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The Prime Minister: That will take time to bring about, but I think that it is a worthwhile reform which will deliver better legislation. We have begun to move in that direction this year, with two draft Bills set out in the Gracious Speech. In future years, I anticipate steadily increasing the number of draft Bills brought before the House.
Mr. Paddy Ashdown (Yeovil): Before observing the usual courtesies to those who proposed and seconded the Loyal Address--as I shall be delighted to do in a moment--I must welcome the Prime Minister's change of mind about the paedophiles register. It must be the fastest U-turn in history, executed even before the Queen's Speech debate has started. What a Government!
If the Prime Minister or any member of his Front Bench team had bothered to approach the Leader of the Opposition or me before the debate, he could have had what he has given way to today. However, he did not want to do that: he wanted to play politics, as he did in his speech. That is a pretty good example of why and how the Government have failed in all sorts of ways, which I shall touch upon later.
I join the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in paying tribute to those Members of Parliament who have died in the past year, and to the mover of the Loyal Address, the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler)--who is probably, perhaps definitely, the last chairman of the Conservative party who is viewed with any kind of affection by his party. His speech showed why.
The hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Field), who gave a good speech, mentioned three of his predecessors who were Prime Ministers. Of course, they were all Liberals. The hon. Gentleman succeeded in mentioning five notable people from the Isle of Wight, all of whom were Liberals, and four of whom he spoke of in glowing terms. Therefore, he will understand why my party, both nationally and locally, is dedicated to working assiduously--leaving no stone unturned--to ensure that he has a long and happy retirement, and that the next parliamentary representative of the Isle of Wight is a Liberal Democrat.
Last year, the Prime Minister told us that the Queen's Speech was a
In May, of course, the British people delivered their verdict on that Queen's Speech, on the Government and on that claim. They voted Conservative councillors out in their thousands, leaving the Prime Minister leading a tiny rump in local government and controlling just a handful of councils. The Conservative party has probably never controlled fewer local councils, and that is a fair indication of the mood of the nation.
Now, in this year's Queen's Speech, we see a programme for next year that reveals the Government in their tormented and twilight days. It is a ragbag of irrelevant measures. Of course, one or two measures will find wide support, including the paedophile register--on which the Prime Minister has now changed his mind; we are delighted about that--and the legislation that will be introduced to control marine pollution and for a national crime squad. That legislation will be brought back, and we will find it possible to support it.
But the programme is evidently--indeed, by the Government's own admission--driven more by what will wrong-foot the Opposition parties than by what is right for the country. Those are not my words, but the Prime Minister's in the Government's briefings in the past 24 hours. What an extraordinary admission. The Government are now acting more like an Opposition than a Government. They have changed their psychology entirely.
The British people are crying out for a message of hope and a strategy for Britain's long-term future, but what they have got is a tactical plan for short-term Tory survival. I have to tell the Prime Minister that it will not work, for two simple reasons--first, because people will not forgot the Government's failures, their bungles, incompetences and broken promises; secondly, because, do what they will, the Government cannot paper over their divisions, hide their sleaze or escape from their record.
The Prime Minister said that to say that was to criticise everything in Britain. What nonsense. He said that there was more good in our society than bad, but we were not criticising our society--we were criticising his Government, and in their record there is far more bad than good. It is not my party but the Tory party that has criticised society so frequently in the past.
Since 1979, the Government have passed 757 laws, yet they have completely failed to solve Britain's deep-rooted and endemic problems. Despite £130 billion from North sea oil and £80 billion from privatisation, since 1979 the British national debt--going back 300 years--has trebled under the Conservatives. It has doubled since the Prime Minister took office.
That £170 billion debt--the John Major debt--was accumulated in six years. The national debt has doubled since 1990, and now amounts to £7,500 of extra debt for every family in Britain. That debt is still increasing under his premiership, by £1,000 a second. We spend more paying the interest on the John Major debt than we spend annually on our police, our prisons and our universities all put together--just to pay the interest on the Prime Minister's debt. But the money from that extra borrowing has not been spent on preparing Britain for the future or improving the lot of ordinary people.
Despite that extraordinary level of borrowing, our national health service is facing a financial crisis. I use the word "crisis" advisedly, and it has been used by many who know the situation in the NHS well. It faces a financial crisis this winter. Beds are closing and waiting lists are lengthening again.
Education has been cut and cut in recent years, and is certain to be cut again to make room for tax cuts. Some 1.25 million children are in classes of more than 31, and that number has gone up by 10 per cent. in the past year alone. One in seven 21-year-olds in Britain now have trouble with basic reading and writing, and one in five have difficulty with basic mathematics. Britain has slipped to a position in the world education league table below China and Argentina, and just above Venezuela.
