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11.9 am
Mr. John Spellar (Warley, West): I shall try to observe what I understood to be the custom in these debates and make a fairly brief speech on one or two urgent matters that require the attention of the House. There is little Government legislation to debate but there is certainly much unfinished business to be considered.
The first matter that I wish to raise will, I believe, be dear to your heart, Mr. Deputy Speaker, because it relates to an incident in Yorkshire as reported in today's press. It involves Mr. and Mrs. Milnes, whose car was wheelclamped and removed. They were told that it would cost £450 to have it returned and an extra £20 for each day that payment was delayed. The total now seems to have risen to £1,000. Such licensed robbery and banditry has been allowed to continue for far too long. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr(Mr. Rooker) has been investigating incidents in the Digbeth area of Birmingham, where cars are left on empty sites to entice unwary parkers whose cars are subsequently clamped--sometimes even with their owners in them.
Let me make it clear that I am not talking about clamping by the official authorities in London of cars parked on the street but about off-street clamping carried out by private operators, many of whom are extremely dubious. The penalty being imposed by such operators--£95 to have the car released and £450 to have it returned after it had been towed away--is way in excess of those imposed under the law for illegal parking on the street. Furthermore, clampers are acting as judge, jury and enforcer. In many ways, the word "enforcer" is apposite.
The Government's delay in acting has been scandalous. It is more than three years since the Home Office finished its consultation on clamping on private land. The Minister of State, Home Office has continued to dither and delay and will not propose a solution, despite the fact that, since a ruling by the Scottish High Court four years ago, private wheelclamping has been illegal in Scotland. That has not led to a breakdown of parking controls. The Home Office should introduce legislation urgently so that companies such as LORE clampers based in Leeds are no longer able to intimidate decent ordinary citizens.
Another matter that has come into focus this week and requires urgent legislation is the funding of political parties--in particular allegations made at the weekend of donations by Serb business men to the Conservative party. In the previous four Sessions, I have introduced a private Member's Bill to try to regulate the funding of political parties. My most recent attempt was on 19 April and it is a fairly modest proposal. It would ban foreign donations to political parties and provide for a register of donations of more than £1,000. Had the Bill been law, The Sunday Times would not have had to make inquiries about
donations; it would have been able to read the register and ascertain who had been contributing to the Conservative party.
The Government's reluctance to introduce legislation or, as suggested by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair) yesterday, to refer the matter to the Nolan committee must lead us and right-thinking people outside to believe that, if those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear, the Conservative party must accordingly have a good deal to hide and a good deal to fear. I have written to the Leader of the House, asking for parliamentary time to be made available to debate my modest proposal, which would be regarded as quite unremarkable in most other western democracies.
I refer now to the continuing saga of the millennium exhibition. I do not want to get involved in the basic question whether there should be a major millennium exhibition, but, as the decision has been made, let us consider the choice of location. The final choice was narrowed down to two possible locations--Greenwich in London and Birmingham.
Birmingham has the experience of operating a large site--the national exhibition centre--and handling huge numbers of people. It had a site available and ready for construction. It also has the personal infrastructure in the form of NEC staff, and equally important--possibly even more important--the transport infrastructure. Birmingham is situated at the junction of Britain's motorway network and has an international railway station and a major and expanding airport. Birmingham also had the group, Imagination, draw up plans for the exhibition. The plans were so good that, when the Government decided to take the scheme to London, they asked Imagination to take over the running and planning of it.
All those factors should have weighed in favour of Birmingham yet it was decided that the London bid should have priority, even though it was unclear where the London funding was to come from. The Birmingham scheme was properly funded but there was great uncertainty about the London scheme--a fact borne out by events as company after company has bailed out of funding the scheme. Indeed, extension after extension has had to be given to London while it tries to get its act together.
The only conclusion that reasonable people can come to--especially people in the midlands--is that the decision was made by the cultural establishment, based on its unremitting metropolitan bias and its refusal to consider sound, sensible and workable schemes outside London because it does not want to travel to Birmingham or elsewhere.
I suspect that the decision was also related to the long-term ambitions of the Deputy Prime Minister to expand London along the estuary. We witnessed another example of that bias in yesterday's report by the Select Committee on Transport, which examined the possibility of an estuary airport for London instead of considering the expansion of regional airports.
The millennium scheme is now in crisis. The months are ticking by but not one sod of earth has been turned. Indeed, construction cannot start until the Greenwich site has been decontaminated. The time scale crisis is partly the result of the Government's lack of forward planning
and their not making decisions sufficiently early so that there was time to get the construction under way. Incidentally, the same appears to be happening with the commemoration of the bicentenary of Trafalgar day--preparations will be put off until the event is upon us.
The problem is that Greenwich was the wrong choice and we have daily proof of that. The Millennium Commission should recognise that it has made a mistake. It should not, as reported in the press, be talking petulantly about scrapping the scheme. Instead, it should be talking about giving the project to the one area that will bring it in on time and make it a success--Birmingham.
Finally in this connection, there is some uncertainty about what will be done with the millennium exhibition buildings on the Greenwich site. In Birmingham, such buildings would become part of an integrated NEC. It would do much for Britain and for areas outside London if the correct choice was made.
