3 minute read
Caroline Lucas MP
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.
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.
CAROLINE LUCAS MP
Of course all the underlying stuff in people's lives that is not really Covid-19 related is happening as well, and people are frustrated at not being able to get answers about those kind of things, whether it's in the health service or social services, but it's not easy for anybody. I'm looking forward to being able to hold the government properly to account, because clearly, although some committees have been meeting remotely, it’s not the same as being able to eyeball a minister and get the publicity you get when you really put a minister on the spot. I am passionate about shifting to electronic voting. It’s ridiculous that if you have six votes it takes an hour and a half, whereas with electronic voting it'd take a minute. It’s important to have people when we can in Parliament being able to stand up in the normal way and hold government to account, but certainly I think what this is showing is that it is possible to be innovative. It's vital that we don't return to business as usual because for the vast majority of people business as usual wasn't working. We have grotesque levels of inequality, an NHS that has been shown to be on the edge in terms of resources, so we need to learn the lessons this crisis has shown us about resilience in our country and the bottom line is that our country is not resilient. Our NHS system has been stripped of resources over the past years, austerity has shredded the social fabric. We’ve just seen how desperate people are and how it hasn't taken very much to push them into it into a really intolerable situation. I hope we all learn that we need to invest in our public services, and we can see that the money is there when government wants to use it. We need to hammer home the idea that austerity was always a political choice. I hope we will remember that the people we valued most during this crisis are the ones who've traditionally not been valued. I hope we will learn that hospital porters and our NHS in general, care workers and supermarket stackers are people that hugely matter and have kept our society going. It's great to see government ministers out clapping NHS staff but they need to start paying and valuing them properly.
I think too that we’ve recognised how important those people who have come from other countries to work in our health system are. We owe them such a debt, and I hope we'll get away from that horrible immigration rhetoric. I hope we that when we come to dealing with the climate crisis we'll be able to muster the same political will and financial resource to deal with that. Hard as it is to say it now the climate crisis is even bigger in terms of its impact than what we're all going through, and we have to do it in a way that’s democratic and inclusive and does not mean that the people with the narrowest shoulders bear the biggest brunt. We must make sure that this is done in a fair and equitable way. Watch the full conversation with Caroline Lucas: https://youtu.be/1EKJGuGvFKI
