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8.39 pm
Mr. Peter Atkinson (Hexham): Many of us who have attended the majority of the debate will leave the House with a profound sense of disappointment that we did not get a single answer to any of the key questions that were put to the right hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair). As my hon. Friend the Member for Chingford (Mr. Duncan Smith) said, there was nothing on tax and, of course, nothing on the West Lothian question. I hope that the hon. Member for Hamilton (Mr. Robertson) will produce more answers, but I do not expect he will.
The Labour party spin doctors at the media centre at Millbank will have had an opportunity by now to work through the speech of the right hon. Member for Sedgefield, and they will have realised that he was clearly outgunned by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister. Perhaps they will come up with an answer to the mysterious West Lothian question, unlike the hon. Member for Paisley, North (Mrs. Adams), who said that the West Lothian question was not a question for Scotland, but a question for England.
The Leader of the Opposition treated us to a display of arrogant sophistry. He might have got away with that in a school debate, and if he had been speaking at a debating competition between Fettes school and Hamilton academy, I would have given him some points; but this is the House of Commons, which represents the British people and they cannot be treated with such arrogance as the right hon. Gentleman displayed tonight. Our democracy works in the normal way, in that all the parties set out their stalls at the general election, but the 1997 general election will be unique, in that the main opposition party--the Labour party--is not setting out its stall on tax, on Europe or on the constitution of this
country. How can the people decide which way to vote if one party does not set out its stall to be judged by the electorate?
I am glad to see the hon. Member for Tyne Bridge (Mr. Clelland) back in the Chamber, because the people of the north will need to make a judgment about whether to support an elected regional assembly for the north, which is what the hon. Gentleman calls for. Before they vote, however, they should be told what a regional assembly for the north means, and in his speech today, the hon. Gentleman made no reference to what was involved and what it would cost. Let me tell the electorate of the north of England that the Conservative view is perfectly clear: we do not want an elected regional assembly for the north of England.
Let me warn the people of the north of England what the Labour party is up to. Labour is using an organisation called the North of England Assembly of Local Authorities as a way of promoting directly elected regional government in the north of England. The hon. Gentleman mentioned that assembly, which was set up with the perfectly justifiable aim of being a forum for local authorities in the area to discuss matters of common concern. It was not set up to promote regional government or to pilot the north of England as a candidate for regional government.
However, the advertisement in The Guardian for the successor to the secretary of that organisation asks for a "director" at double the salary that the previous incumbent of the post received. That new director would have the duties of promoting regional government and piloting the region for regional government in England. That is a disgrace. The purpose of that regional assembly has not been put to the people of the north of England at all. The assembly now has a budget of £250,000 a year, so every council tax payer in the north of England makes a contribution to the Labour party's propaganda campaign. The assembly was set up with good intentions, but has now been turned into a Trojan horse for Labour plans for devolution in this country.
The other aspect of regional government that Opposition Members have not explained is the extensive powers that it will have. It is proposed that the elected regional assembly will take over the role of the Government office for the north-east and the £0.5 billion budget that that Department controls. It will take over most aspects of the lives of the people of the north of England. Let us hear exactly what is proposed--this information comes from the Labour party's own document.
The assembly will take over matters such as business development, industrial planning, strategic planning, environment and pollution controls, purity of rivers, transport in conurbations, railway subsidies, housing and regeneration, the local sports council and arts council and the funding of further education colleges. In addition, it will move in on health arrangements, because one of the preconditions of the assembly is that it will have a right to be consulted on all allocations of health service cash and all capital expenditure in the local health authority. It will, for example, have a say in whether my new local hospital at Hexham is built.
Who will control that assembly? Sadly, we in the north of England have an unenviable reputation for local government waste, cronyism, favours to friends and
sometimes outright corruption. Decades in power for the Labour party have made many Labour councillors arrogant about their voters. After being in power for so many years, the only people whom Labour councillors have to fear are usually those on their own side.
Mr. McAllion:
Look at the sleaze on your own Benches.
Mr. Atkinson:
The hon. Gentleman should wait a little while.
Regional government will be about jobs for the boys and costly additional bureaucracy. The people who run it will seek to abolish some of our existing local government structures. One of the preconditions of regional government has been that we remove one tier of local government in the north. In Northumberland, it will not be the Labour-controlled county council that goes, but our district councils. True local government will be removed from the people of Northumberland in order to give jobs to the Labour boys.
