This morning, I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in this House, I shall have further such meetings later today.
Two years ago, I raised the case of a Norwich Army veteran who was in such agony that he was forced to pull out 18 of his own teeth because he could not get access to a dentist. The grim fact is that despite repeated promises from the Prime Minister, Norwich and Norfolk remain dental deserts. Dentists excel at extracting rotten teeth, so does the Prime Minister agree that the only way my constituents will see results is when this rotten Government are extracted from office and replaced with a Labour one?
I am very sorry to hear about the hon. Gentleman’s constituent. The hon. Gentleman will know that there are record sums going into dentistry and indeed 500 more NHS dentists working today. Because of the contract reforms that we have put in place, 10% more activity can happen, and the Department of Health and Social Care is currently talking about reforming the dentistry contract with dental practices to increase activity further.
My constituent Gordon has, unfortunately, been receiving cancer treatment at Mount Vernon Hospital, which will soon fall within Sadiq Khan’s new ultra low emission zone boundaries. As Gordon continues his daily treatment, he will now be expected to pay a £12.50 charge or buy a new, compliant vehicle. Does the Prime Minister agree that the British people already have enough on without Labour’s London Mayor stretching household budgets further, just so that he can cover his mismanagement of Transport for London’s finances?
I am sorry to hear of my hon. Friend’s constituent Gordon, and I send him my best wishes. He will now that transport in London is devolved to the Labour Mayor, who is expanding the zone against the overwhelming views of residents and businesses. What is more, his plan to raise costs for hard-working families is totally backed by the Leader of the Opposition. Perhaps he can now tell us why.
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I thank all those who took part in the coronation celebrations over the weekend, and I also take this chance to wish all the very best to my brilliant and talented constituent Mae Muller, who is representing the UK at Eurovision in Liverpool this weekend. The whole country is behind you, Mae.
This time last week, the Prime Minister had to correct the record on misleading claims he made about employment numbers. Can he provide a further update now that he has cost 1,000 Tory councillors their jobs?
Let me pass on my best wishes to Mae as well for this weekend’s Eurovision. With regard to the local elections, perhaps I can offer the right hon. and learned Gentleman a tiny bit of advice from one of his predecessors, Tony Blair. I was reading what he said the other day. He said:
“The right hon. Gentleman can be as cocky as he likes about the local elections; come a general election, policy counts.”—[Official Report, 9 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 152.]
We know that the problem for the right hon. and learned Gentleman is that he does not have any.
The Prime Minister said he was going to lose a thousand seats, and then he managed it. After 13 years, a Tory promise they have actually not broken! This is the Prime Minister who has had to fight for only two things in his life. Last year, he lost a Tory beauty contest to the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), who then lost to a lettuce. Last week, when he finally came into contact with voters, he lost everywhere. No matter who the electorate are, the Prime Minister keeps entering a two-horse race and somehow finishing third. Given his track record, who does he think he has actually got a mandate from?
It is a bit rich to hear about mandates from the person who has broken every single promise he was elected on. Going through the list, we have nationalisations, NHS outsourcing, universal credit and now tuition fees—the right hon. and learned Gentleman was for them all before he was against them. He is not just Sir Softie; he is Sir Flaky, too.
I can understand why the Prime Minister is trying to wish away his terrible results, but peddling nonsense just does not work. Up and down the country, people want the Government to focus on the cost of living, but he has got no answers. Is he planning to carry on as if nothing happened, and ignore the message he was sent last week, or will he do what a Labour Government would do and announce an immediate freeze in council tax bills?
I know that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has rightly asked his Labour councillors to focus on the cost of living. Perhaps they could start by reducing council tax to the level in Conservative-run areas. We are getting on with halving people’s energy bills and freezing fuel duty to help them with the cost of living. What is stopping him from having a plan is that unfortunately his shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), recently said that she has discovered that she has a problem: she realised that she actually—shock horror!—has to say where the money is going to come from. With a £90 billion black hole in her plans, she has a lot of work to do.
There is only one party that broke the economy, and they are sitting right there. To quote one of the Prime Minister’s more electorally successful predecessors, “nothing has changed”. He is still blaming other people, still refusing to take the necessary action and still not listening to the country. On council tax, it is quite simple: a Labour Government would give every council the grant they need to freeze those bills, fully paid for by ending the handouts he is giving to oil and gas giants. I ask him again: now that his plan has been utterly rejected, why will he not do the same?
Just a quick history lesson for the right hon. and learned Gentleman: while he was busy softening sentences 13 years ago, we inherited from Labour the largest deficit in the G7, higher unemployment and coffers that were totally empty. It did not stop there: after that, Labour Members wanted a longer lockdown, and now they will not even oppose the picketers and the protesters. Even in opposition, they are damaging the economy.
The Prime Minister is just not listening, is he? Even after the entire country, from the Peak District to the garden of England, rejected his Government last week, he still thinks that protecting oil and gas profits is more important than freezing bills. I am sure that the Prime Minister must finally have met some working people in recent weeks, but did any of them understand why he insists on protecting his precious non-dom tax status, rather than scrapping it and using the money to train thousands of doctors and nurses?
The right hon. and learned Gentleman said that this money would fund the NHS workforce, but that plan was looked at by one of his colleagues recently, who said that it would
“discourage…doctors and nurses…from coming”—[Official Report, 9 October 2007; Vol. 464, c. 171]
here, and that there was a “£2 billion” shortfall in his sums. Who said that? It was Alistair Darling. He might remember those days—it is when Labour bankrupted the economy.
That is the definition of nonsense. This is the price of having a tired, worn-out Government, fronted by a Prime Minister who boasts he has never had a working-class friend. He is smiling his way through the cost of living crisis, gloating about success while waiting lists grow. He is pretending that crime, house building, schools are all just doing fine, while handing the country 24 tax rises, all with his name on them. How does he think the Tories can possibly provide the answers that Britain needs when the whole country has already told him that they are the problem, not the solution?
The right hon. and learned Gentleman is right: we all do say some silly things when we are younger; I was a teenager. He will know what I am talking about, because I think in his 40s he was still talking about abolishing the monarchy.