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Mr. Mike Gapes (Ilford, South): Does the Chancellor agree that if the euro goes ahead and this country stays out, our exporters will face greater uncertainty because of the possibility of continuing transaction costs and of speculation against our currency, and the possibility--or the likelihood--of higher interest rates? Has he noticed how interest rates in Italy and Spain have been falling in expectation of their joining? Can he tell us why our interest rates are not falling?
Mr. Clarke: I agree that those arguments can be made, but if the hon. Gentleman was fair, he would also concede that there might be some downside arguments as well. A great deal depends on how well the project is put together and how it progresses. However, those who are pursuing economic and monetary union believe that they will achieve a strong currency, stable economic conditions and low interest rates, as the hon. Gentleman described. It is certainly
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the case that we have higher long-term interest rates than most of our competitors because of our history of devaluation and fiscal deficits.
Mr. Nicholas Budgen (Wolverhampton, South-West): Will my right hon. and learned Friend confirm that the other countries of the European Union regard our floating exchange rate as conferring upon us a grossly unfair advantage? Will he tell us whether he achieved anything in his negotiations this week that will protect us from retribution from the other countries?
Mr. Clarke: If they do regard it as that, I think that they are wrong. We have a floating exchange rate, which my hon. Friend has always been in favour of--and I am in favour of it.
Mr. Clarke: Now, yes; because the attempt to manage it did not work. I concede that to my hon. Friend; we have had this discussion before. The result is that our exchange rate goes up and down. Whether that is an advantage remains a matter of argument. Currently our currency is strengthening very strongly, and many British industries are beginning to worry that we might get too strong. That is a floating exchange rate. I do not think that member states have complete control over those exchange rates in the way that some people imagine. The market--as my hon. Friend would be the first to agree--determines such things.
Mr. Budgen: What about sanctions?
Mr. Clarke: No sanctions would be taken against us; the single market does not lend itself to the imposition of trading penalties on a country that has the misfortune of having its currency weakened excessively. There are simply no ways in which the single market obligations can be undone, and there is no way in which any fiscal transfers can be demanded.
Mr. Ken Purchase (Wolverhampton, North-East): The hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Budgen) does not agree.
Mr. Clarke: My hon. Friend may not agree, but I wish that he would refer me to any fears that anyone is striding forward with such threats to us.
Madam Speaker: Thank you. We shall now move on to the next business. No doubt, had questions been asked and answered more briskly, I could have called more hon. Members. I am sure that the House is with me on that.
Points of Order
4.27 pm
Mr. Paul Flynn (Newport, West): On a point of order, Madam Speaker. May I ask for your help--as you are the defender of Back-Bench privileges--in the deplorable deterioration of the parliamentary answers that we have been receiving? I have received an apology from the Northern Ireland Office for giving me entirely wrong information, and an apology from the Department of Social Security for telling me that an answer was in a leaflet in the Library. That leaflet did not yet exist, and it was not printed until a month later.
However, those answers pale into insignificance compared to one that I received to a question that I tabled on 19 November 1996. I was astonished to receive, on the same day, a telephone call from a journalist, who said, "That is a huge sum." I had not yet received the answer. The question was:
Later that day, I received a holding answer. The next day, I was told:
The Home Office, however, has not yet answered my question, and it has deliberately withheld that information from the House. The Department's reply is a deliberate, calculated untruth. If I were speaking outside the House, I would describe it as a lie.
It is outrageous to treat Back Benchers in that way, forcing us to ask question after question to get information and then deceiving us. I hope that the House can inquire into that, and will consider the Metropolitan police's comment that the spending is excessive and unnecessary.
Madam Speaker:
I have listened with care to the hon. Gentleman's point. He seems to have an argument with the Minister concerned. It is not a point of order, but I am concerned by the issue that he has raised. I hope that those on the Treasury Bench have noted the matter. If the hon. Gentleman gives me the information, I shall see what I can do about it.
