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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Lord): Order. Before I call the next speaker, I remind the House that Madam Speaker has placed a 15-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches, and that applies from now on.
3.23 pm
Mr. Tony Benn (Chesterfield): This debate was arranged to celebrate another triumph for free trade, and it has turned out to be a long overdue--and, in my case, very welcome--debate about the real nature of global capitalism. It is from that point of view that I want to address the House.
Free trade and global capitalism are accepted almost unanimously among important people in Britain. Multinational companies demand free trade because it gives them freedom. The City needs it to prosper as a financial centre. Speculators depend on it. Most newspaper proprietors and editors are committed to it. The BBC is so devout about free trade that it broadcasts share values and currency values every hour, entirely replacing the daily prayer service. Teachers explain free trade in business study courses, and some trade union leaders believe that free trade is bound to come about.
All Front-Bench Members are utterly committed to global capitalism and free trade. Conservative Members, whether pro or anti the single currency, are utterly committed to capitalism. The Liberals, with their Gladstonian tradition and the Manchester school, are committed to capitalism. I say with the greatest respect that I have never heard a more powerful speech for world capitalism than that just made by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, who occupies an office that I once held.
Third way philosophers line up to support capitalism and free trade. Modernisers and focus groups yearn for more of it, and business-friendly Ministers think of nothing else. Labour Members had an important letter from four Department of Trade and Industry Ministers on 24 November, and the contents of that letter were reproduced in the Minister's speech.
The truth is that the benefits of capitalism and free trade are not really being seen in the world at all. We are told, for example, that the best way to narrow the gap between rich and poor is to have free trade and world capitalism. Ten years ago, the world had 147 dollar billionaires; five years ago, it had 274 dollar billionaires, and that number increased recently to 447, which is a rise of 25 per cent. Those billionaires have a combined wealth equivalent to the annual income of half of the world's population.
We must consider also what the World Health Organisation says about the health of the world. One fifth of the world's children live in poverty; one third of the world's children are under-nourished, and half of the world's population lack access to essential drugs. Each year, 12 million children under five die, and 95 per cent. of them die from poverty-related illness; more than half a million mothers die in childbirth, and more than 1 million babies die of tetanus. What contribution have globalisation and free trade made to solving those problems? The theory that wealth trickles down and that the richer Bill Gates gets, the richer people in Asia will get, is one of the most ludicrous illusions that could possibly be imagined.
What the Secretary of State did not say is that the one thing that globalisation has done is to make multinational companies more powerful than countries. That is why so many third world countries are worried. Fifty-one of the largest 100 economies in the world are now corporations: Mitsubishi's is bigger than that of Indonesia; General Motors's is bigger than that of Denmark; Ford's is bigger than that of South Africa, and Toyota's is bigger than that of Norway. The sales of the top 200 corporations are greater than one quarter of the world's economic activity.
Multinational corporations want free trade because they are trying to get Governments off their back so that they can exploit the profits that they can make with the minimum of interference. They think that global capitalism and free trade will end redistributive taxation and, although this has not been mentioned so far, gradually turn health and education into market-related activities.
A restricted paper circulated to World Trade Organisation delegates was brought to my attention by one of the Members of the European Parliament who received it. It asked:
The Secretary of State for International Development (Clare Short):
There are many myths about the WTO, partly because the negotiations are so complicated that people can make up anything that they like. There is an agreement on trade in services. Some developing countries need banking and other financial services to get their economies going, but the agreement
Mr. Benn:
There may be no compulsion, but the WTO would like health to be market-related.
Clare Short:
No, that is not true.
Mr. Benn:
Well, it said so in the document, and my right hon. Friend must have seen it.
This is a debate marking the end of the millennium, and I do not want to get into a party argument at all; I want to try to understand what is happening. Not long ago, Richard Whelan from the Institute of Economic Affairs said:
When the Secretary of State drew a comparison with the Luddites, he reminded me of the leading article inThe Economist on 26 February 1848--a year or two before I entered the House--in which the slave trade was discussed. The article said:
Global capitalism empowers companies to move money freely, but it does not allow workers to move freely. If someone owns a factory in London but the wages are so high that he cannot make a profit, he can close it and open it in Malaysia, where wages are lower. If, however, someone from Malaysia tries to come to London where wages are higher, immigration laws would keep him out.
Globalisation has nothing to do with internationalism. At least in the European Union there is a free movement of capital and labour. We are not talking about letting workers move in search of higher wages, but only of companies moving in search of higher profits. Global capitalism allows big business to run the banana republics. It involves risks to the protection of the environment, and we are told that it is inevitable.
