House of Commons Hansard Debates for 6 May 1992

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importance and we will proceed with it. We are proceeding with it now, and when we have concluded, we shall report back to the House. We shall also continue our determined assault on the problems of Northern Ireland. The courage of the people of Northern Ireland is undoubted. They have the assurance that we shall not turn our back on their needs. Our overriding aim is to eliminate the evil of terrorism, and to do that we shall make progress on security, and in the social, political and economic spheres.

A further institutional reform is important to the whole House. I refer to the recommendations of the Committee chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Jopling) into the procedures debated by the previous Parliament. But I believe that the present Parliament must also discuss them before decisions can be taken. Therefore, we shall make time available for debate and undertake further consultations. I believe, personally, that the time has come for some of our procedures to be reformed, although that is essentially a matter for the House.

Mr. Skinner : We are not going to give the right hon. Gentleman an easy time.

The Prime Minister : I would never expect an easy time from the hon. Member for Bolsover. Indeed, it would be very boring if he were to give anybody an easy time. I strongly suspect that the hon. Gentleman does not give his own Labour party Front Bench team an easy time.

Mr. Michael Jopling (Westmorland and Lonsdale) : Does the Prime Minister understand that his comments on the recent report on the sittings of the House by the Select Committee are most helpful and welcome? Does he recall that previous proposals for change, particularly the Crossman proposal 25 years ago, failed largely because they did not have the support of a broad band across the House? Does he remember that the recent all- party Committee was unanimous in its findings? Does he also realise that many hon. Members would very much welcome Government action that would mean that the changes would take effect from when the House returns after the summer recess?

The Prime Minister : I believe that my right hon. Friend's points are well made. As I said, we shall consult interested parties on the matter and lay a debate before the House to take the collective view of hon. Members.

Rev. Martin Smyth (Belfast, South) : May we take it for granted that the reforms that the Prime Minister has in mind in the light of the report of the Procedure Committee and of the idea of giving power back to the people will include scrutiny of the Government by a Select Committee on Northern Ireland, to be set up at the earliest possible opportunity?

The Prime Minister : That is one of the matters that we will consider, but I can give the hon. Gentleman no assurance this afternoon.

The Government were returned at this election because we spoke for certain great truths. George Bernard Shaw--no Tory he--wrote that "all great truths begin as blasphemies",

and for many years the received wisdom denied many truths : the truth that lower taxes create more wealth for better welfare ; the truth that competition produces better

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services at lower cost ; and the truth that less state control makes for a better state. Those truths are now accepted by the vast majority of people in this country, and the latest election endorsed that process. People voted for greater choice and the freedom that flows from it.

Mr. D. N. Campbell-Savours (Workington) : Will the Prime Minister give way?

The Prime Minister : If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I have given way generously and I would like to make a little progress. I was referring to the freedom of people to keep more of their own money, to freedom from the fear of inflation and to freedom from state interference and the excessive influence of trade unions--and I refer only to the "excessive" influence of trade unions. Even today, as this debate is being conducted, we are witnessing an extremely important leadership election in which the trade unions wield the largest share of votes. Many of those votes will represent trade union members who voted Conservative at the last general election, as millions of them did. So whoever is elected as leader of the Labour party will rely on Conservative votes to become Leader of the Opposition ; when the next general election comes he can rely on Conservative votes to keep him as Leader of the Opposition. Mr. Campbell- Savours rose --

The Prime Minister : Some unions may not even bother to ballot their members. The right hon. and learned Member for Monklands, East (Mr. Smith) has recognised that inequity--and he wants it changed, but not now, not until he is safely home and dry. To paraphrase St. Augustine, "Give me goodness Lord, but not just yet".

Now that the general election is over we see signs of renewed confidence. Business surveys have immediately reflected stronger prospects. The stock market has risen by over 10 per cent., and sterling has risen to DM 2.92. This week we made the ninth successive reduction in British interest rates since we joined the exchange rate mechanism. The latest cut in bank base rates has already led to a further cut in mortgage rates.

This renewed confidence in Britain flows from the economic policies that we laid before the British people, policies designed to encourage the creation of wealth in Britain and for Britain. We understand that without wealth there can be no welfare and without welfare we cannot discharge our responsibilities.

