House of Commons Hansard Debates for 28 Oct 1996 (pt 16)

Mr. John Carlisle: Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

Mr. Mellor: No, I will not, because I have only 10 minutes.

It would be better if we were allowed to bring our independent judgments to bear. There would be no shame or disgrace on anyone for having held any particular view. I hope that that can be done.

Clubs will have to go to much trouble and fuss to establish proper storage arrangements for .22 calibre guns. There are more than 2,000 clubs, whose members do not want this measure. They are supposed to operate a compromise that they have rejected out of hand. I do not see the point of that.

Derisive comments were made when I asked my right hon. and learned Friend how he would feel if people traded down from one calibre of handgun to another.

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If it is the public will--as I believe it is--to do away with handguns altogether, what is the point of saying that only 40,000 of the 160,000 handguns will be left, when the truth of the matter is that many people will simply invest in .22 calibre guns? Those .22 calibre guns are known to be extremely dangerous. They were responsible for the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Yitzhak Rabin, and for the attempted assassinations of Governor Wallace and President Reagan. That is why I hope that the House will not underestimate the strength of public feeling on this matter.

The Government have a good record in dealing with the problem of knives. Some categories have been banned by order, and the Bill that had Government support in the last Session increases the penalties for going out with knives. It is right to look further, and I hope that that will be done in the spirit of sensible co-operation between the Front Benches.

We should make some further legislative intrusion into the culture of violence which leads to those dreadful magazines that were produced by Opposition spokesmen and the description of weapons that are manifestly sold on the basis of their ability to harm others rather than on their usefulness in the kitchen. My hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster (Dame E. Kellett-Bowman) mentioned that. That should not be beyond the wit of people, and some of the ingenuity that is being used to say that it cannot be done should be used to say that it must be done.

Why are Rambo side-swords or whatever they are called being produced? It is for only one reason--as a contribution to the culture of violence that we have imported by our unthinking acceptance of American entertainment norms. The House needs to grasp that. I was a Minister with responsibility for broadcasting and I am aware that we have all permitted this to happen, but even in Hollywood people are becoming aware of the unacceptable culture of violence. Each film is trying to push the frontier even further forwards, gratuitous violence is pumped in and television follows.

What is spawning the kind of young thug who murdered Philip Lawrence? It is the fact that he could go round as a Triad. Did he learn about Triads even in the advanced history classes in inner-London schools? Absolutely not: he learned about Triads from a cult of unpleasant and unattractive films, which influenced his immature mind. Many people can endure such stuff but others cannot, and we shall have to look long and hard at the issue. It is not a matter for legislation. It is more likely to be a case of asking the British Board of Film Classification to tighten up on violence.

Throughout the 1980s, we were obsessed with sex in films, when we should have been obsessed with violence. It is the unwillingness of television companies, film makers and film distributors to come to terms with that which leads to the kind of climate that breeds the parasites, the people who run the clubs that pander to the taste for violence that has captured the imagination of some people in society, some of whom inevitably ape what they see in public entertainment.

I warmly welcome the Home Secretary's proposals on paedophiles. The problem is that it is extremely difficult for a person, once committed to paedophilia, to get rid of

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the habit. The difficulty that bedevils the law in this area is that people are punished for what they have done but are released without any test for dangerousness. Future danger is what we must fear, and that can lead to ghastly situations, as in the murder of young Sophie Hook. Howard Hughes, who was a known paedophile, was regarded as a ticking time-bomb, a disaster waiting to happen. However, he could not be apprehended until he had done something vile. I hope that the Home Secretary's proposed changes to the law can deal with that.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. The right hon. and learned Gentleman's 10 minutes are up. I call Mr. Denzil Davies.

5.23 pm

Mr. Denzil Davies (Llanelli): Some of the Bills mentioned in the debate will receive a Second Reading and be debated again several times. In the nine and three quarter minutes that are left to me, I shall deal with the seven lines in the Gracious Speech on the European Union and their failure to relate to the single currency or its constitutional consequences.

