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Sir Nicholas Lyell: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is about to answer this question in his next few words, but as he has 44 per cent. of the vote, I hope that he will remember that he is in a minority position as against 56 per cent. Perhaps he will develop his argument.
Mr. Mitchell: Personally, I have far more than 44 per cent. of the vote, I am pleased to say.
If the Conservative party intends to stick to its opposition to proportional representation, in the minority position into which first-past-the-post has put it, that can be for no other reason than that it hopes to get power on the same minority basis again in future, and to abuse it in the same way. That is not what the people want.
The people want the Government who represent them and their wishes to reflect in the party strength in the House of Commons their votes for parties in the same proportion. That will come, because first we shall have the commission to agree on an alternative system, and then we shall have a referendum. I am convinced that that will change the first-past-the-post system, because people are fed up with government by embattled minority, which we have had for the past 20 years.
The people want a Government who listen. They want the same influence that the New Zealand electorate now have upon the system there. We are moving towards proportional representation, which would be a major means of freeing up our system.
Constitutional reform means open government. It means reform of the procedures of this place too, to give the people much more influence and impact on our legislation. I served on the Hansard Society's commission on the legislative process, and we recommended a legislative process very like the one that has now been developed in New Zealand.
Bills are introduced and then advertised, and a Committee receives representations from the people, interested parties and all groups concerned. It hears all their views. That avoids what happens in this country, when organisations come in at the last minute, when legislation is being finalised in Committee and say, "This is terrible. We want something done about it."
The New Zealand system avoids such last-minute discovery and involves the people. It also involves Members of Parliament in shaping legislation. That is important, with a majority as large as ours. Members of Parliament must have a more useful role in the system. If we are to be kept off the streets and away from malignancy--if I may make a joke about the large number of Labour Members--we must be usefully employed here rather than left milling around and regarded as mere brute votes at the disposal of the Whips. We have a higher dignity and importance than that, and that must be realised as part of the process of constitutional reform.
Constitutional reform involves handing over powers to the people--an empowered people. But, to conclude on a note of dissent, it does not involve handing supreme power to the Governor of the Bank of England to use in his own unaccountable fashion, to determine the economic interests of this country on behalf of the financial interests in the City, which he represents. The Labour party national executive, in its old, unregenerate days--in its old good days, some of us might say--said that whoever controlled monetary policy controlled the economic destiny of the nation. That is indeed true. I was horrified to find that the Governor of the Bank of England, Mr. Eddie George, was now in supreme power. I did not even know that he was standing at the election. I thought that I was standing and that the Labour party was. I did not know that Eddie George was contesting the election and had won it.
The change will mean that interest rates are marginally higher, when they have been too high for too long and need to come down. It will mean that the pound will be higher than it needs to be for the interests of competitive manufacturing and exports, when the pound is too high and needs to come down. A modern Government have only two weapons of economic management--the fiscal and the monetary. If we are not to increase tax rates, as we
are committed not to do, we must have greater freedom to use the monetary weapon to manage the destiny of our country and achieve the growth on which everything in Labour's policy depends.
I do not want to face the dichotomy that we faced at the election. The national campaign was about hypotheticals. It was about Europe, trust, honesty and sleaze. I was interested to see the new hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Bell) sitting in his isolation ward earlier. He is not here now to listen to my support for his stance. The campaign on the ground was about grievances, problems and difficulties. It was about the grumbles of the electorate, who faced cuts in the health service, delays in operations, cancelled appointments, increasing rolls in schools and the meanness of the benefits system. Those are the characteristics of a mean society, which has been bedevilled by cuts and economies for 18 years.
Local government, the health service and social services need more money and cannot face and must not be asked to face another round of cuts such as the long round of cuts under the outgoing Government. That was wasting by anorexia. [Hon. Members: "Ah."] That is why it is essential to expand the economy, so that Labour does not follow in the footsteps of the folly that has made local government less effective and less popular and unable to advance the cause of its people.
Mr. Peter Brooke (Cities of London and Westminster):
Mr. Deputy Speaker, I join others in congratulating you on having taken your office. It is a great pleasure to see you wearing a tie in some way related to cricket so early in your time in the Chair.
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell). He and I entered the House at by-elections within months of each other. We are both of us old lags. I have no doubt that I shall demonstrate that in my speech in the same way as he has just demonstrated it in his.
