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3.21 pm
Sir Stuart Bell (Middlesbrough) (Lab): I welcome the opportunity to participate in this debate and to follow the right hon. Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell). I listened to his speech with great interest. As he said, we have among us today a number of former Financial Secretaries—talk about yesterday's men from yesterday's century! We have the hon. Members for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon), for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell), for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) and for West Derbyshire (Mr. McLoughlin), and the right hon. Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack). Of course, I exempt from the term "yesterday's men" my right hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Denzil Davies).
Interesting though the speech of the right hon. Member for Charnwood was, he was a little curmudgeonly in his summary. When he mentioned the surplus that we had of about £16 billion, which is now a deficit of £37 billion, the Chief Secretary reminded him that in 1997 the Conservatives left us with a £51 billion deficit, which reminded me of Joseph and his coat of many colours. I think that it is perfectly legitimate for the Second Church Estates Commissioner to refer to that. Joseph interpreted the dream of the pharaoh, who had dreamt of seven fat cows and seven lean cows. Joseph told him that that meant that we have seven prosperous years, when the economic cycle is in our favour, and seven lean years when the economic cycle turns the other way, and that we must save in the good years for the bad years. The fact that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had a £16 billion surplus and that we are now able, as a nation, to live quite comfortably with a £37 billion deficit within the framework of the Budget is something that I shall be happy to delineate later.
Mr. Jack: Does the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that, by the time the 1997 general election came round, the controls that we had imposed on public expenditure were biting, that tax receipts were rising and that our monetary policy—as witnessed after the first year of the Labour Government—enabled the United Kingdom to hit its inflation target spot on?
Sir Stuart Bell: I remind the right hon. Gentleman that the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of that election stated that he had laid a series of elephant traps for the future Labour Government. That is precisely what he did with his toughening of public expenditure. Many Labour Members regretted that we stayed with that framework, as it did not help the economy. What did help the economy, by reducing the inflation rate, was the independence of the Bank of England, which the present Chancellor brought about.
The right hon. Member for Charnwood made a good point about freezing tax rates, but we know what the Conservatives are building up to at the next general
election. It was Franklin D. Roosevelt who said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself", and the Conservative Opposition are going to try to terrify the British public by telling them that the Labour Government have hidden tax proposals and that there will be a price to pay. I remind the right hon. Gentleman of two promises. The first was made by the then Conservative Opposition before the general election in 1979, when they said that they would not increase VAT. After the election, it went up from 8 per cent. to 15 per cent. The present Prime Minister made the second promise when he was Leader of the Opposition, and it was that a Labour Government would not increase direct taxes. In their seven years in office, our Government have not done so.
Mr. Dorrell: What about national insurance?
Sir Stuart Bell: I am always grateful for a sedentary intervention. I was Parliamentary Private Secretary to Lord Hattersley when he was deputy Leader of the Opposition. We cleverly put a question to the former Prime Minister, Lady Thatcher, to ask whether there was a difference between national insurance contributions and taxation, and of course she said no. I give the same response to the right hon. Gentleman.
Mr. Dorrell: The hon. Gentleman is citing no less a person than the former Prime Minister, Lady Thatcher, to confirm that he was wrong to say that there had been no increase in direct taxation.
Sir Stuart Bell: Lady Thatcher made the point, and I am not going to try to contradict what she said in her years of office.
I shall turn to the speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli, who has quietly left the Chamber. That is one of the facts of life in this place. He stated that Leon Trotsky had said that socialism was not for one country but for all, and I pointed out that actually Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had said that. I am sure that someone out there in the country who reads Hansard will write to me, giving me chapter and verse and referring me to the precise page on which Leon Trotsky made that statement. Anyway, it was part of the communist dogma at the time that communism—rather than socialism—was universal and should be exported. I have to say with some regret that it was exported, which created misery and havoc for some 80 years. That is not to say that communism and enlightened socialism are the same thing—they are not.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli mentioned the pressures of globalisation, but that part of his speech was more fitting to the last century than to this one. However we look at the world economy, globalisation is here to stay. The Chancellor's speech addressed that fact by addressing the challenges in relation to monetary and fiscal policy priorities. I was interested that the right hon. Member for Charnwood referred to Aneurin Bevan and the crystal ball. Aneurin Bevan also said that the language of socialism was the language of priorities, and today we have seen the Chancellor prioritising education and health in the interest of our country and of trying to steer our economy in the right direction to deal with the globalised threats and challenges that we face.
