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Mr. Terry Lewis (Worsley): Bingo and scratch card economics again.
The deputy Prime minister: I cannot help but notice the continuing murmuring of anti-enterprise slogans from the Labour party. The most interesting thing about sitting on the Conservative Benches is to note that the only thing that ever excites the Labour party is yesterday's slogans. The more the leadership of the Labour party talks about new Labour, the quieter the Labour party becomes. The more it lapses into yesterday's jargon, the more hysterically reminiscent it becomes of the old Labour party I know and love. [Interruption.] I should have thought that with so much self-evident success, benefiting the Labour constituencies of this country--[Interruption.]
Madam Speaker: Order. I refer to Mr. Campbell. I will have some order now from the Opposition Front Bench below the Gangway.
The deputy Prime minister: I am referring to falling unemployment, which now creates derision among the Opposition. I am talking about inward investment in their constituencies and the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) sneers. My right hon. Friends spend hour after hour trying to persuade companies to come here instead of the south of Ireland, Germany, Holland or anywhere else and all that we get from Opposition Members is sneering at the results that bring jobs to their constituencies.
That is characteristic of what we know about the Labour party. They are never happier than when they are talking Britain down. The Labour party has latched on to the 1995 world competitiveness report. It is a report in which Chile comes top for having corporate boards which safeguard proper practices and Peru is thought to be the second most likely country in the world to have a low inflation rate in the next 12 months, despite the fact that the present inflation forecast for Peru in 1995 is 20 per cent. To cap it all, it is a report in which public confidence in financial intermediaries in Colombia surpasses that in all G7 countries except Canada.
Not content with that piece of fantasy, the Opposition turn desperately to some of the OECD figures that the Government used in the competitiveness White Paper. The OECD figures do not help them enough, so what do they do? They stick Hong Kong and Singapore into the OECD league tables of GDP per head and select the position just above the United Kingdom in which to put them. They have no idea as to whether they should put them there, so they do whatever suits their political propaganda.
The Opposition are not comparing like statistics with like, but that does not matter. It may not fit the facts, but it serves the narrow, knocking purpose of the Labour party. They leap about and start crowing that the United Kingdom has apparently slipped from 13th position in 1979 to 16th now and when they include Hong Kong and Singapore, it is 18th. However, they overlook inconvenient facts, as they always do.
We might explore whether the Opposition are prepared to get rid of the unemployment benefits and the welfare benefits that we have here but do not exist in Singapore in order to raise the investment levels in Britain to those in Singapore. Perhaps that is new Labour policy, and that is how Britain's competitiveness is to improve, but we might be let into the secret this side of a general election campaign. Perhaps they have it in mind that people should live in conditions characteristic of those in some of the fastest growing economies of the far east. If they would be prepared to allow those housing conditions to exist here, people should be entitled to hear about it.
Mr. John Prescott (Kingston upon Hull, East):
This is absurd.
The deputy Prime minister:
I am not absurd; it is absurd that the Opposition are attempting to compare Britain with those two economies for their own narrow, selfish party purposes, although they were not included in the OECD figures.
Even if one were talking about the events of the 1980s and 1990s, and considering the countries that were included, in 1979 we were the sick man of Europe. Nobody seriously argues with that. I cannot believe that the Opposition would defend it; that would imply that they wanted to go back to it. They certainly would go back to it, but they do not want to imply that intention.
In 1979 we inherited the disasters of restrictive practices, rampant inflation and soaring debt. Thanks to that legacy I concede at once that we slipped to 19th place in 1981. I wholly fail to understand how anybody can imagine that in the immediate aftermath of the winter of discontent we could have seen anything other than the deterioration of the British economy. Where the whole game plan comes unstuck is that from 1981 onwards, we have worked painstakingly and steadily to right the effect of those years of decline. We have achieved something that the socialists opposite never achieved--real, lasting success. While Labour fiddles with statistics, we have been tackling the competition head on.
Mr. Prescott:
It is not us who have been doing the fiddling, such as on the unemployment statistics.
The deputy Prime minister:
Use the word "fiddle" and the deputy leader of the Opposition wakes up. That is his stock in trade, and he is expert at it. I suggest that he calms down because I shall be coming to the deputy leader in a few minutes. Give me a minute or two to deal with the facts before we get to the right hon. Gentleman.
Since 1981, we have seen a significant recovery in this country's status as a world economy because we have systematically put in place the conditions for competitiveness. Although Labour has changed its language, it has changed none of its instincts or ambitions. Labour in the end is the party of the producer, not the consumer. It is the party that will always serve the interests of organised labour as opposed to the interests of the market place. In the end, the Labour party will put its interests above those of the nation at large.
If anyone wants to understand how little Labour has changed and how little it understands of the responsibilities of government--and of how one does not fiddle in Government--consider the point raised by my
hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Mr. Bruce). The leader of the Labour party stitched up a deal with BT, which he announced with maximum publicity at the Labour party conference. If we in Government behaved like that, we would be in the courts for abusing our legal restraints. No wonder the right hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair) has been spending his time ever since trying to persuade the cable companies, which we encouraged to invest billions in Britain, that he had not done a deal with BT. The right hon. Gentleman cannot have it both ways. Either he has done a deal with BT that no one in the Government could do within the constraints of the law, in which case the right hon. Gentleman does not have any idea of the responsibilities of government, or he has not done a deal--in which case he deceived the British people into believing that he did. With the Opposition, if votes are for sale the price is of no regard.
One of the responsibilities of my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade is to preside over the regulatory climate and to operate, objectively and on advice, within the law. I have received a letter from the hon. Member for Sheffield, Central (Mr. Caborn), who is an Opposition spokesman and could find himself in a responsible position and required to study evidence and listen to advice, in taking a wholly analytical and detached view of problems put before him--for that is the job that the hon. Gentleman shadows. Before the hon. Member for Sheffield, Central received any independent advice or heard what the regulators had to say, he wrote to me:
Mr. Richard Caborn (Sheffield, Central)
rose--
The deputy Prime minister:
Of course I will give way to the hon. Gentleman. I will get the letter.
Mr. Caborn:
While the Deputy Prime Minister is getting the letter, I can tell him that legal advice was taken on the BT deal by the Select Committee. In fact, we took three sets of legal advice. We were told that the proposals in the Select Committee report were attainable, and that is what my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition said.
"Bskyb is abusing its market position by restricting consumer choice and disabling potential competitors."
I read in the newspapers that the deputy leader and the Leader of the Opposition ordered the hon. Member for Sheffield, Central to withdraw that letter. After all, what is the point of flying all the way to Australia to suck up to the executives of the Murdoch empire if one's official spokesman back home is trying to carve up one piece of that empire at the same time as one is trying to win votes in Australia? I will give Mr. Murdoch a simple word of advice. Before he listens to the organ grinder, he should keep his eye on the monkeys back home. Nothing shows more clearly what Labour would be like in power and that it has no idea of the responsibilities within which a Government must operate. Labour is not fit to govern.
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