final say.
Conservatives who have traditionally been in favour of the Union and business are basically turning their back on these things. It is all very well the Prime Minister talking about how he values the Union, but if Brexit happens and Scotland pulls out of the UK and becomes part of the EU, much of the industry in England will move to Scotland. We are talking about a divided kingdom, not the United Kingdom, and people should wake up to that. The Government pretend that democracy consists of listening to the result of a referendum some three years ago—since when we have had a general election—with a result that was based on false promises and which is seen to be false. People should have another vote—a vote on the deal in front of them. There is this
crazy notion that some deal that no one has seen should be rushed through the House on Saturday just because the Prime Minister said that we would leave the European Union on 31 October “do or die”. That is frankly absurd.
Let me turn to what was good in the Queen’s Speech. I welcome the focus on mental health because I have my own Counsellors and Psychotherapists (Regulation) Bill. You may know, Mr Deputy Speaker, that the current situation is that you or I could set up as psychotherapists tomorrow, without any training and without practising any evidence-based treatment. The problem is that many people have been abused as a result of this situation. Many individuals with mental health problems go to people who call themselves psychotherapists because it sounds like a professional qualification is needed to be a psychotherapist, but these individuals are basically abused—for example, in conversion therapy or when war veterans are asked to relive their trauma, making their problems worse. This needs to be embraced in the mental health Bill.
Primarily, I want to focus—albeit briefly—on the Environment Bill and on clean air. I have the privilege of chairing the all-party parliamentary group on air pollution. Hon. Members may know that 64,000 people die prematurely every year as a result of air pollution, and that 2.6 million children go to schools polluted with toxic air. That is simply not acceptable. Air pollution affects people’s mental health, contributing to depression, anxiety and psychosis, and giving rise to dementia. It also affects physical health, giving rise to heart attacks, lung problems, strokes and so on. This has to be sorted out. It is good that it has been mentioned in the Queen’s Speech, but of course the devil is in the detail.
What we need in the Environment Bill are specific targets and timetables that include enforcement action. I am particularly talking about PM 2.5 particulates, which are small enough to penetrate women’s wombs and to affect the babies they are carrying. PM 2.5 levels should be at World Health Organisation standard by 2030. The only way to do that is to outline a trajectory to get to the required level of 10 micrograms per cubic metre; we could bring our current levels down to 20 micrograms by 2020, to 15 micrograms by 2025 and to 10 micrograms by 2030. That would require a ban on new fossil-fuelled cars—diesel or petrol—by 2030, instead of by 2042. This is not a new idea. Other places are doing it: Paris is doing it; Rome is doing it; Denmark is doing it; Sweden is doing it; Ireland is doing it. We can do it if we are serious. We can also create the conditions that help to spark new, modern cars, and provide the incentives and direction to have a modern public transport system.
I published my own Clean Air Bill a week ago, which also requires a fiscal strategy to support incentives and move people towards a sustainable transport future. It requires local parents and local people generally to be given information on the pollution levels at their child’s school, so that they can demand action. The Bill would also require the Environment Bill to include indoor air, which the previous iteration did not. Everybody here spends about 90% of our time indoors. How is it that we can have an Environment Bill that is only for outdoor air and is intended to focus on air pollution, given that these days people unfortunately encounter all sorts of toxins in their own homes—from chemicals in furniture, cleaning products, sprays, candles, you name it? These things
actually have a cocktail impact with outdoor air pollution, causing respiratory and inflammatory problems. Indoor air provisions need to be properly integrated in the Bill so that we can all be protected.
I also have a Plastics Bill—I am Buffalo Bill, me!—which provides that we should have clear aggregate targets for the amount of plastics we are allowed to have, as we do for the Climate Change Act for carbon. It also suggests a fiscal strategy, including the taxation of virgin plastic. Quite simply, plastic is too inexpensive. If it cost more to buy a plastic bottle than to get a reusable one, people would obviously not buy plastic ones.
On climate change itself, it is imperative that we move against fracking. The reality is that any extraction that emits more than 2% methane is worse than coal. Methane is about 85 times worse than carbon dioxide for global warming, and satellite imagery tells us that fracking generates 5% of fugitive emissions and leakages, making it nearly twice as bad as coal. It is just not a sustainable way forward. Some 80% of available fossil fuels cannot be exploited if we are to avoid irreversible climate change.
We now know that we are going to hit the 1.5° C change not by 2040, but by 2030. That means that the zero carbon by 2050 target is already out of date. It is no good saying, “Oh well, we have done a really great job in Britain”, because the reason we have got our carbon emissions down so quickly in recent times is that we have closed the coalmines and exported our industry. We need to stop fracking. We need to come forward with a sustainable transport system. We need to have onshore wind. We need Swansea Bay lagoon, in terms of wave power, and other lagoons, and we need to harness the sun’s energy as well.
The right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), who sadly is not now in his place, talked about the importance, in a global environment, of holding our own in terms of cyber-attacks, the critical mass of our military, space and so on. All those arguments lent themselves to the need to act collectively within Europe to sustain our common values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law. It is critically important for our influence, self-interest, security and prosperity, and for being unified, that we remain in the EU. It is incumbent on us to give the final say to the people of Britain: do they want this deal or do they want to stay with the deal they already have? We already know that they prefer to stay where they are, and the growing numbers of young people coming through feel that as well. We should be duty bound to give the deal back to the people for the final say.
8.10 pm