It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Harris. I start by thanking those who organised the petition, including Mr Westwood, for securing this debate on today of all days. It is my birthday, and I can think
of no better place to be, so I thank them very much for that. I also thank the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone), for ably setting out the constitutional position as to when the next general election will be. We know that it will be held on or before 15 August 2029. It is the Prime Minister’s decision when he wants to make a request, but the election must be held by then.
Labour did win a general election a little over six months ago with a huge mandate for the policies set out in our manifesto. We secured 9.7 million votes. In the same election, the Conservatives secured 6.8 million votes, Reform 4.1 million votes and the Liberal Democrats 3.5 million votes. Given those figures, it is perhaps no surprise that lots of people are unhappy with the outcome of the general election in July.
The reason stated in the petition was that we are not going to fulfil our manifesto promises, that we have gone back on our manifesto promises, and that is why there needs to be a general election now. That is what I will focus my contribution on; I want to address that point, because nothing could be further from the truth. We are going to make the most of the full term we have in government to deliver on the policies set out in our manifesto.
One of the first promises we made was to manage the public finances properly, to balance the books on day-to-day spending, as any responsible Government should. We knew this one would not be easy, but we are simply not prepared to continue with the fiction that no difficult decisions are required to fund our NHS properly, to rebuild our schools and to pay down the £22 billion black hole left by the former, Conservative Government. If the Opposition parties—I include all of them in this—are serious about rebuilding trust in politics and politicians, they must stop pretending that no difficult decisions are required to balance the books. They must actually set out exactly where the axe would fall if they were in government. They will not be taken seriously by the British public at the next general election unless they do.
On that point, we must remember the context in which the previous general election was called in the first place. The Conservatives thought they could get away with spending money they did not have in government: they spent the national reserve three times over in the first three months of this fiscal year. They promised compensation to the victims of the infected blood scandal without allocating a penny to pay for it, and they did exactly the same to the postmasters. They promised 40 new hospitals and did not allocate anything close to the money required to actually deliver them, and then they called an election that they thought they might lose so that somebody else could sort out the mess. We have heard it even here today: they are still pretending, even now, that they would not have given out a single penny in pay rises to our public sector workers. Our armed forces, of course, were very fortunate to receive their largest pay rise in 22 years.