I am glad that the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) is still with us. He will remember, as a former Secretary of State, that we had many an intelligent debate, especially on a Friday, on economic matters, when I was on the Opposition Benches and he sat over here. I enjoyed those debates and I enjoyed his speech today. He made an important statement when he said that short-term decisions do not create the right climate for the economy; that is achieved through long-term decisions all coming together. He was right about that. He was also right to say that delivery is a matter for politicians, statesmen and Ministers, because policy and delivery are not necessarily the same thing. He recognised the fact that the delivery of a policy can take some time, and we have to recognise it as well.
I know that the right hon. Gentleman has a house in France. I congratulate him on that, as someone who lived there for 20 years. I admire his taste; to live in France is an excellent thing to do. Some of his comments about France, however, did not reflect my understanding of the French economy. He talked about the growth gap, but France has lower growth than we have.
He talked about VAT, which is 19.5 per cent. in France. He also talked about employment, social charges and the tax burden. Employers in France tell me that for every Euros100 they pay to a salaried worker, there are Euros46 of social charges, so 46 per cent. is added to the wage bill because of France's health, social insurance and taxation structure.
Mr. Lilley: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way and, in the spirit of constructive debate in which he is speaking, may I make it clear that I was not speaking about the performance of France? I was referring to the average of all other countries on the continent relative to us. I suggested not that France is superior to us, but that it is moving in the right direction—in due course, that will have beneficial effects on its poor performance—while we are moving in the wrong direction, which will damage our good performance. I hope that I have made things clearer, if I did not make them clear before.
Sir Stuart Bell: I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman's intervention. He is right in the sense that France is seeking to move in a particular direction. He mentions the average of all the various figures, but the fact is that growth rates in France are lower, unemployment is higher and it has severe administrative burdens and severe problems. All of France's scientists have decided to go on strike because there is not enough funding for them, and every day French newspapers report mayhem somewhere or other. Although I might be a Francophile, I am not enthusiastic about comparing the French economy with ours.
The right hon. Gentleman mentioned a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which I am happy to look at, but he is wrong to say that Government investment over seven years has not yielded any improvement in public services. He also spoke of perception over reality. The other day, I visited the James Cook university hospital in my constituency, where waiting lists are coming down. We are also tackling the question of illness and disease in the hospital.
The right hon. Gentleman referred to a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Mr. Plaskitt). We have to make this point, which I remember well: a Conservative Government began to dismantle hospital cleaning services and introduced contracting out. Whether it was right to do those things or not, the fact is that they began at that time. If I may say so, the problems that we face relate, with some longitude and latitude, to the past.
I would not want to make a political point—not even to encourage my right hon. and hon. Friends—but listening to the debate and the speech of the Leader of the Opposition I realised that the Conservative party is not yet a party of the 21st century. It still has not come to terms with the global economy, the changed nature of our society or the view, which my right hon. Friend the Chancellor expounded, that monetary and fiscal policy must be brought together.
The Conservatives see things in isolation, not in the round, and they seem to denigrate the fact that we have placed so much emphasis on education. Again, I come back to my constituency. My hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough, South and Cleveland, East (Dr. Kumar) referred to the Prime Minister's visit to his constituency 10 days ago to open a city academy. The Prime Minister also came to my constituency to open a new wing of the university. When I was our parliamentary candidate in Middlesbrough in 1983, we could not even get 6,000 students at our polytechnic. We now have about 21,000 students at our university. The centre of our town has been changed. We have a town campus with the university at the centre of it all.
When I visit the schools in my constituency, I see the computer equipment that they have, the money that they have been given—directly by our Government—and the improvements in standards. I would say that the quality of life has changed in my constituency and there is an improvement in public services. We cannot use what I call the wildebeest theory: in Africa, a herd of 100 wildebeest run towards the river, but two decide to skip off and are eaten by lions. We cannot spend our time, rather than praising our public services, taking the isolated case of a trolley in a corridor and saying, "That is our health service." That is not our health service.
We must consider the question of choice, which was mentioned by the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden. My hospital in Middlesbrough is now one of the finest heart centres in the country and we have patients coming from Newcastle. Early on in my time, patients went from Middlesbrough to Newcastle for heart operations. People come the other way now; they have choice.
We now have a spinal unit in our town, which is the centre for the whole north-east, so there is choice in our health service. We are not complaining about the health service—I have never met anyone in my constituency who has left hospital complaining.
I also want to refer to lifting aspirations. There is not only a concrete improvement in the services, hospitals and education system in our town, but a lifting of aspiration. People in my constituency think that they can achieve things—it can be done. That is one of the lasting gifts of our Labour Government. The hon.
Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable), who spoke for the Liberals, claimed that the euro is the most important aspect of our economy. I am a great fan of the European single currency. I believe that we should join and that we will do so at some point, but, as St. Francis said, "Make me pure, but not yet."
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