– Spring Budget –
The Budget not only failed to combat climate chaos, it actively supported making the crisis worse by continuing the 91% tax break to oil/gas exploration. Fossil fuel firms are given wider subsidies, tax breaks and other financial support amounting to £12bn a year. The government also failed to properly tax oil and gas company profits and use the money to reduce energy bills with a mass insulation program and the expansion of renewables.
Jenny was a lone voice in the Lords making the point that you can’t constantly grow the economy on a finite planet. In her speech she said: “Our behaviour as humans is often like toddlers. We grab, we don’t follow common sense and we certainly don’t recognise that the earth is our support system.”
– Illegal Migration Bill –
This Bill is, what it says it is, illegal. However, many see this as part of a plan to blame lefty lawyers and Strasburg when the new rules are challenged in the courts. Jenny spoke in defence of the legal profession and challenged the attacks on them in recent years.
The government’s creation of a hostile environment for immigrants, with the closing down of legal routes and the threat of Rwanda flights, has failed to stop the flow of people seeking refuge in the UK. The impact of austerity has escalated the problem with a growing backlog of unprocessed claims. All the government can do is to scapegoat the courts, in order to defect the blame.
Despite many Conservative MPs speaking against the bill, none actually opposed it in the commons on the second reading. It will be left to the Lords to put reasonable amendments that they can hopefully support. In March, last year, the Lords inflicted 19 defeats on the Nationality and Borders Bill and Jenny is hoping for a similar defence of human decency this year.
– Financial Services Bill and the threat of banking collapse –
The government are taking us back to the pre-crash days of 2009 where “risk is good” and a consensus of Labour and Conservative neo-liberalism allowed an under-regulated banking sector to explode and collapse. Despite the days of debate, it felt like only Natalie Bennett and the backbench Labour peer, Prem Sikker, spoke against allowing this disaster to happen again.
Natalie explained how the “financial sector is not meeting the needs of the real economy, and that issue underlies all the Lords debates on the Bill. Is the financial sector there as a high-stakes casino in which a few people can make a lot of money and the rest of us have to pick up the pieces when it all goes wrong, or is it there to meet the needs of the real economy and give us a genuinely sustainable—in all senses of the word—society?”
Natalie supported several amendments to insert some green ideas into the Bill, saying “The economy and financial system are complete subsets of the environment. There is no financial system on a dead planet.”
One Natalie amendment meant that companies would have to show that they are operating within the limits of the planet. If the finance sector is going to fund things, then it has to operate within this limit, because we all know now on climate, nature and so many other things that companies’ operations and activities that have been financed are destroying the planet.
Natalie has pointed out this bill takes us in the opposite direction of travel to the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill.
– Public Order Bill round up –
The Public Order Bill has returned again to the Commons with Lords amendments after 2 rounds of Ping Pong. The Lords are digging in on suspicion-less stop and search having won some protection for journalists. Details of the government defeats can be viewed here
Jenny said “What a pity you do not care about what the Government are doing to the country, because I say that what they are doing is a lot more illegal than what these protesters are doing.” Her argument is that while disruption by protestors on the roads and within our cities might delay a few people it does not necessarily stop them going to hospitals. It is the Government who are stopping people going to hospital because they are underfunding the NHS and stripping out our doctors and nurses by not paying them properly.
– Retained EU Law Bill –
Both Green Party peers asked the house to completely reject the bill as it ends parliamentary democracy by handing the power to Ministers to make, or delete, thousands of laws and rules, without recourse to MPs. While there isn’t a Lords majority for outright rejection, there is more opposition to this bill across the house than there has been to any other recent legislation. Key sections of it are likely to be deleted or heavily amended, before going back to the Commons.
Jenny’s speech went viral – with nearly a quarter of a million views on social media – as she explained how she had gone from supporting Brexit to wanting to rejoin the EU. “The Green Party has decided the relationship should be as close as possible until the political circumstances are right for us to rejoin the EU. And I support that.”
Natalie raised concerns about incompetent Ministers being given such dictatorial powers. “The Government lack the capacity to deliver the fantasy they are setting out in any kind of orderly way.”
– The Green vision for social care –
When people imagine what a Green New Deal looks like, people in hard hats installing solar panels tends to be the first image that pops to mind. But in a debate in the House that set out just how broken our social care system is, Natalie set out the Green vision of social care as an integral part of a Green New Deal. Our policy is for social care to be available without charge for all who need it, for Universal Basic Income-plus for unpaid carers, and for the profit motive to have no place in care provision (reversing the disastrous privatisation pursued by governments of all stripes over recent decades). She pointed out that technology may be useful, but robots cannot provide “the comfort of a human touch”.
– Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill –
Notable for the government confusion and chaos around it, with its agenda essentially abandoned by Rishi Sunak, (and as Jenny pointed out no clear definition of what levelling up means), the debate has nevertheless demonstrated that the Green Party is winning the arguments around housing, active transport and healthy communities, as Natalie wrote for Green World. It was also notable for praise for the work of Green London Assembly members on the provision of public toilets from Tory Lord Moylan.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb 