It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, after you helped me to set up my parliamentary office 25 years ago, I think, this month.
As we are thinking about what will happen after covid, a couple of my constituents recently asked me to raise in the House the question of why our area has been left behind. It is not only my area, but many other areas, and we are not just being left behind—we have been held back by successive policy failures. It is plain as the nose on your face that this is now an acute and chronic problem for the whole country, yet policy makers have simply turned their backs for so many years on so many communities.
There was rapid and unconstrained deindustrialisation; an economic system that generated colossal inequality. Just look at my constituency. The average wage is £5,500 per person less than the national average. It is a scandal. There are 4,200 children in poverty. Food banks are springing up everywhere, and it is not simply Hemsworth, is it? There are 14 million people now in poverty in our country, 7.5 million of whom are in work. We have the worst regional inequalities of any advanced OECD country. Social mobility has come to an end—that is according to the Government’s own Social Mobility Commission. We have a class system that is now clearly ossified. In a three-minute speech I can only hint at the powerful processes that brought all this about; I will come back to these issues in the coming weeks.
Our office has identified seven interconnected processes: austerity; unconstrained markets; the dominance of finance over the economy; inadequate investment; globalisation; the domination by commercial interests of too much of the public sector, including the Government themselves; and repeated attacks on organised labour, leading to a reduction of the wage share as a proportion of GDP. All these together form a single neoliberal policy consensus that is embraced by the British establishment and has done massive damage to our national interest.
Suddenly, Government Members are talking about levelling up—as if someone somewhere just woke up to what has been happening in plain view for more than a decade. So what should we do? First, let me say to the Government that market-led solutions are not a solution; they have been the problem, and so has austerity. The Government’s towns fund barely scratches the surface; it is purely empty sloganeering.
Let me say now to my own Front-Bench team and to our leadership: as all of us know, social justice is, as all of us know, right at the heart of Labour’s DNA. The country has drifted so far away from justice that it now requires big change. Timidity will not deliver what is plainly now in the national interest: only a radical and transformative politics in a dynamic campaigning party can lead to our national renewal. Nothing less will do.
3.51 pm