Mr. Alan Duncan (Rutland and Melton):
On a point of order, Madam Speaker. During Prime Minister's questions this afternoon, there was a disturbance in the Gallery, which was echoed by confusion on the Floor of the House, as a result of which you exercised your authority from the Chair. I was not able to see exactly what took place amidst that confusion, but will you confirm that your ruling was that the hon. Member for Ceredigion and Pembroke, North (Mr. Dafis) was
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Madam Speaker:
The hon. Gentleman has not quite got it right.
Mr. Alex Salmond (Banff and Buchan)
rose--
Madam Speaker:
Hold on. I can deal with this.
The hon. Gentleman has not quite got it correct. I was cautioning hon. Members--there were more than one of them--who were applauding an interruption. I do not approve of hon. Members applauding an interruption to the proceedings of the House. I gave a caution. I did not use the Standing Order. I am rather more ferocious than I thought I appeared to be. The hon. Member for Ceredigion and Pembroke, North (Mr. Dafis) seemed rather intimidated and got up and went out. I wish that hon. Members would do that more frequently. I have not expelled him from the House for the remainder of the day. I cautioned him.
Mr. Salmond:
Further to that point of order, Madam Speaker. My interpretation of what you have said is that you were giving a yellow card rather than a red card. As one of those who has had a red card in the past, I appreciate the difference. In terms of order, even in unparliamentary terms, I can think of worse things in the House than applause for a small nation that is suffering genocide--one is school sneaks on the Conservative Benches.
Madam Speaker:
I disapprove of interruptions to the proceedings of the House. Now we are going to move on.
Mr. Andrew Faulds (Warley, East):
Further to that point of order, Madam Speaker.
Madam Speaker:
There can be no further points of order. I have dealt with the matter.
Madam Speaker:
Order. If the hon. Gentleman has another point of order, I shall take it.
Mr. Faulds:
It is the same issue.
Madam Speaker:
In that case, we must go on with the ten-minute rule motion.
Mr. Andrew Rowe (Mid-Kent):
I beg to move,
The young people of the nation do not feel involved in the government of the country. Not only do they despise us politicians; they refuse to vote in elections. At the last general election, the number of 18 to 24-year-olds who did not vote rose to 45 per cent. There are signs that they will be joined in their indifference by the succeeding cohort of first-time voters. If those trends continue, the claim of this place to represent the nation will be badly undermined.
While we spend much of our time here passing laws to regulate in finest detail the acceptable materials for building houses in areas of special landscape importance or the breeds of dog that can or cannot be bought in pet shops, the future of our democratic society is coming into question. Our young people are steadily marching away from electoral involvement. The aim of the Bill is to arrest that desertion.
Under the Bill, local authorities would be required to set aside a proportion of their revenue support grant income for expenditure requested by young people. Unlike existing arrangements for funding the youth service, for example, the money could be spent only in response to proposals submitted by young people. If they knew that some of their ideas were assured of funding, they would have an incentive to connect with the political process. At the moment, only a tiny handful of would-be career politicians and a slightly larger number of single-issue enthusiasts see any purpose in taking part in politics.
Wherever I go, I meet young people who ask why politicians pay no attention to them. "You never ask us what we think. Even if you occasionally do, you don't pay any attention to our ideas, and nothing changes," they say. The younger generation have no desire to run society, but they want to be taken seriously by those who do.
In May, an ad hoc organisation, Heirs to the Millennium, which I chair, set out to collect young people's ideas for party manifestos, and submitted them to the party leaders. The young predicted that nothing would come of it. They will all be mightily surprised if they are taken seriously by the party policy-makers, and even more surprised if any effort is made to tell them what part their suggestions played in the discussions. Their justified cynicism is one reason why I am introducing the Bill.
Some local authorities are beginning to think about how consultation might be introduced. In Croydon, for example, an alliance of the mayor and Madam Speaker's predecessor--it is no surprise that it was my right hon. and noble Friend Lord Weatherill who set up the Speaker's commission on citizenship--has established
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In my experience, young people nearly always have valuable ideas to offer and new insights to bring to the problems that bedevil us all. Most local authorities have no idea how to involve young people, and actually could not care less. If local authorities had a sum of money that could be spent only in response to ideas submitted by young people, they would undoubtedly facilitate the creation of channels for collecting and evaluating such ideas.
