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8.1 pm
Mr. Andrew Reed (Loughborough): I begin by thanking you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and the House for doing me the honour of listening to me this evening.
I am proud to inform the House that I represent two parties: the Labour party and the Co-operative party. In the general election, I stood as a Labour and Co-operative candidate. The Co-operative party is the political party representing the wider co-operative movement and is dedicated, as I am, to promoting co-operative principles. For that reason, I am proud to be referred to as the Labour and Co-operative Member of Parliament for Loughborough.
It is my first and pleasant duty to refer to my predecessor in the Loughborough constituency, who is now the right hon. Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell). Unlike many hon. Members who have said goodbye to their predecessors in their maiden speeches, I look forward to the opportunity of saying hello to mine on the Opposition Front Bench. I shall watch the Conservative leadership election with a certain amount of local interest.
I was sorry that, in the Queen's Speech, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary did not introduce legislation on nuisance neighbours. The Loughborough constituency is placed directly between Charnwood and Rushcliffe. I know that it is improper to mention people's names in case work, so let us refer to my nuisance neighbours as Ken and Stephen.
The right hon. Member for Charnwood represented Loughborough for 18 years, having entered the House at the tender age of 26. He was then the youngest Member. I suppose that, at the grand old age of 32, he would have felt quite ancient, as I do, looking at some of the younger Members that we have now.
The right hon. Gentleman rose steadily through the Government ranks, despite being regarded as rather wet in the Thatcher years. No party could overlook his obvious talents. His ministerial duties placed a heavy burden on him in the past few years, but he had a formidable record for hard work in the constituency, and I hope to emulate him in that.
Over the past two years, I have had the honour to serve as the right hon. Gentleman's local councillor. In the troubled times that he may have in the coming few weeks, he will be more than welcome at my surgeries, of which I will give him the dates and times--especially after the Conservative leadership election result is announced.
Like the hon. Member for Hereford (Mr. Keetch), I am proud to represent people with whom I was educated and with whom I have worked and shopped. It is a great honour to be in the House and to be a member of that community. I do not claim that Loughborough itself is as great as Hereford or the Forest of Dean, but we have the Charnwood forest and the great areas of Leicestershire that I am proud to represent.
Loughborough is a combination of urban and rural areas within the triangle of the three major cities of the east midlands: Leicester, Nottingham and Derby. That is a great economic strength and we hope that we can promote the location, which is only two hours' drive or
railway journey from about 60 to 70 per cent. of the English market. It is a great place for relocation, if any company should be so minded.
My constituency also contains some smaller villages; I have lived in and represented one of those--Sileby--for the past five years. It is the home of the previous Quorn hunt and offers beautiful locations in the Wolds villages. It has a richly diverse population. There is a thriving ethnic minority population in Loughborough, and we enjoy excellent race relations. I have taken great pleasure in the past few years in visiting and meeting people in the Shree Ram Krishna centre, the Gudwara, the Gheeta Bwhan and the mosque. I have always been given the warmest of welcomes, and I hope to develop our excellent relationships.
People in the villages are extremely proud. The villages--particularly Shepshed and Sileby--were developed and built around the textile industry at the turn of the century. Sadly, those industries have been in decline for the past 10 to 15 years; but there is still great strength of feeling in the communities.
I want to spend my time in the House reviving the textile and small engineering sectors, to ensure that the villages and small towns can survive. As soon as the factories and smaller workshops start to move away from those places, the high streets start to die and community spirit tends to go with them. I hope that some of the measures that we have proposed can start to make a difference.
In places such as Sileby, it is especially important to ensure that one is part of the community. I have been there for only five years, and I understand that it is difficult to be accepted as a real resident of Sileby. While out canvassing, I came across somebody who had moved there when she was three; she was now 76, but she said that she was still referred to locally as "Ethel from Leicester". Obviously, I have a long way to go before finally being accepted as a genuine Sileby resident.