Later this month we will introduce the Finance Bill to enact outstanding measures from the Budget--

Mr. Canavan : Not again. The last one was rubbish.

The Prime Minister : It is worth having another. Like so many Conservative Budgets, this one once more delivered cuts in income tax. Every taxpayer will benefit, while nearly 4 million taxpayers on low incomes will pay tax at the new 20p rate--young people starting out in their careers, many women working part time and many disabled people. Our aim in these cuts is to encourage effort and reward endeavour at every level.

Mr. Campbell-Savours : Will the Prime Minister give way on that very point?

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The Prime Minister : I have given way generously--

Madam Speaker : Order. The Prime Minister has made it clear that he is not giving way.

The Prime Minister : The 20p band shows the way ahead to further tax reductions. We can steadily extend it up the income scale, so that, as and when prudent, more and more people pay income tax only at this lower rate.

Both the Budget and the manifesto made clear our determination to pursue the fight against inflation. Within the framework of the exchange rate mechanism and with the support of sound monetary and fiscal policies we have the opportunity to do as well as and better than our European competitors. Our aim is to restore to this country the security of stable prices, and our plans on fiscal matters are clearly set out in the Red Book.

Mr. Campbell-Savours : The Prime Minister was pressed by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition to say how he intended to balance the budget over the medium term. Will the Prime Minister give an honest answer ? Will he increase the burden of taxation over the medium term ? Does he rule that out ?

The Prime Minister : I am surprised by the first part of the hon. Gentleman's question because he knows as well as any hon. Member that the plans about the change in the fiscal deficit are clearly set out in the Red Book. They are there for the House to examine. They were there before the election and they are there now, and we shall seek to stick to them until we have a balanced budget. The direction is clear. We saw the cyclical rise of the fiscal deficit during the recession, and as we come out of recession that deficit will begin to fall. We have made that entirely clear to hon. Members time and again.

Mr. Skinner : When will the books be balanced ?

The Prime Minister : I shall not give way to the hon. Gentleman. I have already dealt with that question but the hon. Gentleman clearly does not understand it.

We shall take forward the crusade against over-regulation and state interference that stifled free enterprise for so long. We shall resist any pressure from whatever source--domestically or from Brussels--to reimpose handicaps on our industry that we removed one by one in the 1980s. Not for us the interventionism that would put people out of work, with minimum wages and artificial restrictions on working times. Not for us either the damaging paraphernalia of the social chapter.

We shall continue to encourage opportunity in a labour market, free of unnecessary restrictions, and we shall develop the reforms of industrial relations that have brought peace to the workplace. As set out in our manifesto, we propose to introduce legislation to increase the rights of ordinary trade union members, to require proper notice to be given of an intention to strike, and to give every user of public services the right to restrain the disruption of those services by unlawful industrial action. Never again should the people who depend on our public services be held to ransom by illegal strikes.

We shall also extend the benefits of privatisation. It has extended share ownership to millions who would never have dreamed of owning shares before. Millions of workers now own shares in their own industries, and all over the world other countries are now following our lead with those policies. Even the Labour party paid a grudging

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tribute to our success. Of course, that tribute was the dog that did not bark--the concealment of clause four. The Opposition dare not commit themselves to reverse every privatisation. They would like to, but they dare not. The hon. Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) would renationalise water and the hon. Member for Kingston-upon-Hull, East (Mr. Prescott) would apparently renationalise the lot-- [Hon. Members :- - "Hear, hear."] Clearly, he has support for that. I am grateful to hon. Members--not for the first time.

Privatisation is a great aid to efficiency. It has transformed many loss leaders into world leaders--dead weight to heavy weight--but I am not sure that even a privatised leadership election could manage that trick for the Opposition.

We now propose to return British Coal to the private sector, and we shall introduce legislation to enable the private sector to operate rail services and to encourage competition. At the same time, we shall safeguard the national network of services, and provide subsidy where necessary. We want to recover a sense of pride in our railways and recapture the spirit of the old regional companies.

