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3 Apr 2003 : Column 1121—continued
Mr. Bercow : The truth of what my hon. Friend has just said about the redistribution of resources is powerfully underlined in my own area. Is he aware that in Buckinghamshire, 7.5 per cent. of the projected 14.8 per cent. rise in council tax is exclusively attributable to Government theft from our area to prop up and subsidise their profligate friends in the north?
Bob Spink: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for supporting my argument and driving it forward. People up and down the country will be able to make their views known to the Government on 1 May.
Local pharmacies are part of the primary health care service. They are not just retailers; they are professional health care deliverers, and part of the very fabric of our society and communities. They take a great burden off GPs and, if regulations were relaxed just a little further, they could do even more—and they should be able to. We should celebrate and support them, rather than threatening them, which is what the Office of Fair Trading is doing with its control of entry regulation recommendation. I call on the Government to reject that recommendation, as it would damage pharmacies and set back the pharmacy service by 10 years.
The OFT recommendation would damage most the more vulnerable people in society. I am talking about people with mobility difficulties, young mothers with children and pushchairs, elderly people, people who do not have two cars, and disabled people—it is they who would suffer most. I therefore call on the Government to think carefully about the matter and introduce policies
that would use pharmacies more, not put them under greater threat. I congratulate The Evening Echo, Yellow Advertiser and Island Times in Essex on backing local petitioners and chemists by drawing public attention to this important matter.Last week, the Home Office Minister with responsibility for prisons visited Castle Point to look at the ongoing problems of youth nuisance. He walked around the Roseberry walk area, where traders regularly suffer from the antics of vandals and hooligans. As you know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I have raised that matter on the Floor of the House many times, and you will be surprised to learn that the Minister was discourteous to me: he did not even bother to drop me a note to let me know that he was going to my constituency—I had to read about it afterwards. That is a flagrant breach of the conventions of the House. It shows the Government's contempt and arrogance in stopping listening and in not treating this House with the respect that it rightly deserves by giving us the power properly to hold the Government to account and to represent our constituents' interests.
I have news for the Home Office Minister. It is his Government who are the architects of the burgeoning street crime, because, in the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, they took away from the police the power to remove from young people on the streets and in public places unopened cans and bottles of alcohol. It means that, if a police officer finds a group of nine or 13-year-olds on the street with a six-pack of extra-strength lager, of which they have drunk three quarters of the contents of one can and not opened the other five, the police will remove the quarter-full open can and say, "Now go away and drink those other five cans somewhere else." What total nonsense. The Government have now made a humiliating U-turn and a complete climbdown by reinstating in the Licensing Bill—they could not even do it in a proper criminal justice Bill—the police's power to remove the unopened cans that my private Member's Bill gave them in 1997. I am glad that I have been able to put that matter on the record again.
The Government said in their manifesto that they would support the post office network, yet they recently announced that they expect 3,000 more post offices to close over the next few years. That is not supporting the post office network, but damaging the fabric of our community. They have also changed, in a disagreeable way, the method by which benefits and pensions are paid. That causes distress and harm to people, especially disabled people who cannot go to the post office themselves to draw their pension. Such people may use different people each week to do it for them, and cannot be spreading their PIN numbers around liberally. I ask the Government to consider that problem.
I also ask the Government to consider the universal bank account, which is very user-unfriendly. People with universal bank accounts are often the poorer people in our society, who could best take advantage of the significant discounts that utilities offer for setting up direct debits and standing orders, yet the universal bank account denies them the right to have a standing order or a direct debit. What utter nonsense. The universal bank account should be improved so that people can use it properly and benefit from it.
The Government are presiding over a progressive attack on our local village centres and community shopping centres in rural and urban areas. They are ripping out the heart of our community.