We have had free trade in Britain for a long time, but it has not solved the problems of poverty automatically. There was terrible poverty in Dickensian Britain and, even today, the gap between rich and poor is wider, even though Yorkshire cannot impose bans or tariffs on goods from Derbyshire. It is time that we looked at how free trade is a complete illusion.
Let us look at the matter from another point of view that is all the more important. Global capital is eroding political democracy. Power has already been transferred to Eddie George. I do not know which constituency he won at the election; I could not find his name anywhere on the list. None the less, he has more power than the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The European central bank will have more power than either of them.
None of the representatives of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the WTO is elected. Who elects the Secretary-General of NATO and the director-general of the WTO? Nobody. Our political democracy has been decapitated in the interests of worship of money. As Keir Hardie said at the beginning of the century, we must choose between worshipping God or mammon, and there is no doubt on which we decided.
That brings me to another matter. People outside the House know that there is a massive coalition in this Parliament in favour of capitalism, and they are therefore becoming cynical and disillusioned with the political process. One of the reasons why people do not vote is that they think that there is one view inside the House--that all the leaders are huddling together in coalitions and patriotic alliances--and that they are excluded from it. That is of course what happened in Seattle.
The Minister who made that point clear is now the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. He said in Bonn on 3 March last year:
The Prime Minister, if I may quote him with approval, said when Leader of the Opposition during a debate on the Halifax summit in June 1995:
The internet plays a very important part in these matters because, through it, all the groups sent out their messages. They could not get their messages across through Rupert Murdoch, CNN or the BBC, but they could communicate directly. They have no leaders to be demonised by the press; groups turned up with their own faith.
In the next century, people want co-operation and not competition in self-sustaining economies, working with other nations. They want security in their lives--and that does not mean more nuclear weapons. They want to plan for peace as we have always planned for war, with a single-minded determination to meet our needs. They want democratic control over their own destiny. That is the real lesson that this century must teach the next one.
I shall finish with a quote that, in a way, sums up what I feel on this issue.
"How can WTO members ensure that ongoing reforms in national health systems are mutually supportive and whenever relevant market-based?"
It will not be long before some countries can say to others, "You are discriminating against us because you have a health service and our workers have not, so you must cut back your health service so that you are not taking unfair advantage."
"Africa should be privatised and leases to run individual countries auctioned off".
That is serious. In the Financial Times, James Morgan, the BBC economics correspondent, said:
"If some countries, especially in Africa, were to be run along the lines of commercial enterprises rather than states, investors might find them much more attractive".
That is what the multinational companies are thinking about.
"If in place of entering into Treaties for the suppression of the Slave Trade, we made conventions to ameliorate the conditions of the existing race of slaves--to establish and regulate on unquestionable principles the free emigration of Africans . . . we might, with a tenth of the cost, do a great substantial good to the African Race".
I can imagine Ofslave being set up, with Chris Woodhead in charge, naming and shaming the captains of slave ships on which the sanitary arrangements for slaves are inadequate. For God's sake, surely we must take some account in this debate of the worry of the enormous number of people in the world who have not got rich through free trade.
"It may be that the era of pure representative democracy is coming slowly to an end".
That was a more candid account of what is happening than the praise of trade in this debate.
"is not the central issue the revolution in the globalisation of the financial and currency markets, which now wield massive speculative power over the Governments of all countries and have the capacity seriously to disrupt economic progress?"--[Official Report, 19 June 1995; Vol. 262, c. 23-4.]
That idea inspired many of the people who went to Seattle. The churches were there, many concerned about world poverty, there were environmentalists, animal welfare groups, trade unionists and those who campaign for the cancellation of third world debt. All were immediately denounced as anarchists, extremists, members of the mob, and so on. The police in Seattle put up a pretty good show of organising a Tiananmen square operation without the killings. When I saw the police in their Star Wars outfits and the arrest of 500 people who wanted only justice for their own people, it gave me an indication of what it is all about.
"We have lived so long at the mercy of uncontrolled economic forces that we have become sceptical about any plan for human emancipation. Such a rational and deliberate reorganisation of our economic life would enable us, out of the increased wealth production, to establish an irreducible minimum standard which might progressively be raised to one of comfort and security".
Those are the words of Harold Macmillan in his book "The Middle Way". I sat in Parliament with that man--the great grandfather of the wets, who was well to the left of the present Government.
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