Hundreds of thousands of people remain trapped on welfare and out of work. Crime has doubled since 1979, and 1,000 homes a week are still being repossessed.
The Government's failures are not revealed merely in figures. The poll tax, rail privatisation, arms to Iraq, cash for questions and the Pergau dam, and much more, add up to a record of incompetence and underhandedness that is probably unparalleled in modern times. This year, we have had perhaps the most glaring example of all--the handling, or perhaps I should say bungling, of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy crisis. Even if we suspend judgment on the mistakes made in containing the BSE epidemic since the mid-1980s, the past seven months have been an object lesson in dither, delay and scapegoatism. There has been blank incompetence.
Of course BSE was never going to be an easy problem to handle, but it did not have to be as we see it now. When the original bombshell broke on 20 March, my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler) and I told the Government that their first proposals would be inadequate to deal with the crisis. We offered our party's support if the Prime Minister agreed to take decisive action. Instead, and since then, he and his Government have prevaricated. They have temporised, wavered at home and blustered abroad.
Had the Cabinet been in office in 1982, the task force would never have made it out of port, let alone reached the Falklands. The Government seem to believe that BSE stands for "blame somebody else". First, the House was told that it was the fault of Opposition parties. Then it was the fault of the media. Most bizarrely of all, the Secretary of State for Health said that it was the fault of consumers. Inevitably, when all the other so-called alibis had collapsed, the Prime Minister blamed BSE on his favourite scapegoat, which is Europe.
In May, after yet another confrontation with fellow Conservative Governments in France and Germany, the Prime Minister saved his failing Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and appeased his anti-European Conservative Back-Bench Members by declaring his ridiculous "beef war" on Europe. It all ended, as it was bound to, in humiliating retreat.
After the Florence summit in June, the Prime Minister tried to justify his belligerent tactics by claiming that the timetable for the relaxation of the export ban was exclusively in the Government's hands. To prove it, he promised to end the cull backlog and lift the export ban by the end of October. He has failed to deliver either measure. In fact, exactly the opposite has happened. The cull backlog, far from diminishing, has kept on growing, and is growing still. As winter approaches, farmers are left feeding cattle that they should have had compensation for weeks ago. Businesses throughout the industry are going under as a result.
Farmers are suffering terribly. But some people are doing very nicely, thank you, out of the chaos. The Government's decision to privatise the cull in the hands of a tiny cartel of large abattoir groups has meant excessive profits for them, on a scale that even the Government's auditors have declared unacceptable. Those firms have received an extra two months of an undeserved bonus, while farmers, caught in the cull shambles for weeks, have been forced to take a cut of 10 per cent. in compensation payments as a penalty for the Government's failure and incompetence.
Farmers know exactly where the blame lies. The day after they met the Prime Minister in Bournemouth, the National Farmers Union council passed an almost historic vote of no confidence in the Minister of Agriculture.
It is not quite too late to reverse the escalating crisis. First, there must be an agreed strategy to clear up the cull backlog fast, using emergency powers if necessary. Secondly, beef and dairy farmers need more help to see them through the winter and to cope with the consequences of the Government's failures. Thirdly, we need a step-by-step programme to establish BSE-free areas--starting in Northern Ireland and Scotland--and action to speed up BSE eradication where necessary, also
on an area-by-area basis. Fourthly, we must set up an independent food safety commission, separate from the Ministry of Agriculture, to restore consumer confidence for the future.
It gives me no pleasure to say that our proposals are almost exactly the same as those that my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall made the day after the crisis broke on 21 March, a full seven months ago. If they had been followed then, a great industry and tens of thousands of farmers would not have been brought to their knees by a Government whom they thought they could trust, and to whom they looked for help. That betrayal felt by farmers is, I believe, now widely felt by others across the nation.
The Government's failures in recent years have given rise to a national mood that is uncertain, unself-confident, even fearful. All the fixed points on which we thought that we could rely in the past now seem to have gone. The Government who ought to be fighting for the people are instead at war with themselves; the politicians who ought to be representing them are instead seen helping themselves. Politics, which used to give a lead and solid things for which to vote, has instead become a thing of soundbites, slickness and spin doctors.
"common-sense, practical programme of traditional Conservative values".---[Official Report, 15 November 1995; Vol. 267, c. 28.]
The year since has hardly provided a ringing endorsement of that claim. Two members of the Prime Minister's party left to join the Liberal Democrats, arguing specifically that the Conservative party has lost touch with the British people's traditional values of decency and fairness.
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