I turn to the war in Iraq. Some of my constituents support the Government's action and some are very much against it. I do not know which judgment will prevail, but I do know that, in a democracy, we must listen to all views carefully and take them into account. I believe that if, by taking action, we can on balance save lives, we should support a leadership that has the moral courage to take that action. That is why I support the Prime Minister and support our troops in Iraq.
Humanitarian aid is very important. The oil-for-food programme under United Nations resolution 986 has not worked terribly well and a lot of money is bottled up in it. Once the conflict is over, we shall have to release that money for real projects, such as hospitals and schools in Iraq. We shall also have to ensure that aid—especially food aid and medical aid—flows freely during and immediately after the conflict. We must never underestimate Saddam Hussein's ability to deceive and manipulate. His trickery is boundless and the depth of his evil and depravity is without parallel, as my constituent Jock Hall keeps telling me. He has, and will again in future if he gets—
Mr. Desmond Swayne (New Forest, West): Jock Hall?
Bob Spink: Jock Hall is an engineer who has worked in the region and who knows the depths to which Saddam will go and how he manipulates situations. He is deeply concerned that Saddam might remove the chlorine plants that make the water safe, thus poisoning his own people; or even put lures on hospitals, schools or religious monuments to try to make our attacking forces mistakenly destroy those institutions so that he can drive a wedge between the coalition forces and the other Arab nations. I am sure that our forces are well aware of that kind of trickery—I know that the Minister is. We must be very careful about Saddam Hussein.
We must also be careful to resist a Turkish incursion in the north of Iraq, which would be very destabilising and damaging. I congratulate the Kurds on setting up what is in fact a parliamentary democracy with power sharing between the two main groups. That has removed the traditional conflict between those groups. The Parliament has been able to be set up because of the no-fly zone. It is a wonderful institution and I spoke in it myself about four weeks ago. It was a great opportunity to witness a democracy growing and getting stronger in that region. It could be a model for the rest of the middle east, if we can feed, fertilise and nurture it. For instance, that Parliament has proportionately many more women than ours. Some of them are feisty women and very eloquent speakers, who were doing a tremendous job.
I welcome what the Kurds have achieved. In a post-war Iraq, the new administration should flow from the Iraqi people themselves. We cannot impose it on them, but we must facilitate, encourage, advise and help them in developing good plans—the Iraqi opposition forces already have well-developed structures. In December,
there was a conference on the issue in London, and about a month ago there was another conference at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies. The opposition parties are co-operating. Of course, there will be a single federal state of Iraq, which will look after foreign affairs and defence. It will take all the oil revenues from the whole country, whatever the region, and then redistribute them equitably in a way that I am sure they will be able to agree on. The state will be based on a parliamentary representative democracy. Within the state there will be regional governments, one of which should be a Kurdish regional government. The Kurds accept that they will not get a separate state now, and that they will not be able to interfere with Kurdish minorities in Syria, Iran or Turkey. They are happy to accept a regional Kurdish government in Iraq as part of the federal Iraqi state. That is what they are unanimously asking for, and I welcome that very much. None the less, we must not take our eye off the Israel-Palestine problem; we must address that with great energy as soon as possible.God speed and protect all our forces who are fighting out there. They have shown great courage, dignity and determination, and tremendous, characteristically British professionalism in executing their duties as servicemen and women.
Finally, I turn to questions about the federal state of Europe into which the Labour Administration are attempting to lead us. I invite the Minister to kill any last hope that Labour may have entertained that there will be a common European foreign and defence structure. Iraq has shown what nonsense that would be and how dangerous it would be.
Will the Minister give a commitment that we will withdraw from the common agricultural policy and the common fisheries policy, both of which have been expensive failures, increasingly so during the past decade? I have called for such a commitment on other occasions, so the Minister should not look so incredulous.
Will the Minister denounce further tax harmonisation, which would destroy our competitiveness? That is why Europe wants tax harmonisation. Will he stop the ever-burgeoning burden of EU regulations that swamp us? Will he set up a serious programme to remove those unnecessary and inappropriate regulations?
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