I join the hon. Gentleman in congratulating the hon. Member for Keighley (Mrs. Cryer). I played cricket for the Lords and Commons with her husband, who was in the great tradition of Yorkshire slow left-arm bowlers and, in that capacity, possessed a perfect but nagging length, which he then transferred into parliamentary affairs. It is a pleasure that she should speak so early in our deliberations in the House, because it increases the number of times that we shall hear her in the rest of the Parliament, to which we already look forward.
There have been signs in this week-long debate on the Queen's Speech that hangover and fatigue are overtaking the Government Benches. Even the Prime Minister's speech was described by a commentator as lacklustre. The Secretary of State for Scotland was a lively exception and my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) transformed the debate by the quality of his speech. In addressing the House as he did, he brought it home to me that the constitutional cheese that is being put in front of us owes less to Caerphilly than to Gruyere--the country of origin of which is addicted to referendums. I look forward more than I expected as I got up this morning to the reply by the Secretary of State for Wales, the right hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr. Davies).
In the early years of the 1950s, in a particular week, The Times on the Monday referred to the publication of the collected poems of the distinguished American poet Wallace Stevens, Faber and Faber, 2 guineas. On Tuesday, it reported with regret the death of Mr. Wallace Stevens. On Friday, the leading article in the Times Literary Supplement began with the words, "This has been a good year for Mr. Wallace Stevens." It has been a rather less good year for the Conservative party. Conversely, since 1 May, a bright morning has been visible for the Labour party.
I am one of the eight survivors in this House of the very first Administration of my noble Friend Lady Thatcher. I can remember exactly what it was like. I do not begrudge anyone in the new Administration a single moment of the bright joy that the Labour party is enjoying. I echo the quotation that the hon. Member for Great Grimsby gave from Wordsworth. One of the most vivid features of government that I recall is the headiness with which one took unpopular and radical decisions and the long delay that then elapsed before one had to introduce them. When they were exceeding unpopular, they were disagreeable and one forgot the headiness with which they were embarked upon.
I have a particular personal reason for wishing the new Administration well. I have only once taken part in a lawsuit, at an industrial tribunal. Our counsel was the present Lord Chancellor and the pupil who accompanied him throughout the case was the present Prime Minister. Given my satisfaction as their client on that occasion, it would be churlish of me to deny them as a citizen my good wishes for the task on which they have set out.
The people have spoken. The battle of Isandlwana is over and the defence of the mission station at Rorke's Drift is about to begin. At the heart of that defence will be the adherence to principle that has been at the heart of the Conservative party for the past 300 years, not least on the constitution. But in due course, as at Rorke's Drift, I hope that we shall mount periodic guerrilla forays into enemy territory, ever mindful of the comment at the cafe tables in Athens in 1945 when the news of the British election results arrived to the effect, "Poor old chap, fancy having to take to the hills at his age." I expect us to be a nimble, probing and, I hope, stylish Opposition. Incidentally, contrary to some rather lazy calculation in the media, 33 of us in my party have had experience of opposition before.
The Queen's Speech contains uncontroversial measures that are indistinguishable from the thinking of the previous Government. That is the scale of the
Conservative party's achievement in the past 22 years, even if most of the pledges on the Deputy Prime Minister's famous card were somewhat mouselike. I have listened to the verdicts of experts in the various fields--"Fairly limited," said one, "Modest," said another. In the most damning indictment of all, "Frankly pathetic," said the chairman of the British Medical Association.
The pledges were soundbites--the intellectual underpinning for a poster campaign that seemed to promise so much more--but they were simple enough to remember, even for the candidate who uttered that memorably banal response to a journalist, "I am not an individual. You must speak to Millbank."
The principal feature of the Queen's Speech, which distinguishes it from the policies of the other main party, is the proposals on the constitution, which is the subject of today's debate. The debate is too short and crowded to dissect each of the Government's constitutional proposals this morning, but I am conscious that I shall have serial opportunities to examine them again in the future. Each proposal is, however, surrounded by a central paradox. The Government's logic is that they wish to devolve, delegate and decentralise, yet they are themselves a new model army that holds all power to its centre. Indeed, direct from the ducking ponds of Hartlepool, they come equipped with their own witch-finder general.
