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Mr. Blunkett: I had not intended to intervene, but I wanted to take the opportunity to welcome the new Deputy Speaker to his first sitting and to offer our congratulations to him. I also want to ask the shadow Secretary of State whether he thinks that wanting the best for all children can be described as hypocrisy.
Mr. Lilley: When what someone has decided is best for his child is what he refuses to others, I think that there is no other word but "hypocrisy" to describe that decision--although "arrogance" is perhaps the runner-up, given the way in which the Government have handled the issue.
That is the arrogance of which we have seen so much over the first few days of this Government. First, there was the Bank of England: without having warned the
voters, the Chancellor ceded interest rate policy to the Bank. He made what he described as one of the most fundamental changes in the way in which the country is governed without even bothering to make a statement to the House. Then came the issue of Prime Minister's questions. The Prime Minister now tells us that he will answer questions only once a week--and, as though that were not enough, he even wants to be told the questions in advance. That is another change that we now know to have been pushed through without any consultation or agreement with Madam Speaker.
Mr. David Winnick (Walsall, North):
I think that we have just heard a leadership bid. It is not for me to intervene in the internal affairs of the Conservative party, but I must say that I heard hon. Friends sitting behind me say that they hoped that the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) would win the election for the Leader of the Opposition. I do not wish, however, to declare any preferences.
Let me be the first Labour Member to congratulate you on your appointment, Mr. Deputy Speaker. This is a very different House of Commons from the one that I last addressed: it is almost impossible to believe how much the House has changed as a result of the electorate's decision on 1 May. Understandably, much attention has been paid to the increase in the number of female Members of Parliament--mainly, of course, on the Labour Benches. That is indeed progress, and I submit that further progress will be made when the number of female Members no longer attracts attention from any quarter. I hope that that day is not too far away.
I welcomed the mention in the Queen's Speech of prohibiting the private possession of handguns. Like a number of my hon. Friends, I argued in the previous Parliament that after Dunblane we should take drastic action on handguns. The previous Government went so far and no further, and I am pleased to learn that the House will have the opportunity to vote for a total ban on handguns. I take it that it will be a free vote, and I know which way my vote will go.
If I have any regret, it is that the House did not take the necessary action 10 years ago, following the tragedy at Hungerford. Indeed, in the previous Parliament I criticised the Government, but also criticised Opposition Members such as myself, who should perhaps have been more forthright in demanding the kind of action that was taken, at least in part, after the further and terrible tragedy at Dunblane, which we must never forget. I accept that we might not have succeeded after Hungerford, but nevertheless we should have been more forthright.
The ban on trade union membership at GCHQ--Government communications headquarters--has now been lifted. As some of my hon. Friends know, during
business questions I took the opportunity to welcome the lifting of that ban. If there was ever an illustration of the arbitrary way in which the previous Government acted, it was their decision to impose the ban, without any justification. I reiterate the fact that two years before the ban, after the Falklands war victory, the director-general of GCHQ praised those involved in intelligence gathering.
We should pay tribute to those who fought the ban year in, year out--people such as Mike Grindley, who must have wondered at times whether he would ever see victory and the lifting of the ban. Those people have a spirit of believing in and fighting for a principle. Mike Grindley was dismissed from GCHQ and refused the compensation because the principle was so important, in fact so sacred, to him that he would never give up the fight. Victory has come to him, and I should like him to be given an award for the fight that he so bravely and heroically put up for an important principle, which is certainly appreciated by the Government if not by the Opposition.
Mr. Fabricant:
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that GCHQ has an important role in the nation's security? Does he advocate trade unions in the armed forces?
Mr. Winnick:
As usual, the hon. Gentleman's intervention is totally irrelevant. When the time comes for a debate on the armed forces, we can express our views.
Mr. Fabricant:
The hon. Gentleman does not know the answer.
Mr. Winnick:
The hon. Gentleman has asked me a question; if he will be good enough to be quiet for a moment, I can give my response. I am speaking about GCHQ. If and when there is a debate on the armed forces, we shall deal with the matter to which the hon. Gentleman alluded.
I am pleased that the Queen's Speech makes it clear that, after 18 years of Tory rule, local authorities will once again be allowed to start building as well as carrying out essential improvements. I am sure that new Members will find in their constituency surgeries, as I find in mine, that most of the people who come do so because they want to be housed in the first place or because they live in a high-rise block, perhaps with two or more children, and are waiting to be rehoused in a house.