The town of Loughborough is dominated by the university: out of 60,000 residents, about 11,000 are students; there are 6,000 people in the Asian community; and we have many skilled research and development staff involved with the university, with British Gas research or with large pharmaceutical research and development companies such as Astra and 3M.
The economy of Loughborough has changed significantly since the right hon. Member for Charnwood made his maiden speech 18 years ago. There has been a major decline in the textiles sector and, especially, in manufacturing. The saddest loss for us all has been the great decline of the Brush factory. Many hon. Members will have travelled in trains pulled by Brush. In the early 1980s, the work force was about 6,500 strong; it is now about 2,400. Everybody knew somebody who worked at Brush in Loughborough. I hope that we can start to revive that company and the fortunes of engineering.
The complexion of the local economy is changing. I do not want to concentrate only on the engineering sector and the manufacturing base: Loughborough offers excellent opportunities for the high-tech, high-skill, high-wage economy that we want to establish.
Only two weeks ago, we were able to open a fibre-optic training centre, the first of its kind in the country, at Loughborough college. The university has demonstrated
exactly the sort of partnerships that we want between higher education and industry. The Prime Minister opened the British Aerospace laboratory at Loughborough university 18 months ago.
The university is also well known for its second skill, sport. One thing that we in Leicestershire can claim is sporting excellence over the past 12 months. My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Foster) mentioned Worcestershire. Worcester may have the most beautiful cricket ground in the country, but Leicestershire's team won the county championship last year.
Leicester also has a football team that, despite my original fears, did not get relegated from the Premiership and went on to win the Coca-Cola cup. Fortunately, that was the only time that the blues beat the reds this year, and I welcomed that victory. To me, as a member of the Leicester Tigers rugby union club, the greatest honour was winning the Pilkington cup this year. The home of the British academy of sport will soon be decided. I am sure that the Sports Minister will look favourably on Loughborough, with its fine reputation for athletics and for sport in general and with its central location.
Two weeks before the general election was called, I knew that we were on for a landslide. I still play rugby for Birstall, which is just outside my constituency. For the first time, playing at fly-half, I managed to score four tries in a 98-nil win--a good omen for the landslide that we got a few weeks later.
I wanted to speak in this debate because education plays such a key role in the life of my constituency. The university and the college are both important, but this debate is especially important because we know that it is the early years that make the difference in enabling people to succeed in later years.
I am a governor of Sileby Highgate school, where class sizes range between 34 and 39 for the seven classes. It is abysmal that children and staff work in such conditions. That is why this debate is important. The people to whom I talked on doorsteps and outside schools knew that class sizes matter. They were desperate to make a real change. That is why I welcome these proposals.
Mr. Keith Simpson (Mid-Norfolk):
I compliment the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Reed) on an excellent speech and wish him all the best. Making one's maiden speech at the tail end of a debate such as this is a matter of stamina as much as anything else. It tests all one's faculties, but one advantage is that it enables one to observe and listen to a wide variety of Members, old and new, and to learn about the Chamber and the subject under discussion.
Like other new Members, I am delighted to be here to represent my constituency. I am only the second Member for Mid-Norfolk, which was created in 1983. Its first
Member was Richard Ryder, who has been transferred to another place. He had a distinguished political career in the House. Before 1983, he worked as political secretary to Margaret Thatcher. He was then selected for the new constituency of Mid-Norfolk, and straight away made an impact as a good constituency Member and achieved the ultimate height of public service by serving as a Minister.
As a constituency Member, he pushed through the House the Bill that established the Broads Authority, which had a big impact not only on the eastern margins of my constituency but throughout Norfolk. He also began the long task of dualling the main east-west road through Norfolk, the A47. That task has not yet been completed, but I and Members for neighbouring constituencies will want to emphasise it strongly.