Let us look at some of those Labour boys who might well get jobs. Last Saturday, The Journal, Newcastle's morning newspaper, carried three stories in a single edition on this subject. A headline on page 2 read "Police quiz council chief", and the ensuing story told how an elected councillor was being quizzed about a possible expenses fraud. On page 7, the headline was: "Councillor to liquidate print firm". The first paragraph stated:
On page 26, there was another story about the Labour party.
Mr. Clelland:
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. We are supposed to be debating the constitution. Is the way in which the hon. Gentleman is proceeding in order?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes):
I have been following the hon. Member's argument and seeking to perceive the connection which I hope he will shortly make. Hon. Members will know that Adjournment debates are, of their nature, fairly wide and the constitution is a fairly wide subject anyway, but I trust that the hon. Gentleman will be able to satisfy me and the House.
Mr. Atkinson:
I can satisfy you, Madam Deputy Speaker. The point I am trying to make is that, sadly, elected regional government in the north-east will be run by Labour, because the Labour party has exclusively controlled local politics in the area for many decades. It will be run as a system of jobs for the boys, and I am pointing out the sort of boys who will be getting the jobs.
The third story in that edition of The Journal stated:
Mr. Dafydd Wigley (Caernarfon):
I am grateful to be called at the fag end of the debate to give the view of my party, although it's view has been pretty well attacked by some of the speakers, not least by the hon. Member for Clwyd, North-West (Mr. Richards) in the claptrap that he spoke about the economic position of Wales. I am sorry that he is not in his seat at the moment.
It is unfortunate, not only that that is the case, but that Wales has not been represented on the Front Benches during the debate. I would have expected the Secretary of State for Wales to be directly involved in a debate as important as this, and I expected the main spokesman on the Opposition Front Bench to be from Wales. Indeed, a week ago today, the Leader of the House said that he expected that the Secretary of State for Scotland and the Secretary of State for Wales would be the ones to participate in the debate. I believe that the people of Wales are heartily sick of the way in which the needs of Wales are marginalised within the Chamber; that is one of the most pressing reasons why we need constitutional change.
During the Prime Minister's opening speech, I put it to him that he appeared to believe that there was only one alternative to the status quo--which is unacceptable in Wales--that alternative being full self-government, because the Conservative party was totally and unreasonably unwilling to consider any compromise. He answered, "We shall give greater powers to the Welsh Grand Committee." In fact, he said "We have given greater powers to the Welsh Grand Committee," although Welsh Members have not seen them.
That Grand Committee is incapable of taking any decision on behalf of the people of Wales; it is a talking shop par excellence. It does not make the Executive answerable to Members from Wales, and it does not advance a Welsh agenda or formulate policy. If that is the only offering that the Conservative Government are willing to make, it is little wonder that the people of Wales believe that they have no alternative but to seek full self-government for our country.
During recent years, the failure of the existing political system to give us democracy in Wales has been exacerbated. We do not have democracy in Wales, for the most basic of reasons. As the Prime Minister said in his opening speech, he accepts and recognises that Wales and Scotland are nations in their own right. Being nations in
our own right, we have slightly different priorities, values and expectations from those in England. They may be better or worse, according to the eyes of the perceiver, but they are different. Those are manifested most in the political representation that has come through from Wales to the Chamber during the 140 years since there has been some form of democracy.
It has been said--it bears repeating--that never, in any single election during that period, has Wales elected a majority of Tory Members of Parliament. Following some elections, there has not been a single Tory Member from Wales. At the moment, with a Tory Government in power, only six of the 38 Members from Wales are in the Conservative party, and three of those have majorities of fewer than 1,000 votes.
Probably, following the general election in the next two or three months, once again there will not be a single Tory Member from Wales, yet we may find ourselves governed by a Conservative party, whose values, priorities and policies are totally out of line with the needs of Wales and the wishes of the Welsh people. That is not democracy.
People argue that we are seeking an additional tier of government. That tier of government is to a large extent already in place. We have a Welsh Office, 80 attendant quangos and a Secretary of State with responsibility for £7,000 million of public expenditure, but we do not have democratic answerability for the way in which the policies that decide how those resources are used are enacted.
