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MY WEEKLY UPDATE

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Dear John,

It was a busy week in Parliament with dozens of key votes in the Commons,
including amendments to the Building Safety Bill, the Elections Bill and
the Policing Bill, about which more than 190 constituents wrote to me
expressing their concerns.

Labour tabled vital amendments to the Policing Bill to stop Conservative
efforts to criminalise the right to peaceful protest. I voted in favour of
these changes. However, it was sad to see the Government try to silence
local communities in this way, forcing the Bill through unchanged.

In votes for the Building Safety Bill, Labour once again pushed to cap
cladding costs as low as we could for leaseholders who should in no way be
made to pay for this crisis. Sadly, the Government defeated our amendment
which would have ensured no leaseholder would have to pay anything but a
nominal sum for cladding costs.

Nevertheless, over the past two years, we have made great improvements to
this Bill, and this is a great credit to the leaseholders and campaigners I
have worked with across Birmingham who have held ministers feet to the
fire, including at the Birmingham Cladding Scandal Summit I organised the
other year. While we didn’t get all the concessions we wanted this week,
the government has said it will continue to engage with leaseholders and
seek to make improvements through secondary legislation to address their
concerns. We will hold them to it.

Finally, the Elections Bill also returned to Parliament. This is a Bill
which will cost taxpayers over £120 million to enforce, put through at a
time when the Government can’t seem to find the money to fund services to
tackle crime or help ordinary people cope with the cost of living.

This Trumpian bit of legislation risks denying millions of people their
right to vote by requiring voters to produce photo ID at polling stations.
All of this, we are told, is to tackle the issue of voter fraud. Yet at the
last general election, there were – count them – zero cases of voter
fraud in Birmingham. In fact, across the whole of the UK in both the
general and council elections that year there was precisely one conviction
for personation. This law is a solution in want of a problem.

What it does do however is disenfranchise thousands across Birmingham, and
worse, hands the government ultimate power over the previously independent
Electoral Commission, which is supposed to hold executive power in check. I
have personally voted against these measures at least four times, and my
Party has every single time it has had the opportunity. Sadly however, due
to the size of the government’s majority, it won every vote.

By ramming these measures through, the Conservatives are reversing decades
of democratic progress. We must not let them get away with it.

Next week, we will have our chance to send a message to Boris Johnson and
his government at the ballot box. By voting Labour at the local elections,
you are telling the Conservatives that you won’t tolerate a government
that ignores the cost of living crisis, repeatedly breaks the law, rolls
back our democratic rights and freedoms, and acts as if there is one rule
for them, and another for the rest of us.

If you want to help our campaign, please get in touch by clicking the
button below.

GET INVOLVED

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WE NEED AN EMERGENCY COST-OF-LIVING BUDGET

This week I backed calls for an emergency budget to help residents across
Birmingham, Edgbaston cope with the spiralling cost of living. As people
across Quinton, Bartley Green, Harborne and Edgbaston received their pay
packets this week, they will have seen Tory tax rises eat into their
take-home pay, just as more and more people start to feel the pinch of
rising energy, food and fuel costs.

New analysis produced by Labour this week has revealed that families across
Britain will fork out more than £10 billion more on fuel costs compared to
this time last year.

The Conservatives have done nothing to get to grips with the crisis,
ignoring Labour’s fully costed plan to help people with energy bills, and
instead ploughing ahead with their National Insurance Tax rise on working
people. Confronted about this earlier this week, Rishi Sunak branded
helping people who are struggling “silly” [5].

The Prime Minister and Chancellor have buried their heads in the sand for
too long. They pretend the economy is booming while turning a blind eye to
the real challenges people face.

A vote for Labour next week is a vote for a real plan. A plan that would
levy a one-off windfall tax on oil and gas companies that have been making
so much unexpected profit they call themselves a “cash machine”, and
put that money in people’s pockets to help with energy costs. We’d also
would ramp up home insulation, saving households as much as £400 on their
bills, and scrap the Tory national insurance tax increase.

READ MORE HERE

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CHALLENGING PRITI PATEL'S COMMENTS ABOUT SIKHS

Over two months ago now, footage emerged online of the Home Secretary Priti
Patel giving a speech at an alt-right US think tank, where she levelled an
inflammatory attack on British Sikh groups, comparing them to antisemitic
right-wing terrorists. Her comments rightly caused considerable alarm in
the Sikh community.

This week I wrote to the Home Secretary about her remarks, since she has
ignored pleas for clarification from the community and even MPs for nearly
eleven weeks now. I pointed out to her that a report on Sikh extremism that
was commissioned and then cited _by her own department_ calls her comments
out as nonsense.

As the minister responsible for our national security, Priti Patel should
not be waging these divisive political attacks on the Sikh community with
no evidence to back them up. We have already seen what this can lead to
with the West Midlands 3, with an extradition order signed off by the Home
Secretary against three innocent Sikhs, which was thankfully thrown out of
court last year. Sikhs will not be pawns in the Home Secretary’s
political games.

MY LETTER

© 2020 Printed from an email sent by Preet Kaur Gill. Promoted by A.J Webb
on behalf of Preet Kaur Gill, both at 56 Wentworth Road, B17 9TA.
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