Did you mean did can speaker:Jeremy Corbyn?
Jeremy Corbyn: ...halted and reversed by 2030, against a baseline of 2020”, and creating “robust and well connected natural infrastructure across all UK nations”, as the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) pointed out in her excellent contribution to the debate. If we do not have that sense of joined-up thinking, we will be missing the whole point altogether. There are many issues we...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...of our people for a decade, the talk of levelling up is a cruel joke. The reality is that this Budget is an admission of failure: an admission that austerity has been a failed experiment. It did not solve our economic problems, but made them worse. It held back our own recovery, and failed even in its own terms. Today’s measures go nowhere near reversing the damage that has been done to...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...holders, including him, get from our allotments and the produce we get from them. I hope this will provide an opportunity for a genuine, bipartisan working relationship over the onions and the carrots. It was just two months ago that the Prime Minister made the Queen come here in the rain as part of a pre-election stunt. Since then, he has made many promises to many different parts of the...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...that time, a Westminster councillor—intended to introduce a nightlife tax. Thankfully, the hon. Gentleman was able to reassure the now Prime Minister that the nightlife tax would apply only to car parking charges and not to other activities—although, on reflection, he may have missed a great opportunity of earning a great deal of revenue for the people of Westminster. I suspect it is...
Jeremy Corbyn: Since the Government did nothing to protect the steel industry in Redcar, I hope that they will do a bit better in Scunthorpe, where 5,000 jobs are at risk. The Select Committee on Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy raises questions about whether the Government actually entered into the negotiations in good faith. Another sector that has been failed by the Government is the renewables...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...in bus routes, cycle routes and infrastructure, and reopening railway lines and improving railways in public ownership, so that people can travel quickly and cheaply, and not necessarily by car. The solution also means big investments, such as the Swansea bay tidal lagoon, and not prioritising fracking, which rides roughshod over local communities and damages our climate. It means planting...
Jeremy Corbyn: I join the Prime Minister in paying tribute to Lord Bhattacharyya, who died last week. As she said, he was a champion of the car industry and manufacturing in general, and he played a key role in saving Jaguar Land Rover, not only safeguarding jobs but, crucially, ensuring that international research is done in the UK. We thank him for everything he did. Tomorrow is International Women’s...
Jeremy Corbyn: I did write the Prime Minister a very nice letter setting out our views. I am sure she received it and read it and I hope she will think on it. It appears that the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) was right when he said last week that in the event that the Prime Minister’s deal does not succeed “this Government…and this Prime Minister…would prefer to…head for...
Jeremy Corbyn: The warnings come from across the economy: the car industry; farming and food; road haulage. UK manufacturing is currently in recession. So much for the much-vaunted “march of the makers”. The Government said that austerity would mean that the deficit would close by 2015. Today the Chancellor has confirmed that it will still be there nine years later, in 2024. Even now, great chunks of...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...pay. Instead, this Government weakened trade unions and introduced employment tribunal fees, now scrapped thanks to the victory in the courts by Unison—a trade union representing its members. Why did not the Chancellor take the opportunity to make two changes to control debt: first, to cap credit card debt, so that nobody pays back more than they borrowed; and secondly, to stop credit...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...later became part of the Chartist movement, to which we trace the origins of socialism in this country and the Labour party. Naturally, I hugely admire the Birmingham Political Union for what it did. A member of the parliamentary choir, the right hon. Member for Meriden was in fine voice today, and I am sure the whole House will join me in thanking her for her speech. I turn to the...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...failure. Just a month ago, the Prime Minister welcomed here EU proposals on country-by-country tax transparency, but on 26 April Conservative MEPs yet again voted against these same proposals. Did they not get the memo from the Prime Minister? That same Prime Minister continues to allow UK tax havens not to issue public registers of beneficial ownership and he opposes wholesale the...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...in public enterprise and public endeavour, I have to concede that the London Passenger Transport Board was established under a Tory Government in 1933. Lord Ashfield was its first chairman and he did a fine job in promoting its development. So even then, in the depths of the recession in the 1930s, there was a consensus that the public ownership of assets mattered, and he stood up against...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...that time, we were expressing concern about the disposal of assets. There was a degree of thinking among London Underground and others that transport usage in London would continue to decline. It did not. It has not. We now have a very fast-growing public transport network in London. As I said, London underground has a maximum capacity of 4 million passengers a day, which has been achieved...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...Government of that time, or indeed Iraqi Governments since. Britain quite happily provided equipment, support and political cover for Saddam Hussein in Iraq because it was opposed to Iran. The west did that, as did the US and lots of other people. In 1988, when the gas attack took place on the Kurdish people in Halabja, I raised the issue here in Parliament and was told that the situation...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...and strongly opposed the war in Iraq because I could see no good end to them. It was not that I and others who opposed the wars supported the Taliban or Saddam Hussein’s regime. We simply did not believe that western intervention would bring about peace and justice or human rights; it seldom does. Indeed, although the intervention in Libya killed and removed Gaddafi, it has left behind...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...and the need to incorporate cycling in designs. Coming back from my one and only visit to Beijing, I met an engineer, a Chinese gentleman, on the plane. I have never forgotten this. He said, “How did you find Beijing?” I said that I thought that it was a lovely city and very interesting, but I was very concerned about the pollution and the traffic. He said, “Don’t worry. We are...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...in our society is the fault of the previous Government. I want to place on the record a couple of points about the previous Government's record. First, I strongly praise them for the work they did on the decent homes standard, and for the huge and very necessary investment that was made to deal with the repair backlog in council and housing association accommodation. It is a joy to see...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...provoked a statement on the NHS Islington website acknowledging that a large number of people were upset about the proposals and inviting further comments. That was good, although it is a pity it did not happen some months before. I understand that some kind of consultation is going on today, although I am rather unclear about who has been invited to it or how they got invited. It is...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...under international law. Indeed, the UN representative there has said as much. The question of settlements is a serious one. When Israel agreed to withdraw its settlements from Gaza, it reluctantly did so, but they were for the most part withdrawn. However, the number of settlements has increased on the west bank, and while the settlement policy is allowed to continue, settlements continue...