The matter is urgent. With every year that passes, we are pushing the age at which young people become self-determining adults further and further into middle age. For many of the most able and creative people in Britain, the age at which they feel welcome to play a responsible part in adult society is beyond the age at which Pitt became Prime Minister, and close to the age at which Alexander the Great died. Add to that the pressures on them when they first enter work, which discourage them from taking an active role in the cumbersome and time-consuming structures through which we normally work, and it can be seen how huge is the swathe of people whose opinions and experiences we disregard.
I use the word "experience" advisedly, because there are many areas of modern life in which the young alone have any serious "street cred". Who, for example, knows about drugs in the playground or the disco, or gangs or bullying--the young, who experience such things every day, or Members of Parliament, councillors and local government officials? For most of us, the youth culture that creates so many tensions in our communities is a closed book. If we are lucky, it may be selectively opened for us by our children. We have virtually no first-hand experience of its dangers and opportunities.
I believe that, if we required local authorities to hypothecate a sum of money to be released solely on the application of young people, we would kill several birds with one stone. We would encourage young people to make sensible plans to improve the communities in which they live; we would give them a sense of ownership of what was done as a result; we would find all sorts of new ways in which to approach some of our problems or be reassured that we were not missing obvious tricks.
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I have no doubt that many councillors and council officers will panic at the idea and claim that, with all the many claims on council resources, there is no scope for any other activity, and they will be paranoid about the chance of some of the money being wasted. To argue thus is to argue mindlessly.
Everyone in the House can quote appalling examples of spectacular wastefulness that has been incurred by the very people who are the quickest to refuse to give responsibility to others. I have little doubt that the cost of meetings called simply to monitor the runaway expenditure on the British library exceeds any sum that is likely to be made available to young people if my Bill were to become law.
I am not suggesting additional expenditure. Indeed, I would be out of order to do so in a ten-minute Bill. I merely suggest that some of the money currently spent would be at least as well spent at the instance of young people. I believe that, if young people were given the responsibility for putting into practice ideas that they themselves had put forward and could call on the sort of support available to councillors, we would see a cost-effectiveness in delivering those projects that would be the envy of many local authority auditors.
We have to find new ways to make our young people able and willing to share in the governance of this land. After all, they will inherit it. They will have to pick up our mistakes, and will have to look after us in our old age. If we leave them on the outside and dismiss their hopes, fears, ideas and aspirations as irrelevant to the serious business of politics, we may wake up one day to find this place and all its local authority creations up and down the country sent packing by a generation whose views of our meanderings would echo Oliver Cromwell's.
My Bill is a tiny step towards demonstrating real interest in the younger generation and a small attempt to enlist their enthusiasm, experience, competence and idealism in solving the problems that we here find so hard to deal with. I hope that the House will give me leave to introduce it.
"To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what was the total cost of the police participation in the state opening of Parliament."
The journalist told me that the answer was £284,000.
"As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister stated in his reply to the hon. Member . . . any additional costs of police staff who took part in the ceremony are not separately costed."--[Official Report, 20 November 1996; Vol. 285, c. 621.]
I am holding a letter that was sent from one department of the Metropolitan police to another. The heading is "Parliamentary question: Mr. Paul Flynn, Newport, West." The letter contains the answer that was reported to the Metropolitan police committee, on 15 November--three days before--and provides not only a detailed answer and the total cost, but even further details. It is one of the fullest answers that one could receive.
4.32 pm
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require local authorities to take into account the priorities of young people in allocating expenditure.
The Bill addresses one of the important political issues of our day. While we here debate the management of the great public services such as health, education, housing or social security, a silent revolution is occurring which, if left unnoticed for much longer, could destroy this place and render all that we do here of no effect.
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