Industrial relations and privatisation are crucial to our continued economic success. Equally, so is the quality of education. For too long, education reflected the views of professionals to the virtual exclusion of parents. For too long parents found the education establishment more difficult to break into than Fort Knox. In the last Session we changed that. Parents will now receive clear, consistent information about their child's education. Many people regarded that as outrageous ; astounding. The truly astounding thing is that it has not always been normal practice. Schools will be inspected once every four years and, under the national curriculum, children will learn a core of essential knowledge to meet the demands of adult life and the modern world.

In just over two years grant-maintained schools have proved their worth. Already over one in 10 secondary schools has balloted its parents on grant- maintained status, and many more now plan to do so. We intend to extend the benefits of self-government. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science will publish a White Paper by the end of the summer and an education Bill this autumn.

Mr. Bruce Grocott (The Wrekin) : Will the Prime Minister give way? My point is on education.

The Prime Minister : Our target is to raise standards, widen choice and open up opportunity for hundreds of thousands of children. We shall have a lengthy debate over many days. My right hon. Friend will be returning to this issue.

We also want more choice for local authority tenants and leaseholders. Under a new housing and urban development Bill, local authority tenants will be able to join a rent-to-mortgage scheme. They will have the chance to buy a share in their homes, with mortgage payments no greater than their rent. It should help tenants whose current income is not quite enough for them to benefit under existing right-to-buy legislation. In addition, right to repair will be extended. Leaseholders of flats will have new rights either to buy the freehold collectively or to extend their leases.

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The Bill will also implement our manifesto commitment to create a new urban regeneration agency. Too much land still lies idle, especially in our inner cities. Idle land means lost hopes, lost opportunities and lost chances for people living there. The agency will bring vacant and derelict property back into use. It will bring more jobs, more wealth and more hope to our urban areas.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for National Heritage will introduce legislation to create a single national lottery. Hundreds of millions of pounds will be raised to foster the arts, to encourage sport and to sustain our voluntary bodies. It will provide funding on a hitherto unprecedented scale. It will improve massively our arts and sports facilities. It will help to preserve our heritage and perhaps create new buildings for us to hand on to our children. It will help support the network of voluntary bodies of which this country can be so proud, and with which it is uniquely blessed.

During the next few weeks the House will debate the legislation that is needed to implement the agreement that we reached at Maastricht. At Maastricht, my right hon. Friends and I argued successfully for policies debated and agreed by the House. The House endorsed the results on our return.

Shortly after the debate on the Maastricht Bill we shall take on the presidency of the European Community. We face issues that are vital to the health of the Community and the interests of this country : completion of the single market, continued reform of the common agricultural policy, negotiation of the Community's future finances and the first steps towards the Community's enlargement. These are far-reaching objectives and their achievement will involve hard negotiation--negotiation in which, as President, this country will take the lead. I can assure my right hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley that we shall continue to argue strongly for our national interests as well as for the interests of the Community as a whole. I agree with him that for the Community to succeed it must stay in tune with the democratic wishes of its citizens. The Community must adapt to those wishes across Europe.

It will fall to the United Kingdom also to manage the Community's relations with the rest of the world. No task is more important than developing our relationship with the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe. The west is now helping them on an unprecedented scale. Britain has led in successfully promoting Russian membership of the International Monetary Fund. We have won support for a stabilisation fund. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer has played a crucial role in negotiating these measures to help the Russian reforms succeed.

The survival of fledgling democracy in the east must be the top foreign affairs priority of those of us in the west. It is partly for that reason that Britain has championed the enlargement of the Community. Austria, Finland and Sweden have already applied. I hope that they will join by 1995, and Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia by the year 2000.

One crucial element over the coming year will be European security. My right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for Defence will enlarge on that issue later in the debate. We start with a system of defence that is built upon the continuing American presence in Europe. The Gulf war showed how crucial that presence is to the defence of our common interests.

Mr. Dalyell : Will the Prime Minister give way?

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The Prime Minister : I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, but I wish to make some progress. Many other hon. Members are waiting to speak.

Increasingly, countries that join the European Community will also join the Western European Union, as the European pillar of a common defence effort ; but, if the need ever again arose, it would be through NATO that the members of the WEU would defend themselves. Any European country joining the WEU will still look to NATO--including the American presence in Europe- -for its defence. That is the reality ; it is also good sense.

I was the first Head of Government of the Group of Seven to undertake to attend the Rio summit. I shall go backed by our commitment to the target of returning carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000, provided that others will do the same. We hope to sign global conventions on biological diversity and climate change.