It is disgraceful that for 18 years local authorities have been denied the means of building rented accommodation. Most people want to buy, but those who are not in a position to do so have been punished by being made to wait so long to be rehoused. It is right that capital receipts should be used in a phased way, as we clearly described in the general election campaign, so that local authorities can once again undertake the work that they did under Governments of whichever party before 1979.
In 1978, the last full year of a Labour Government, more than 75,000 local authority dwellings and nearly 18,000 housing association dwellings were started in England. In 1996, only 500 local authority dwellings and nearly 22,000 housing association dwellings were started. I am not sure where the 500 were--certainly not in my borough, where no starts have been made since 1979. The 22,000 housing association dwellings in no way compensated for the number of local authority dwellings built previously. No wonder there is so much housing misery and hardship.
In the late 1960s, when I was a Member of Parliament, and in the 1970s, when I was outside the House, I never saw the scenes of homelessness that are now so common. I do not drive home; I go to Charing Cross station, and people now are always lying down for the night there and all along the Strand, and many of us see homeless people in our constituencies. That is only one illustration of the current housing shortage and the misery that it causes. There are also the jobs involved in housing construction and in furniture and other related industries that go hand in hand with housing starts.
There has been much justified concern about poverty and near poverty over the past few years, which, of course, was not mentioned by the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden. Much of that poverty has been deliberate Government policy. I want inequality to be narrowed considerably in the next few years. Large-scale unemployment, low wages--often very low wages--short-time working, insecure employment and the abolition of the wages councils have all contributed to poverty and inequality. As we knew during the post-war years, there is no more effective way of ending poverty and near poverty than once again to give unemployed people the chance to earn their living.
Far too many people in the west midlands are paid very low wages. Some are even paid less than £2 an hour. It is almost impossible to believe, but that is not unknown in the west midlands. I am sure that it is true in other parts of the country. A national minimum wage is needed and justified. I listen carefully to the arguments against it, but I do not accept them. I found it nauseating in the previous Parliament that Conservative Members who were not content with their parliamentary salaries went out of their way--not illegitimately or in a way that would come under the Downey report--to take directorships and consultancies, but lectured us about how terrible a national minimum wage would be, because it would undermine the economy. I used to wonder how they would like to work for such disgraceful wages, when they were not content with their parliamentary salaries or last year's increase.
There are many changes and reforms that I would like. I do not know whether this is old Labour, new Labour or any other Labour, but I accept that those changes cannot come about overnight or in months. After 18 years, it will take time--more than one Parliament--to bring about many of those changes on a secure footing. In the days after the general election, people felt relieved. Perhaps that feeling was confined to me, although that would surprise me. I am talking not only about Labour activists. People came up to me in the street and at the surgery that I held soon after the election and told me how relieved they were at the change of Government.
Without wishing to exaggerate, I believe that in some respects it was a bit like the feeling in eastern Europe in 1989. For so long, there was a feeling in Britain that there would never be a change of Government. People felt the arrogance of those in power, the way in which time and again the Conservatives belittled any belief that there would be a change of Government. They gave the strong impression, and I do not believe that they have learned the lesson yet, that they were the masters and had every right to rule. Like the communists in eastern Europe, they
believed that they had the historical right to rule this country for ever and a day. The electorate decided otherwise.
The Prime Minister told the parliamentary Labour party at Church house last week that Labour Members should always remember that we are the servants of the electorate. I believe that we should always bear that in mind. We are indeed the servants of the electorate. We should at all times carry out our duties with modesty and humility, always recognising that in a democracy, it is the electorate who decide at the appropriate time who should be the Government of the day. I hope, and I have every reason to believe, that we shall never show, however long we remain in office, the arrogance of those who ruled the country for the past 18 years.
I believe that the House of Commons will win back respect, as it has to, because our reputation is not high for all sorts of reasons. Its reputation is nowhere near what we would like it to be. We shall win back the respect of the electorate to the extent that people will see that we are doing the job for which we were elected as Members of Parliament; that we are not in the pay of lobbyists and companies; and that we have not been elected to get second, third and fourth jobs. Our job is here, first and foremost. When people see that over a period, regardless of my party's fortunes in future general elections, it will do much for the House of Commons.
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