It was as Chief Whip from 1990 to 1995 that, in a quiet way, Richard Ryder made his mark. He was Chief Whip at a time, to quote Harold Macmillan slightly out of context, of a little local difficulty for the Conservative party. As Chief Whip, he demonstrated his self-effacing manner and what Matthew Parris called his "state-of-the-art circumspection" to a T. In 1992, he received the Spectator award as Whip of the year. It is said that, when asked why he wore his watch face down, he replied that the time of the day was not public information and that he would give it on a need-to-know basis. That tradition is followed by all Chief Whips.
It was that great Conservative party leader and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli who judged that the office of Chief Whip required
In his maiden speech in 1983, Richard Ryder remarked that the constituency of Mid-Norfolk resembled a large banana balancing on top of Norwich to the west, north and east. It is a large constituency, 60 miles wide and 20 miles deep at its greatest extent. I love my constituency dearly, not least because I am a Norfolk boy by birth, but it is one of those constituencies about which people ask, "Where exactly is it?" Invariably, one has to go into a great deal of description. As a footnote, I think that many hon. Members relish, and want to keep, the idea of being Members located in a territorial constituency. I for one would reject any changes to the electoral system that meant that Members of Parliament were merely allocated from a list to a region. I hope that we would all reject that.
In my constituency, three market towns, East Dereham, Aylsham and Acle, form focal points in the west, north and east. The fourth and smallest market town--and because I now live there, I must also say that it is the most beautiful--is Reepham, which is approximately in the centre. There is no natural political, economic or social centre to my constituency. That has both weaknesses and strengths. One could argue that the Member of Parliament is, to all intents and purposes, the focal point.
The weakness concerns identity and unity of structure. The strength is that we in Mid-Norfolk look beyond the narrow constituency boundary to the county boundaries and beyond. We all love our constituencies, but most hon. Members recognise that many of our problems and
challenges go beyond our narrow constituency interest. In the best possible sense, we need to co-operate. That does not, of course, preclude the most severe debates and political tiffs on matters on which we fundamentally disagree.
Traditionally, the county of Norfolk has a sense of isolation and a strong, potentially exclusive, local identity. Horatio Nelson would now be regarded as politically incorrect. He rose to high rank in the Royal Navy, disobeyed orders and was a man of extreme temperament. He publicly flaunted his mistress to all and sundry. The chief of naval staff would probably not promote him today. Nelson was a Norfolk man by birth. In the 18th century, he wrote of "going into" and "coming out of" Norfolk as though it was a physical entity separate from the rest of the United Kingdom.
More recently, the great writer and novelist Malcolm Bradbury, formerly of the university of East Anglia, our local university, commented that Norfolk was cut off on four sides: on three sides by the sea and on the fourth side by British Rail. I am happy to say that, thanks to the last Government's policy of privatisation, Anglia Rail is making certain that we are no longer cut off on the fourth side.
At its worst, Mid-Norfolk can be very parochial. We cannot claim a wit and a scholar like Oscar Wilde, although I suspect that some of my constituents might say, "Thank goodness for that." However, we did have Parson James Woodforde, who from 1774-1803 was rector of the small village of Weston Longeville, which is only a few miles from my constituency office. As many hon. Members will know, he kept a diary during that period.
Particularly vivid are his descriptions of the gargantuan meals he enjoyed with friends--something that many of us have not enjoyed in the past five hours--his impressions of the Norfolk countryside and his enthusiasm for what is now regarded, at least by many Labour Members, as the politically incorrect pastime of country sports and for something now forbidden by the Labour party, political gossip. Although Woodforde lived in momentous times, his diary accords no more space to the fall of the Bastille in 1789 than to an account of how he bought an extra-large crab from a travelling fisherman--indeed, the crab is mentioned before the fall of the Bastille.
Hon. Members will note, however, that, at its best, my constituency looks beyond its parochial borders to the rest of the United Kingdom, to Europe and to the wider world. I would also argue that Mid-Norfolk adapts to change. It is a mixture of old and new, with one replacing the other sometimes, but--more frequently--the new acting as a complement or counterpoint to the old.