We are continuing to work for agreement in the GATT trade talks. Too much progress has been made to allow the remaining gap to lead to a breakdown. These issues require constant management, constant vigilance and constant diplomatic effort. We shall need all the means at our disposal.

Mr. Dalyell : Is there not enough environmental destruction in the world already, without the possibility of yet more? Will the Prime Minister rule out any military attack on Libya--especially in view of the fact that the lawyers acting for Pan Am's insurers now have the gravest doubts about the whole case, and about whether the Libyan state was involved? Even Pan Am's insurers' lawyers are doubtful.

The Prime Minister : No, I am afraid that I cannot accommodate the hon. Gentleman's wishes and rule that out.

Within the time available today, I have not been able to deal with all the plans that we have set out for this Session, but I have sketched in the majority of the most important. All those plans are geared to maintain a country that is respected abroad and has self-respect at home--a country in which, increasingly, everyone may realise his or her aspirations ; a country in which people are able not only to get their feet on to one rung, but to scale the whole height of the ladder if they have the will and the skills to do so. There must be no barriers--no glass ceilings. I do not want people to be "cabined, cribbed, confined" by the action of the state. This Government have the vision to take the United Kingdom forward into the 1990s. They have the experience, the skills and the competence, and, after the election, they have the confidence of the country. The wide-ranging programme outlined in the Gracious Speech demonstrates that that confidence was well placed. I commend it to the House.

Mr. Tim Devlin (Stockton, South) : On a point of order, Madam Speaker. During the general election campaign I had an opportunity to talk to a large number of my constituents. Many asked why certain Members of Parliament were in the habit of making frequent sedentary interventions, and were apparently allowed to get away with it. I am sure, Madam Speaker, that it would benefit the whole House--particularly new Members, and more particularly some of the older ones--if you, as the new

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Speaker, made a statement at an early stage about the attitude that you will take to sedentary interventions and, indeed, to points of order.

Madam Speaker : I thank the hon. Gentleman for his advice. I shall let him know when I am ready to make a statement to that effect. 4.3 pm

Mr. Paddy Ashdown (Yeovil) : Perhaps I should start by thanking the hon. Member for Stockton, South (Mr. Devlin) for what was--as far as I was concerned, at any rate--a very timely point of order.

I join the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in congratulating the right hon. Member for Mole Valley (Mr. Baker), who proposed the response to the Gracious Address, and the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Mitchell), who capably seconded the motion. The latter wishes that he has a future ; the former wishes that he did not have a past.

I must confess that I found nothing particularly odd in the right hon. Gentleman's partial and badly informed view of proportional representation. Such views should not surprise us, coming from someone who has been in charge of Conservative party propaganda. I thought it rather odd, however, that the Prime Minister--perhaps providing evidence of a somewhat wicked sense of humour--should ask the right hon. Gentleman to propose the response to the Gracious Address, given that the right hon. Gentleman was responsible for nearly all the real disasters that occurred in previous Government programmes. For my hon. Friends and, I suspect, for many others, almost the most frightening of the Prime Minister's choices in his new Cabinet, as testimony of his determination to have a successful Government, was to commit the right hon. Gentleman to the Back Benches. Nothing could have shown more surely that he is serious about seeking to succeed.

I should like to join the right hon. Member for Mole Valley in his words about the Leader of the Opposition. I do not know whether this is the last time we shall have the pleasure of hearing the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Kinnock) at the Dispatch Box leading for his party since the leadership election is a few months away. However, if this is the last time, I should like to say that many of us who do not share his views or belong to his party have, nevertheless, looked with great admiration on his leadership of the Labour party. He has done an immense and historic service to his party. In my view, the service extends beyond that to the Labour party to the country at large. By ensuring that his party more nearly matches the mood and spirit of the nation than was the case when he took over, he has strengthened our democracy.

