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8.14 pm
Mr. Alan Hurst (Braintree): I believe that it is the tradition to compliment an hon. Member on making his maiden speech. This is in effect a double maiden, but I nevertheless compliment my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty) on a speech which is sure to overshadow mine. I studied it with great interest to see whether I could pick up on certain points.
I am proud to represent the county division of Braintree in Essex. At one time, my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Mr. Mackinlay) was the sole Labour Member for the county of Essex, but we have multiplied that figure a number of times--I believe that there are now six of us.
It is not only a matter of tradition but a personal wish that I pay tribute to my predecessor, Tony Newton, the former Leader of the House. Hon. Members will not be surprised to learn that he was very highly regarded in the constituency or that the election campaign in Braintree
was clean and straightforward. I shall certainly convey to my constituents the fact that Tony Newton was clearly held in high regard in the House. He served the constituency for 23 years. It is some consolation to me that, when he was first elected in 1974, he had a smaller majority than I have. For various reasons, not least his own effort, he increased that majority to 17,000 at one point. I therefore look with hope to the future.
I must also mention some other previous illustrious representatives of the Braintree division. One who will spring to the mind of older Members is Mr. Tom Driberg, who represented the division between 1942 and 1955 when it was joined with Maldon. Of course, he was first elected in a wartime by-election as an Independent. Come the 1945 election, he was given the choice--in the Maldon Labour hall, I believe--of taking the Labour ticket or not. Tom Driberg took the obvious course. He took the Labour candidature and went on to represent the constituency for a further 10 years. To this day, he is remembered in virtually every small hamlet and nook and cranny of what is a widespread division, even though it is some 42 years since he represented the constituency.
Another name that I must mention is that of Sir Valentine Crittall, who had the honour of being the first Essex Labour Member of Parliament elected outside the London area since 1923. His name is linked with window frames; his family firm was a major industry in the constituency, especially in the model village of Silver End.
It may come as a surprise to hon. Members that I mention a Mr. R. A. Butler, who represented two villages in my division, Earls Colne and Gosfield. Conservative Members will remember that he twice failed to become the leader of the Conservative party. I fear that he might have had just as much difficulty in doing so were he here today. However, Mr. Butler is still well regarded by Labour voters in that part of the constituency, even after such a long time.
For hon. Members who are not familiar with real Essex--central and north Essex--I should point out that the constituency of Braintree includes not only the town of Braintree, which would be good enough in itself, but Witham and Bocking. They are mediaeval wool towns. The area is surrounded by approximately 40 villages and hamlets of various sizes--Kelvedon and Coggeshall are among the larger, while Rotten End is a mere hamlet with only a few residents.
Industry provided the backbone of the towns of Braintree and Bocking, which were surrounded by agriculture. It is tragic to see the changes that have occurred since 30 or 40 years ago; old photographs show the market squares of those towns full of men and women coming home from work. Full employment was universally understood in those days to be a normal part of our system. In my constituency, we have lost many major employers, some of which will be familiar even to those who do not know my part of Essex well: Coulthard, Lake and Elliott, Hunt and Crittall. All these have either vanished or been reduced to shadows of their former selves. It is easy to imagine the effects on local employment, especially when one bears in mind the fact that employment on the land has also been in decline. Agriculture was still a major employer in the constituency as recently as 25 or 30 years ago.
This explains why my constituents are most interested in the new Government's welfare-to-work proposals. Indeed, the logical centrepiece of our whole programme is welfare to work. We have heard Conservative Members today discussing the perceived inequities of taxing the profits of the public utilities, but I can assure them that my constituents will welcome the money being channelled into employment and training--initially for young people, but I trust that in the longer term the programme will generate wider successes.
I want to end on a local matter. I am sure that my constituents will have been encouraged to hear of the review of hospital provision in London, and to read the report that appeared in The Guardian today which stated that large, centralised hospitals are not necessarily the answer to medical need. It may already be too late; we may have already passed midnight--I make no reference here to darkness--but I would ask those responsible for health to consider Black Notley hospital. It may not be at the forefront of their minds at present, but that hospital outside Braintree has a long history and has been greatly valued in the constituency. The health authority has scheduled it for closure, and planning permission has been obtained, as so often happens I am sorry to say, to redevelop the site for gain. The priority seems to be selling houses as opposed to providing local facilities.
I hope that, even at this late stage, some consideration may be given to maintaining medical facilities at the site, to serve not just the town of Braintree, but the surrounding villages.
Mr. Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood):
I begin by congratulating you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, on your election to your post. I look forward to being able to address the House on a number of future occasions under your auspices.
One thing strikes me immediately as I rise to wind up this debate on education, employment and the national health service. The Prime Minister has made great virtue of the fact that new Labour Members have been sent to this place to work. Quite a few of them seem, however, to have gone home to dinner this evening. I find it surprising on the first main day of the Queen's Speech debate that there should be such difficulty keeping the debate going to fill the allotted time. Clearly, more than 200 new Labour Members this evening have preferred to eat new Labour dinners than to come here and debate education, which the Prime Minister regards as his first priority, and employment, which I would expect to be a major priority in the constituencies of all those absent 200 new Labour Members. There is also the matter of health, my former ministerial responsibility; I would have expected them to want to voice their concerns about the NHS.