My constituency, like those of many other hon. Members, has seen massive population growth in the past 10 years, with families attracted to the beautiful environment of the county, business to new opportunities and pensioners because it is a good place to retire to. Many of my constituents drive to work outside the constituency. All that means that there is massive pressure on all the facilities and public services that we require.
My constituency was traditionally dominated by agriculture. That is less true today, but agriculture is still very important and supports a wide range of businesses and light industries. Today's farmers in Mid-Norfolk recognise that, above all else, farming is a business.
Nevertheless, the majority of my good farmers believe that farming is linked to the environment and the wider community.
If hon. Members can spare the time--I hope that my Whip will permit me to spare the time--that attitude will be seen when the Royal Norfolk show takes place later this month and when many people from my constituency and other constituencies will attend "The Countryside Rally" here in London on 10 July. I hope that that rally will prove to many hon. Members and to the citizens of the metropolis how much variety exists in the countryside, and how important jobs and a way of life are to tens of thousands of men, women and children.
Like many hon. Members, as part of museum week, I visited one of my local museums--the Gressenhall Norfolk Rural Life Museum and Union Farm. It is a marvellous museum, which educates people, especially children, about the change in the countryside and agriculture--education at its best, whereby the past is brought to life and compared with the present, and the future is looked to as well.
Tourism is also adapting to change in my constituency. Every year, hundreds of thousands of tourists visit Norfolk--the coast, the Broads, the countryside and our towns and villages. Mid-Norfolk gets its share, and the welcome aspect of that is, of course, money and employment. However, other hon. Members who represent constituencies in which tourism is an important industry will recognise the downside of tourism--pollution, noise, traffic and crime. Mid-Norfolk is more than a theme park.
Defence is rarely mentioned in the House these days, perhaps because of the end of the cold war. From 1941 to the late 1980s, East Anglia was one enormous airfield. During the second world war and throughout the cold war, we had strong links, not only with the Royal Air Force, but with the United States Air Force. Many USAF personnel still live in the region, although not in my constituency. I might be regarded as churlish in my maiden speech, but I have to say that many Labour Members were wrong in their assessment of the threat we faced in the 1970s and 1980s, and were slow to adapt to changing circumstances.
We in Mid-Norfolk have had to adapt. It was with great regret that we saw the RAF leave its old base at Swanton Morley, but, thanks to the hard work of my predecessor, Richard Ryder, we now have the 9th/12th Royal Lancers, an armoured reconnaissance regiment. Once again, I hope that hon. Members will take this comment in good part, but I have to say that in constituencies where many jobs depend on the presence of the military, Labour's strategic defence review--it seems that the Labour Government consists of a series of reviews, like Brian Rix come to Westminster--casts a deep pall over local communities. I sincerely hope that the Secretary of State will recognise the impact that the review may have on such communities.
Looking ahead to a future agenda, I turn briefly to the subject under discussion--education. Many hon. Members have commented on the different aspects of the assisted places scheme and whether its abolition will have an immediate impact on children and local communities. Only a few people in my constituency will be affected--perhaps a dozen; no more--but it will affect all of them as individuals, as my hon. Friends have said.
I have been greatly depressed by some of the arguments advanced by Labour Members. I felt as though I had been rewound 30 years to the sort of debates I remember having at university in the late 1960s--indeed, when I see the Home Secretary sitting on the Front Bench, I realise that I have actually returned to the late 1960s when, in a different guise, he was chairman of the National Union of Students. This first education Bill of the new Government misses the point. It is a mean, selfish little Bill, which provides a fig leaf for the fact that the Labour Government have failed to come up with the moneys to meet the challenge to achieve lower class sizes that they laid down in their manifesto.
"consummate knowledge of human nature, the most amiable flexibility and complete self-control".
Richard Ryder was that man and politician. I am sure that all hon. Members will wish him well.
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