I congratulate the Prime Minister on his election victory. It was a considerable personal achievement in which he is entitled to have some pride. The Government are now entitled to our good will in their task of governing our country, especially if they take the strong action necessary to get the country going again and to get people back to work. A wise Prime Minister would reject the triumphalism that has been evident in some quarters of his party. A wise Prime Minister might reflect on the fact that his victory was won not so much on the basis of enthusiasm for Conservative policies or on the Conservative party's record but out of fear of what the Labour party had to offer. Perhaps the Prime Minister

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senses that, as he has spoken of a Government who will be gentler in their approach. The tone of his speech seemed to carry that forward. He has told us that he will be more concerned with constructing consensus and more committed to building a nation that is, in his phrase, "at ease with itself". If that is so, the change of style will be welcomed, and my hon. Friends and I will respond to it.

The central question on which the new Administration and the Prime Minister will be judged is this : having been given this opportunity, what does he intend to use it for? We now have the curious spectacle of a Government and an official Opposition who have abandoned their previous creeds-- Thatcherism and socialism, respectively--because those creeds made them unelectable, but each has yet to find anything appropriate to replace them.

The Government tells us--it was at the centre of the Prime Minister's speech--that their big idea is opportunity. If that is proved to be so, it is welcome, but we shall need more than words in a Gracious Speech to make that point. For millions in our country, opportunity has died rather than grown in the past 13 years. Where is the opportunity for those in rural areas who have seen their public transport vanish with the privatisation of the bus service? Where are the opportunities for poor students who have seen loans and cutbacks put higher education beyond their reach? Where are the opportunities for the young who crowd into our surgeries looking for homes that the Government have refused to allow councils to build for them? Where are the opportunities for those who live in squalor in our tumbledown inner cities which the Government promised to put right, just as they do now, but then forgot? Where are the opportunities for those who rely on our education system to provide them with escape routes but who now see that system increasingly demoralised, confused and underfunded? If the Government are really to live up to the Prime Minister's rhetoric, and the words in the speech, they will get a genuine welcome from the Liberal Democrats.

I see little or no sign of such a change in the Queen's Speech. Indeed, such signs as there are seem to point in the opposite direction. In the past the Prime Minister has said :

"Nothing is more important than education to ensure all our young people have the opportunities they deserve".

I agree, but what does he intend to do about it?

In the Gracious Speech it was said that the Government would raise standards in education, but those are empty words unless the Government are prepared to increase investment in education--which, as a percentage of national wealth, has declined rather than increased over the past 13 years. If the Government are serious about those words, we must ask whether the process will be reversed. It seems that it will not. Indeed, quite the opposite : the election was only a few weeks ago, but already a new round of education cuts has begun. Many councils are now leaving teaching posts unfilled, and others are cutting staff. Her Majesty's inspectors of schools now estimate that nearly half our schools are using inappropriate buildings. In a recent report the Audit Commission tells us that there are £4 billion worth of repairs outstanding to the fabric of our educational institutions, and that after 13 years of Conservative Government one third of all lessons are still unsatisfactory.

I have looked in vain in the Government's programme in the Gracious Speech for a commitment to tackling the

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problems of underinvestment which blight the opportunities of so many of our children. All that I have seen has been more educational dogma of the sort that has created such damaging innovation fatigue in education over the past 13 years. Now that appears to be spiced with a little personal neo-Victorianism from the new Secretary of State for Education. That will not bring opportunities to education ; all that it will bring is more confusion, uncertainty and disruption--and fewer chances and opportunities for those who pass through our education system.

The Prime Minister spoke of opting out and of grant-maintained schools, but neither he nor the Government have answered the question about their long- term aim for grant-maintained schools : do the Government want all schools to opt out?

Mr. Archy Kirkwood (Roxburgh and Berwickshire) : Will they allow them all to opt out?

Mr. Ashdown : Indeed, will the Government allow all schools to opt out? The latest information is that opting out is such a good idea that some people will be refused access to it--that some schools will not be allowed to opt out. If all schools are to be allowed grant-maintained status the Prime Minister must tell the House where the extra funding will come from. If that is not to be allowed, is it not true that the Prime Minister's "Opportunity Britain" will tolerate--indeed, will create--a two- tier education system? Those questions must be answered before we know about the progress of the Government's programme.

I fear for much in Britain under this Government. I fear for the cohesion of our social structure, and for the underfunded national health service. I fear that we shall not do what is necessary to put the economy really right in the long term. But most of all, I fear for our education system under this Government. I do not believe that the Government understand what education is about, or the vital importance of investing in education now, for the nation's future.