Mr. John Marshall (Hendon, South):
I listened with interest to the speech of the hon. Member for Warley, West (Mr. Spellar), who suggested that the millennium celebrations should take place in Birmingham. As a Member representing a London constituency, he will not be surprised to learn that I do not agree with him. London is a mecca for tourism, and if the celebrations are designed partly to attract people from other parts of the United Kingdom and from overseas, London is a far more logical choice than Birmingham. In 1951, the then Government decided to hold the Festival of Britain on the south bank rather than in the midlands.
Mr. Marshall:
On this occasion, the hon. Gentleman and I form a holy alliance. We represent the city of London, our tourist capital. If the celebrations are held in London, they will be of great benefit to the whole country. I suspect that if they were to be held in Birmingham, they would receive much less support from the people of this country and from overseas.
Earlier this week, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development had to revise its economic forecasts for this year and next year. It pointed out to the people of Europe that the provisions of the Maastricht treaty were squeezing growth out of the economies of continental Europe, particularly those of France and Germany, which are obsessed with creating a single currency by 1999.
Britain is in the fortunate position of having the strongest economy in western Europe. We can look forward to good growth this year and next year, and the Bank of England has confirmed that the Government's inflation targets are being achieved. We have much lower unemployment than other European countries, and we have received significant inward investment. That is not due to some accident of history.
We can all recall the magic words of Jacques Delors during the Maastricht discussions, who forecast that the fact that Britain was exempt from the social chapter would act as a magnet for inward investment. I do not often quote the former President of the European Commission with approval--nor does my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Knapman), the Whip on the Front Bench--but on this occasion he was 100 per cent. right. If we were to reverse the policies that attracted companies to the United Kingdom, we could say goodbye to inward investment, low unemployment and the rapid economic growth that is enabling the Government to improve our social services.
Earlier this week, a number of hon. Members were able to meet the parents of an Israeli, Zachary Baumel, who went missing in Lebanon in 1982. His parents have no idea what has happened to him, although there are suggestions that he is still alive. Surely any parent has a right to know after 14 years what has happened to his or her son. Some of us have met the mother, brothers, wife and daughter of another missing Israeli, Ron Arad, who was captured nearly 10 years ago. He will shortly have spent a longer time in captivity than the duration of the first and second world wars. It is surely wrong that any prisoner of war should have to spend 10 years in captivity without being allowed to send or receive letters for most of that time.
When Mr. Arad was captured, his daughter was a year old. What sort of people prevent a young girl from seeing her father between the ages of one and 11? What sort of captors prevent a prisoner of war from receiving letters? What sort of people prevent a man from being with his wife for 10 years? What sort of people prevent an elderly mother from seeing her eldest son? That is what is happening in the middle east to the Arad family and to the parents of Zachary Baumel.
It is ironic that Israel kick-started the release of western hostages in the middle east by allowing many Palestinian prisoners to leave prisons in Israel and go to other countries, but Israel has received no reward for that humanitarian act. The parents of the Israelis who are missing in action do not know what has happened to their sons, who may still be alive. Some believe that Zachary Baumel is alive, and there is evidence that Ron Arad is still alive.
When Mr. Arafat visits Britain shortly--no doubt to ask for money--the Government should ask him to provide information to the parents of the missing Israelis. The failure to do so is an international scandal and a fundamental denial of human rights.
The most pressing problems facing the United Kingdom are the low education standards, achievements and--in some places--expectations in our inner cities. In London, many children aged 11 have a reading age of nine. Education is the escalator of opportunity that allows children from deprived inner cities to live, work and use their talents to the fullest elsewhere. If the education
services in inner London fail to give children the basic building blocks of a decent education--the ability to read, spell and add up--we will fail a whole generation. The late and unlamented Inner London education authority failed to provide those building blocks. The results for inner London that have been published, thank goodness, by the Government show that it is a national scandal. I hope that the Government will continue their policies of ensuring that the basics of education are taught.
If we do not teach the basics of education in our primary schools, it will make it almost impossible for the head teachers of secondary schools to enable children to develop their talents fully. Everyone supports the Government's policies to make secondary education more diverse, and everyone welcomes the announcements made yesterday by the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, but it is essential that we examine the basics of education in our primary schools to ensure that children are not deprived of their basic right--the ability to read, write and add up.
An issue raised at Question Time on Monday, which will no doubt be raised from time to time, is the problem of the legal aid fund. Under this Government, expenditure on legal aid--[Interruption.] I see that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Sir I. Lawrence) is about to leave. Expenditure on legal aid has risen from £100 million to about £1.5 billion. Many of us are concerned that the legal aid fund is providing funding for cases that should not be funded by the taxpayer.
For example, in what is known as the Sony case a German resident sued Sony in the British courts over a patent dispute. The German had no intention of living in this country or paying a deutschmark in British tax, but he received £500,000 in legal aid from the British taxpayer. Some hon. Members will have seen in the Daily Mail on Saturday that an old Etonian received £200,000 in legal aid while suing Clifford Chance, a well-known firm of solicitors.
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