Green Party MP for North Herefordshire, Ellie Chowns said: “Lifting the ban on UK funding for the United Nations aid agency for Palestine (UNRWA) is welcome. It is vital that the UN is now allowed full access to Gaza and the Occupied Territories to carry out its humanitarian work. The UK government has an important role in ensuring this happens.

“As I pointed out to the Foreign Secretary in the Commons this morning, I am clear that arms sales to Israel should stop, given that the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court has said war crimes have taken place. The legal advice that the Foreign Secretary has commissioned should be published immediately.

“I question the Foreign Secretary’s approach to achieving the very overdue and necessary full ceasefire in Gaza. It is clearly not enough to ‘call for’ a ceasefire or talk about diplomatic pressure for a ceasefire.

“These tactics are woefully insufficient in persuading both parties to stop fighting. The Netanyahu government is deeply incentivised to continue the conflict. There must be meaningful pressure on both parties, including the threat of targeted sanctions, to force them to end the horrific bloodshed.”

Responding to record sentences for environmental protests, Green MP Sian Berry said:  

“These sentences feel like a hangover from the last government’s obsession with punishing disruptive but non-violent, peaceful protests. They should be appealed as wholly out of line with the disruption caused.  

“There is, however, a wider challenge for the Labour government. It should review the guidelines given to judges that have led to such extreme, disproportionate sentences for peaceful protest.” 

Ellie Chowns, MP for North Herefordshire said: “Our thoughts today are with the families of the over 230,000 people who have died from Covid-19, the key workers who risked their lives to keep the country going and countless others who had to make terrible sacrifices when Covid-19 first struck.

“As this report lays bare the awful truth is that many of those deaths, and the subsequent lengthy lockdowns we had to endure to bring cases down, would have been avoided if better preparation had been in place. We simply can never allow these failures to be repeated.

“The grim truth is that the UK is in an even worse position to deal with a pandemic today than it was at the start of 2020. With our NHS overstretched, lengthy waiting lists and a demoralised workforce.

“The Government should commit to adopting the recommendations made by the Covid Inquiry, but just as importantly they must match our pledge to invest £30bn a year in the NHS by 2030, to ensure we have infrastructure, workforce and equipment in place that we need. The cost is miniscule compared to what will be required if another pandemic strikes whilst our health service is in its current state.”

Reacting to the King’s Speech today, Adrian Ramsay MP said:

“Labour promised change but today it has fallen short of the urgent transformative programme we need, and which the Government has the power to deliver.  

“Our four Green MPs, and the nearly two million people who voted Green in the election, want to see a bolder Labour Government that will invest in ambitious change, including to restore our essential public services and tackle the climate and nature emergencies.    

“We welcome the Prime Minister resetting the tone of politics as being about public service and there were some welcome announcements in the King’s Speech, but Labour’s ambition will sadly be hampered for as long as they handcuff themselves with the Conservatives’ fiscal rules.   

“Greens want action to clean up our rivers and seas by ending the failed experiment of water privatisation, the immediate scrapping of the cruel two-child benefit cap, no climate-wrecking oil and gas extraction from Rosebank, and local authorities to be given the powers to introduce controls on private rent levels. This is what a genuinely ambitious programme would look like, rather than a fixation on growth for growth’s sake which fails to recognise the big challenges.”