Mr. Michael Colvin (Romsey and Waterside) : The right hon. Gentleman has twice criticised the Government for cuts in education spending. I wish that he would check the record. If he did, he would find that since the Government came to power in 1979, spending per pupil--which is what really counts--has increased by 50 per cent. in real terms. Will the right hon. Gentleman please check the record before making such statements?

Mr. Ashdown : The reason for that is the drop in school rolls and school numbers--

Mr. Colvin : No.

Mr. Ashdown : I take the point, but I make the opposite point to that made by the hon. Gentleman, whom I know to be a reasonable man. Does he recognise that, whereas every other advanced nation has increased the percentage of national wealth invested in education in the past 10 years, ours has been decreased? If the situation is as the hon. Gentleman describes it, how is it that council after council, including my own in Somerset which strives for the best education in the county that it can--I may disagree with its political colour, but I know that it

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genuinely strives for that--is having to leave teaching posts unfilled? How can that be so if the situation is as good as the hon. Gentleman suggests?

The immediate test that the Government face is the economic test. Some say that the economy is at last pulling out of recession. I hope so. I fear that that will not be of much comfort or immediate assistance to those who have lost their jobs or are in danger of losing them in the near future. Was the Prime Minister wise to sound quite so triumphalist about that in his recent speech to the Institute of Directors? The Prime Minister may deny that. As an event, the speech seemed to have all the razzmatazz of an election rally--a kind of rich man's Sheffield after the event. I believe that the Prime Minister's speech on that occasion will be a rich mine for quotations in the months and weeks ahead as we see how the economy develops. The Prime Minister has grabbed his success slightly before it is firm in his hands or established in recovery.

Mr. Kirkwood : Ask George Younger.

Mr. Ashdown : Indeed. George Younger himself showed a rather clearer and more balanced approach than the Prime Minister did with his euphoria today. The Prime Minister seemed to imply in his speech that Britain's problems were now solved, that the rest of the world was making a path to our door and that there were only sunlit uplands ahead. If that is the Government's attitude, I must say to the Prime Minister that I believe it to be dangerously complacent.

Even if the recession is over--and many business people are far from convinced of that--the underlying weaknesses in our economy persist and it will require sustained and effective Government action to put them right.

Mr. Nicholas Winterton (Macclesfield) : What are they?

Mr. Ashdown : I will come to that in a moment.

The recent decline in inflation, culminating in yesterday's desperately needed interest rate reduction, is welcome, even if the process of gettitng there has cost the country so much in jobs, in business failures and in personal misery. If all that pain is not to be wasted, we need policies for sustained low inflation and stable low interest rates. That requires three actions : first, and most immediately, a move to the narrow band of the European monetary system ; secondly, a commitment to establish the operational independence of the Bank of England ; and, thirdly, ditching the unnecessary and damaging opt-out clause on our entry into the European monetary union. I see no commitment to any of those actions in the Government's programme. Unless the Prime Minister and the Government make those changes, Britain will be condemned in the years ahead, even if there is a recovery now, to plunge once again around the back-breaking cycle of boom and bust which we have experienced twice under this Government--once under the Prime Minister's premiership and chancellorship.

I also see no commitment to the steps that are needed massively to increase competition in our economy, further to stimulate enterprise, to create greater flexibility in the labour market or to give employees a greater stake in the firms for which they work.

Mr. Nicholas Winterton : I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. He has just clearly advocated our membership

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of the exchange rate mechanism, and has urged the House and the Government to go into the narrow band. Does he accept that the ERM is both an advantage and a disadvantage? If Germany, through its powerful currency, continues to use only high interest rates rather than increasing taxation in Germany to solve its reunification problem, we shall have growing problems within Europe as a whole and in this country in particular. Will the right hon. Gentleman urge the Chancellor of Germany to increase taxes to contribute to the solution of that country's problems?

Mr. Ashdown : The hon. Gentleman gives a very partial view. Anything that one does has advantages and disadvantages. The huge advantage of the ERM and the reason why we should stay in it--and, in my view, move to the narrow band--is that it has imposed disciplines that Britain has dodged for 40 years concerning wage rises and their impact on unemployment. There is now no realistic mechanism for dodging those disciplines. If Britain chose a way out of the ERM and its disciplines, the initial consequence might well be a short-term boost to the economy, but the inevitable long-term consequence would be not lower but higher unemployment.