The past four Secretaries of State for Wales have not even been Welsh constituency Members of Parliament. They have been sent in as governors-general to run our country. The origin of the Secretary of Stateship for Wales was the idea of having a member of the Cabinet who could speak up from Welsh experience, knowing our Welsh needs, and who could articulate our hopes and fears. Instead, we now have a commercial traveller on behalf of the Cabinet in Wales, peddling Tory policies from London, not representing Wales in Cabinet.
The system that was supposed to safeguard Wales has broken down, yet the House is not willing to give an inch to allow any variation in policy formulation to meet the diverse needs of Wales. When the Welsh Language Act 1993, the Local Government (Wales) Act 1994 and other Acts were going through their stages, the Committees that considered those Bills were packed with English constituency Members of Parliament, who knew nothing about what was being debated and did not have to live with the consequences of the legislation.
We want a parliament for Wales as a first step to Wales becoming a self-governing country within the European Union. In its first stage, the parliament would take over all the functions under the Welsh Office with full law-making powers, and all taxes collected in Wales would be aggregated to a Welsh Treasury Department. That parliament should also have direct links with the European Union, because we know by now how many of the decisions that affect Wales daily are taken far away in Europe, not here in Westminster.
If we have a real, effective voice for Wales in the European Union, we can expect to obtain a better deal than the pathetic bargain that has come from the representation that London has given for Wales in Brussels.
This week, the Library of the House of Commons released figures showing that, in 1996, for the first time, the gross domestic product per capita of the Irish Republic overtook that of the United Kingdom as a whole. Can you imagine that being the case, Madam Deputy Speaker, if Ireland had still been governed from Westminster, and can you imagine the people of Ireland ever wanting to turn the clock back to those days when they were dying of famine?
The people of the Ireland have been able to build up their economy, first by virtue of the fact that they have control of their legislation, and secondly because they have been able to work with the grain of Europe to obtain the best deal that they can for their people. That has not happened for Wales. Ireland has been able to get 10 times as many resources per capita from the European Union than has Wales.
The people of Wales--especially the farmers of Wales, considering what has happened with the BSE during the past year, during which they have paid a price for the way in which the Government have failed to represent us--need a real parliament.
My sadness in hearing the opening speech by the Leader of the Opposition was that he made hardly any reference to Wales. There was certainly no justification for giving Scotland a parliament, albeit with inadequate powers but at least full law-making powers over some subjects, and giving Wales an assembly with no primary law-making powers whatever. That is not good enough.
We need a parliament that can make a difference in matters such as education and health, housing and employment--the matters that are important to the people of Wales. We are seeking a parliament, not just a building on the banks of the Taff instead of on the banks of the Thames so that we can say, "We have a symbol," but a powerhouse of a parliament, which can make a difference in the everyday lives of the ordinary people of Wales--their education and health, jobs and housing.
Our great fear is that, if we get only an assembly with no primary law-making powers, in five years' time we may have a Redwood-led or Portillo-led Government who will try to bring in right-wing legislation to privatise education or health. It may not apply to Scotland, where there will be a parliament with law-making powers, but it will apply to Wales, and our assembly will be nothing more than a glorified moaning shop, which cannot make any difference.
In conclusion, I make an appeal: when we have that referendum, let us ensure that it is fair. It should be a consultative referendum that gives all the people of Wales the right to express their preference. The options should be, first, full self-government in Europe; secondly, a parliament with law-making powers, rather than full self-government; thirdly, the Labour party's suggestion of an elected assembly; and, fourthly, the status quo for Tories who believe that nothing can be done to improve the situation. Those four alternatives should be on the ballot paper in a referendum, if that referendum is to be meaningful. If they are not, the referendum will not be worth the paper it is written on.
"A print firm whose links with a crisis-hit North union were at the centre of a probe is set to go into liquidation, it emerged last night."
The business is run by a local councillor. A senior member of a Tyneside local authority put his business into liquidation after it was revealed that his girl friend, who works for the union, was giving him £1,000-worth of work a week. He had also been working for local Labour-controlled authorities.
"A Labour Party official has been banned from attending party meetings after he was accused of assaulting a colleague."
Those are the sort of people of whom the population of the north of England should beware. That is what regional government will mean: jobs for the boys and extra cost. It is no wonder that local business and local people do not want that form of devolution.
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