There is a critical contradiction in those emphases, which carry all the risks of schizophrenia. I have a personal bias towards delegation. Perhaps I belong to an older strand in Conservative thinking, born partly of genetics, which would ascribe powers to local government more than has recently prevailed, but I am not plagued in my own thinking by the intellectual, emotional fault line that runs through the heart of this Government, which I noticed was caught by Garland in The Daily Telegraph yesterday when he chose the image of the glacier or the geological rift.
My own image is more pastoral. I have been only once to Negril, at the far end of Jamaica, where Nelson's 18th-century fleet used to gather in the bay. Latterly, it has become a resort. When I was there a quarter of a century ago, it was a fishing village on a beach, to the right of the road from Montego Bay to Ian Fleming's Savannah le Mare. The road was narrow, and to its left the cartographers had filled a large open space with those tufts which, on battlefield maps, indicate marshes. The cartographers had, however, also given the area a name: it was simply called The Great Morass.
It is off the narrow road of sensible government and into this great morass that the Government are marching their own troops and this Parliament, with the Secretary of State for Scotland at their head. He carries a particular responsibility for this venture, for in the debate on the constitution shortly before the election, in response to an intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir P. Cormack), it was out of his hurried words to the then Leader of the Opposition that sprang the weasel words of a short cut across the great morass, by taking the Committee stages of constitutional measures in Committee rather than on the Floor of the House. The House knows me as a mild-mannered man, but that way lies tyranny.
I agree that the Government are operating in this regard behind a smokescreen of opaque language, but what Dr. Watson would have called "The Case of the
Prime Minister's Questions" is profoundly discouraging. The Government's defence of the latter episode yesterday was leaden-footed and broken-backed, and if such batting continues, we shall not win the Ashes this summer.
I hope that wiser counsels prevail before the Secretary of State for Scotland embarks on his short cut across the morass. He has, I acknowledge, done a fair job of repairing the Prime Minister's parish council gaffe, but he still has around his neck the albatross of the Prime Minister's remarks about Scottish tax intentions, which portrayed more vividly than anything else the central fault line of the Government, to which I referred earlier. In the constitutional debate to which I referred, the present Prime Minister did not answer the West Lothian question either.
I shall allude to one other feature of the Government's constitutional policies: the plethora of envisaged referendums. Unlike most of the House, I have lived in Switzerland in my day. I have always found mildly disturbing the enthusiasm of my more Euro-sceptic friends on these Benches--in seeking to avoid further continental entanglements--for the concept of referendums, which have always seemed to me profoundly continental devices wholly antithetical to seven centuries of parliamentary government in this House. Of course they have their place, but the present Government seem to be making them a substitute for careful thought and reasoned debate.
The debate on London lies a little further ahead, but I am constantly bombarded in the media by expressions of the passion of Londoners for a strategic authority, as evidenced by opinion polls. In the glorious weather in April, I called on one in 10 of my constituents in their homes, during 120 hours of canvassing. I must tell the House that, in a gallimaufry of agreeable conversations on the doorstep, the need for a strategic authority for London never once fell from the lips of one of my electors, let alone their enthusiasm for it.
What does surprise me, given Labour's refrain over the 11 years since the demise of the Greater London council, is how little detailed preparation has been done and vouchsafed to us on the London proposals, but now that the civil service is available, no doubt, as Alec Douglas Home once said in response to a question on VAT, a lot of clever chaps are thinking about it.
We are to be ruled by Puritans, although I am not at all confident that the Protector would have approved of anyone calling him Ollie. I hope in due course that someone will tell the London tourist board of this Puritan tendency, just as I hope, too, that the Minister for sport--an inspired appointment--will survive within this Spartan regime.
I take my final words from the war that gave the Puritans power, and from that notable royalist officer, Sir Jacob Astley. He might be said to have had the first words of the war, for it was on the morning of the battle of Edgehill that he gave the English language that great prayer:
"O Lord! thou knowest how busy I must be this day: if I forget thee, do not thou forget me."
I commend that prayer to the Treasury Bench. More apposite still to this debate are what might be regarded as the last words of the war, when, in 1646, he surrendered the garrison at the manor house at Stow-on-the-Wold and
handed over his sword to the parliamentarian commander with the words, "You have beaten us. Now go fall out among yourselves."
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