We might also look in the Queen's Speech, which is supposed to be about opportunity, for some sign of opportunities for women--a reversal in the Government's policies on child benefit, perhaps, or the expansion of nursery provision--but there is no sign of those either. We might look for something giving opportunities to the ethnic minorities, but all that there is, in a year when the number of people applying for asylum has dropped by more than half, is a commitment to the return of the Asylum Bill, one of the worst and most discredited Bills of the last Parliament which--despite Labour's retreats in Committee--will be racist in its outcome even if it is not intended to be racist in its framework.

The Gracious Speech--the Government's programme--speaks of opportunity, but the Government's actions seem to me designed to continue to close opportunities off, as they have regularly been closed off during 13 years of Conservative government in Britain. There are two external matters that the Government must address this year--the first is Europe and the second is the Brazil earth summit. The Government will know our view on Europe--a divided party and a confused policy drawn up a year ago, more in pursuit of unity in the Conservative party than in the best interests of Britain. Now the Government have their mandate, they can put internal party manoeuvring behind them.

Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury) : Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Ashdown : If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I should like to continue for a while as I want to give other hon. Members the opportunity to speak.

Britain takes over the presidency of Europe at a crucial time, with many European countries facing internal difficulties and many European institutions facing self-doubt. It would be very easy indeed for Europe to lose momentum at this stage. Perhaps that is what some in the Conservative party want--and many in the Labour party, too--but I hope that the Prime Minister will realise that Europe cannot stand still : if it does not go forwards, it will begin to go backwards, and a Community in retreat would be a Community that had dangerously lost its way just

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when leadership was much needed in an increasingly turbulent and troubled continent. I urge the Prime Minister to combine his courage with what I believe are his true convictions and give a strong lead in Europe, ignoring the voices of his own party and showing that Britain does not have to lag behind in Europe but can give a lead in Europe.

In particular, I urge the Prime Minister to get rid of the opt-out on the social chapter. There is now a new and growing understanding in Europe of the undesirability of recreating, at European level, the old corporatist industrial structures and attitudes that we in Britain got rid of in the 1980s. Britain has a real chance to influence the social chapter in favour of liberal markets, a more flexible approach to employees' rights and a more flexible labour market. I hope that the Prime Minister will take that chance, which is a considerable one for him and for Europe.

We also hear that the Government are at last prepared to consider voting reform for the next European election. Let us be clear that it is one thing for the House to be distorted in its representation by our voting system but quite another to unbalance the make-up of the European Parliament because we alone insist that our system must not be proportional. Unless the Government are prepared to give the people of Britain the same fair voting system for elections to the European Parliament that every other European citizen enjoys, their claims to be the Government of the citizen will be exposed as fraudulent. I hope that the Prime Minister will tackle that as well. We hope and expect that the Government will take a lead at the earth summit in Brazil. Regrettably, the environment was barely mentioned during the general election, but it is one of the greatest challenges that mankind faces. I applaud the Government's recent, if belated, decision to reduce the period within which we stabilise carbon dioxide emissions, but the target that the Government have chosen is inadequate in the face of the urgency of the problem and still leaves Britain well behind other advanced nations. It is extremely depressing that the commitment to a powerful environmental protection agency, which was given by the Prime Minister and was promised in the recent Conservative party manifesto, finds no place in the Queen's Speech.

Why does the list of things to which aid might be linked not include progress in environmental areas as well as in economic and human rights areas? I cannot see how the Government can claim credentials on environment matters when they duck every tough decision that they have to take in that area.

There are welcome items in the Queen's Speech, but by and large they are small items. I greatly welcome the Prime Minister's agreement to acknowledge the existence of MI6. However, the public acknowledgement of something about which the nation was aware previously is a small item. It would have been a big item if the security services were made accountable to the scrutiny of a Select Committee of Privy Councillors in this House. If the Prime Minister really wants open government in this country, it would have been a big item to ensure that we at last had a freedom of information Bill, but there is no sign of that in the Queen's Speech.

There are other points about the tone of the Gracious Speech. It was inconceivable under the Prime Minister's predecessor that the Government's programme would

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