I am not surprised that the Government did not mention the single currency. Since 1972, the Government and, I am sorry to say, the Opposition have embarked on a journey of obfuscation on the constitutional consequences for the House and for democratically elected Governments of a single currency. The leadership of both main parties are determined to establish that a decision to join the single currency is a matter of economics and nothing else. It is said that it is a question for the counting house and not about the United Kingdom's constitution and the power of the Government.

Whatever the economic advantages or disadvantages--that matter poses difficult questions--the single currency is substantially about democracy. As I have said, it is about the power of democratically elected Governments over the economy. Whatever one's view of the economic consequences, it cannot be denied that joining the single currency would considerably diminish our already imperfect democracy.

The powers that now reside with democratically elected Governments over a range of significant economic functions such as the exchange rate, the setting of interest rates, the control of the money supply, price stability, the control of inflation and the level of public borrowing would be lost. Those powers would go to a European central bank or to the Commission, or they would be entrenched in treaties, all of which would be supervised and controlled by the European Court of Justice. Powers currently exercised by Ministers in democratic states would be exercised by bankers, bureaucrats and lawyers.

Many people argue that it is not necessary to have such powers, or that they are illusory, and democratic Governments do not really possess them. It is also said that they are too important to the functioning of a modern economy to be left to democracy. For example, let us examine power over the exchange rate. We have been told that devolution is bad and no panacea, so it is better not to have it. Of course it is not a panacea. Everybody understands that, from time to time, short-term adjustments have to be made to an economy, and that the power to devalue helps to make such adjustments.

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The German Government are desperate to devalue the mark because of problems over productivity and wage costs. I have not read pompous editorials in the Financial Times about how terrible is devaluation. The Germans are said to be adjusting their parity, or trying to, and of course it is being adjusted down, because that has short-term benefits. I make no criticism of the Germans for that.

A few years ago, many people said to me that the Government no longer had power to set interest rates, and that anyway the Bundesbank does it. One good feature that emerged recently is the transparency introduced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his fine-tuning of the British economy with the Governor of the Bank of England. It is a crazy system, but at least we know that it is done by the British Government. That has been happening since the war, but it now it takes place more or less in public. The British Government, quite properly after consultation with the Governor of the Bank of England, determine interest rates.

Price stability is a strange concept. I understand that it means that inflation should be zero, or perhaps 1 per cent., and that decisions should be taken on the basis that inflation must remain very low or be non-existent. That is the latest economic ideology. Again we are told that price stability is too important to be left to politicians but must be entrenched, as it is in the Maastricht treaty. None of us must touch this economic icon.

One can imagine on 1 January 1999 this icon of price stability being carried through the streets of Frankfurt, bedecked, bejewelled and painted, taken to the cathedral of the European central bank and placed there away from democracy and the mobs in the streets, so that it is unsullied and undesecrated. But economic fashion changes, and economic ideologies come and go. The gold standard was considered a marvellous ideology, and perhaps it was for a long time. If the Maastricht treaty had been drawn up in the gold standard era, we would have had an entrenched clause in the treaty saying that the gold standard had to go on for ever and be protected by treaty.

It is said--I do not know whether it is true--that, when Britain eventually came off the gold standard in the 1930s, a former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer said, "Nobody told us we could do that." If we had had the Maastricht treaty in the 1930s, we could not have gone off the gold standard.

We come to the 1950s and that now despised ideology, if I can so describe it, of Keynesianism. For 20 years, from the 1950s to the middle of 1970s at least, there was no alternative to the doctrines and theories of John Maynard Keynes. All the political parties agreed. Bankers did not spit on Keynes in the 1950s and 1960s. Again, if we had had the Maastricht treaty then, Keynes's theories would have been entrenched in that treaty, to go on for ever, despite the changing economic circumstances of the 1970s, which in the end destroyed that economic fashion and ideology.

I dare say that price stability will not last very long either, and that that economic fashion will become outdated, but we are asked to entrench it for ever. The House will not be able to change it. Democratically elected Governments will have no power to do so. It is supposed to be put beyond the reach of the horrible mob and that terrible thing called democracy.