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THE VIEW FROM PARLIAMENT Brighton Rainbow Fund chair Chris Gull interviews Brighton & Hove’s three MPs about how they are continuing to handle business in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
PETER KYLE MP
to reform but the way you do things in the House of Commons sometimes isn't really logical, but when you learn it you realise it's a system that actually has merits.
) With the virtual Parliament we won't yet
We reorganised the team way before the lockdown. As soon as we saw where this was heading I stopped coming into London because it was very difficult to socially distance. Don’t forget we had the first outbreak in Brighton & Hove and the socalled super spreader was one of my constituents. This was in the very beginning in February, so it was testing and contact tracing. Bear in mind how stunningly effective that first strategy was. There were seven residents who caught coronavirus – not one of them passed it on to a single person.
PETER KYLE MP
have full debates. We haven't figured voting out yet, so to start with we're going to do the very basics.
There are things that do just need to change. Voting is one of them, but there's a flip side to everything and that's why we need to have a debate about it. When we're voting it’s the only time every MP has to be in one place and it’s an amazing chance for MPs to meet other MPs. Let me give an example. I had a constituent who went to Thailand and she died in Thailand. We didn't know whether it was suspicious circumstances. The family went to Thailand and told me they were having real difficulty with the Foreign Office, which I contacted but didn't get to speak to the Foreign Secretary. The family were in dire straits and stranded abroad grieving. Now there was a vote and I thought, I'm going to stand outside the exit and wait for the Foreign Secretary to come through, and I grabbed him and said: “Dominic I need 10 seconds of your time.” I was able to go back to the family and say: “I have spoken directly to the Foreign Secretary, I have put your points directly to him.” If we were voting electronically that exchange would be impossible. That's not a reason not
“Don’t forget we had the first outbreak in Brighton & Hove and the socalled super spreader was one of my constituents” There was an avalanche of correspondence because people were worried about public health, schooling, people with disabilities… Government was quick to give broad advice, slow to give specific advice, so people didn't know what their specific recommended advice was.
We've got to have economic recovery but we also have to have public health recovery. It's not going to be until we can have a vaccine or some kind of system with treating coronavirus, then we're not going to be able to suddenly go back to where we were. We have to breathe life back into our local economy and, this very important point, do we go back to business as normal? No! I don't want to go back to the way our economy was. We have this thing now that's brought our economy to a standstill which is the perfect opportunity to start rethinking. Watch the full conversation with Peter Kyle: https://youtu.be/aX6tFUe0QUk
CAROLINE LUCAS MP BRIGHTON PAVILION THE GREEN PARTY
) These are strange times and I'm so grateful
for my team around me. They are also working from home but the volume of work the officers have been dealing with has been overwhelming, and I guess the thing is just being aware of so much fear and worry that people have, whether about their loved ones or their jobs. These are really scary times. Mostly we're dealing with emails because most people are contacting us in that way. One of the biggest issues has been about the government's programme for self-employed people. Our city is so dependent on a vibrant self-employed sector and there are lots of holes in that piece of legislation in terms of the people that don't quite meet the criteria. To be fair, ministers have made themselves available and there's been an awful lot of lobbying around things like ensuring the banks start getting money out to people that need it.
At the same time it's having a massive knockon effect for businesses. That awful period where they told people not to visit pubs and clubs and restaurants but didn't shut them. That's what the government really misunderstood and underestimated. When lockdown happened, supporting people with the economic impact has been the biggest challenge. People call and contact by email and we have good systems for that, but there's been this thing where, because we live in the world where we have Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, I get bombarded with direct messages. Sometimes you'll get a message from someone saying “I'm in real difficulties”. When you start to catch up you see an hour later “Why don't you reply?” and then two hours later “You're my MP”, and then “I'll
CAROLINE LUCAS MP
HOVE AND PORTSLADE THE LABOUR PARTY
never vote for you again”. This is the message that's come by Instagram and gone into the pile of things you just don't see and it's heartbreaking because I want every person that contacts me to get a response.