I have also been struck by how much Labour Members have concentrated on the record of the former Government. Almost every Labour speech has mentioned the shortcomings of that Government. If this were really the radical Government that the Prime Minister claims,
Labour Members would have risen today to enthuse about a genuinely radical programme, explaining to the House, their constituents and the country how new Labour's ideas will change the lives of their constituents.
Yet almost all the Labour speeches we have heard today have failed to mention how the Government's ideas will change the country. Instead, they have given us a tired litany of perceived difficulties after 18 years of Conservative government.
Despite these general criticisms, I do want to congratulate those who have made their maiden speeches on their fluency and presentational skills. Perhaps we should not be surprised by those attributes. New Labour Members have led us to come to expect fluency and presentational skills. Still, almost all of them paid gracious tributes to their predecessors.
There cannot be many maiden speakers who can refer to two predecessors as distinguished as Tony Newton and Rab Butler, who were mentioned by the hon. Member for Braintree (Mr. Hurst). Tony Newton was a sad loss to our side. When I was first elected, in 1979, his was the friendly face that met me as the representative of the Whips Office. He was my delegated Whip who tried, not always successfully, to keep me on the straight and narrow. Between 1979 and 1997, he developed a reputation second to none in this House as an effective constituency Member and as a friend of the House of Commons. He loved this place and understood its workings. Every member of the Conservative Government came to respect him as someone who could persuade us that we really did agree even though we usually came to meetings thinking that we did not. We shall be the poorer without him.
Rab Butler was a key figure in Conservative history--one whom my party would do well to heed as it squares up to the challenges that it faces over the next few years.
The hon. Member for Shipley (Mr. Leslie) probably imagined that his colleagues would be able to keep this debate going until 9 o'clock--a perfectly reasonable assumption--so I do not criticise him for being absent. He spoke graciously of Sir Marcus Fox, who was a distinguished parliamentarian and another sad loss to the Conservative Benches. I understand that the hon. Member for Shipley is the youngest or almost the youngest Member of the House. In that, he follows in my footsteps--I was the youngest Member in the 1979 Parliament, but I was 27 when elected, so I was an old man compared with the 24-year-old elected in Shipley. He developed his argument clearly and fluently and I am sure that the House will hear more from him in the years ahead.
The hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Mrs. Stuart) paid a gracious tribute to her predecessor, Dame Jill Knight. All the Conservative Members who heard it will have been grateful for that.
I enjoyed the speech of the hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke). I particularly welcomed his unambiguous support for the private finance initiative and the hospital building project in Norwich. Given his background on a wing of the Labour party that would not in its time have been regarded as new Labour, the hon. Gentleman's endorsement in his maiden speech of an idea that was at the heart of so much of what the previous Government sought to do is a striking testament to the way in which the Conservative party has dominated the intellectual tide of the 1980s and 1990s.
The hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Mr. Turner) also paid a gracious tribute to Sir Andrew Bowden, who was not only a hard-working constituency Member of Parliament, but a man who developed a wide range of friends and admirers among those interested in the affairs of pensioners. He will also be sadly missed in the House of Commons.
The hon. Member for High Peak (Mr. Levitt) paid a gracious tribute to Charles Hendry. I have no doubt that Charles will soon be back in this place, resuming a career for which he was clearly well equipped. He served his constituents with distinction and I look forward to his return to this place. He is, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff) said, a distinguished and articulate representative of one-nation Conservatism.
The hon. Member for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty) paid tribute to his predecessor, Hugh Dykes. Hugh and I go back a long time. Throughout his time in the House of Commons, he remained a friend of mine, even if that was not immediately obvious from some of our public comments on his constituency concerns. I am sure that the new Secretary of State for Health will have further exchanges with his hon. Friends representing Harrow and surrounding constituencies. I look forward to watching the unfolding of that issue and the relationships between the Secretary of State and his hon. Friends.
I congratulate you, too, Mr. Deputy Speaker--as you have just changed places with another new Deputy Speaker--on your election to an important and distinguished post in our affairs.
I have told the new Secretary of State for Health privately and I repeat publicly that he comes to one of the best jobs in the Government. Conservative Members will watch with great care the way in which the right hon. Gentleman and his ministerial colleagues discharge their responsibilities. We are as committed as I do not doubt that he is to the principle on which the national health service was founded--that health care should be available to the people of this country on the basis of clinical need without regard to their ability to pay. That is the simple but powerful idea on which the national health service was built. The Conservative party, like the Labour party, is committed to that. We shall watch how he turns that idea into practice. Day by day, week by week, month by month, we shall be watching to see that under his stewardship the national health service delivers on the commitment for which it was established.
I do not detract from my welcome to the right hon. Gentleman when I observe that his appointment came as a little bit of a surprise. During the general election campaign, when I was debating with the health spokesmen from the other parties, I offered the Liberal Democrat spokesman a small wager on whether the new Secretary of State for National Heritage would assume the health brief if the Labour party won the election. The Liberal Democrat spokesman replied, "No bet." I thought that that was an interesting comment on the way in which the issue of health played out in the dying days of the last Parliament.
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