Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-171)
LORD JONES
OF BIRMINGHAM
23 FEBRUARY 2009
Q160 CHAIRMAN:
We do not want to get too bogged down with this but I think it
is the beginning of a slippery slope. President Sarkozy uses exactly
the same argument to justify subsidies to French car makers with
French taxpayers' money, to justify explicitly protectionist measures
in his subsidy package. The French and German governments use
scrappage allowances because they know they will go for German
cars; the Germans buy German cars. These are all protectionist
measures and you are beginning on the slippery slope. You are
giving them permission by saying British ministers, which I would
agree with you about, should drive British cars. That is the trouble.
The battle to protect free trade is difficult because we all make
little compromises to suit domestic audiences.
LORD
JONES OF
BIRMINGHAM:
I think it is a valid point.
Q161 MISS
KIRKBRIDE: Are we compromising
on that one then?
LORD
JONES OF
BIRMINGHAM:
I think he has made a valid point.
Q162 MISS
KIRKBRIDE: So Obama is very naughty
but we will still buy British from the British Government as long
as it is not put in legislation? Is that a rough summary of what
it is all about?
LORD
JONES OF
BIRMINGHAM:
By the way, the President of the United States of America, from,
I think, the middle of this year—when you see him wave as
he gets on to his helicopter on the White House lawn, that helicopter
will be made in Somerset.
Q163 CHAIRMAN:
They may rescind the contract, actually. They are not so sure.
They are looking at it again because they are unhappy about it.
LORD
JONES OF
BIRMINGHAM:
There you are: protectionist again. Do not upset me on this Monday
afternoon, Chairman.
Q164 MISS
KIRKBRIDE: So if we have a bit
of difficulty when it comes to goods and services and free trade—
LORD
JONES OF
BIRMINGHAM:
You do.
Q165 MISS
KIRKBRIDE: Between us, I would
say.
LORD
JONES OF
BIRMINGHAM:
Do not "we" us.
MISS
KIRKBRIDE: "We"
in terms of reconciling how—
MARK
OATEN: You are
both Bromsgrove.
Q166 MISS
KIRKBRIDE: Yes, exactly, but I
mean "we" in terms of reconciling what emotionally we
might like to do with a policy that would be fair and reasonable
with regard to free trade. What about when it comes to British
jobs for British workers?
LORD
JONES OF
BIRMINGHAM:
I should think the Prime Minister—and I have not spoken
to him about it so this is just a personal view—regrets
the day he said it. One of the things that this country has excelled
at over hundreds of years, not the last five or ten but hundreds
of years, is getting quality people, skilled people, from all
over the world to, yes, okay, enrich us socially and culturally
but really to add to the GDP of the country. We have done it for
hundreds of years incredibly well. We have even got a royal family
that every time we run out of people we have gone off to Europe
and got another lot. We have done it for hundreds of years, so
I think, rightly, that if there are unemployed construction workers
in Britain who think, "Two years down in the Gulf, two years
in eastern Europe is what I'll do because I can't get a job here",
the Auf Wiedersehen Pet argument, I think that is a good
thing, but it hardly becomes us to turn round and say to others,
"You can't come here and do the same thing". What I
would say is welcome to competition because some of you might
remember in 2006, just after I finished at the CBI, I took the
Dispatches cameras on a tour and made a programme about
Polish workers in Britain. This was at a time when you could not
get a plumber for love nor money. I remember there finding out
so often that people were saying, "Oh, these Poles have nicked
our jobs", and with the camera there I used to challenge
them. I would say, "You do the job then". "I'm
not doing that job". "Why not?". One guy said,
"I've got to get up early". Another guy said, "They
don't pay enough". I do not blame the Polish workers for
coming here, and I know the argument is that in the refineries
and all that it was not Poles but the concept is the same. Please
do not tell me that if we can get a more productive nature from
people who are prepared to come here and work for a wage—and
I hope there is no abuse; I do not want breaching of minimum wage;
I do not want breaching of any health and safety or employment
regulations; that is despicable, I do not want that, but if it
is purely competition—then at the end of the day we have
a history of welcoming people here to work hard, bring their skills
and deliver for this country. It will be one of the elements by
which we get ourselves out of this. I would love to take this
opportunity in public to say this, Chairman. If we allow protectionism,
and we have agreed a compromise on one or two areas, to get hold
of the major nations of this world you will find nationalism follows
very quickly behind it, and the moment you get nationalism you
get extreme parties playing to populism and it will be the easiest
thing in the world to get people who are worried about their jobs,
worried about their future, to turn on certain ethnic minorities
in this country, and indeed sometimes not even minorities. I would
just say to us all that we have to kill that at birth, strangle
it at birth, because I do not think it is too emotive to say look
what happened when the 1930s went that way.
Q167 MISS
KIRKBRIDE: Okay, so we are clear
about workers.
LORD
JONES OF
BIRMINGHAM:
But not buying a British motor car.
Q168 MISS
KIRKBRIDE: What about your general
view of the protectionist sentiment that is rising around the
world, whether it is coming from America or whether it is the
French up to their usual tricks? Are you concerned that in the
present political climate we are going to have some difficulties
on this front?
LORD
JONES OF
BIRMINGHAM:
We have always had difficulties as a nation preaching the free
trade gospel around the world. On balance, if you look at it over
a cycle, our free trade stance, I agree, is bent at the edges
but it has made this country richer. It is very difficult to sell
that story to someone who has just lost their job and your democratically
elected politician has to explain that he or she has just voted
for them to lose their job. That is a pretty difficult call in
a democracy, I fully understand that, but over a cycle you tend
to make more money as a country if you are free trade. At this
moment we are seeing a challenge to democratic capitalism, are
we not, and when that happens the different voices that come to
challenge that do not all come from people who are inherently
nasty or anything else. A lot of them come from people who are
just very worried, very insecure. It is a very difficult path
to walk to keep the free trade mantra going but if this nation
does not have a world that by and large is free trading we will
never pay our way in the world and we certainly will not trade
our way out of this.
Q169 CHAIRMAN:
This has been how I knew it would be, a wide-ranging session,
perhaps a little more wide-ranging even than I had expected, but
nevertheless a helpful one. The principal purpose of it was to
draw on your time as a minister and to understand what changes,
if any, you think need to be made to the public policy environment
that surrounds our export promotion effort. That was the principal
purpose: to make sure we can trade out of a recession and make
use of a weakened sterling, for example. Is there anything—and
this is a dangerous question to ask Digby Jones—you have
not had an opportunity to say in that specific context that you
would like to put on the record before we draw the session to
a conclusion?
LORD
JONES OF
BIRMINGHAM:
I would hope that as the Government of the nation—and this
is not about a Labour Government or a Tory Government or a Liberal
Government; it is nothing like that at all—faces the next
15 years of pulling in one's horns and raising taxation, and both
of those two things are going to have to happen whoever is in
charge because of the nature of the national debt, I just hope
that they do not say, "We have got to cut things so that
means less on trade promotion, fewer nurses, fewer teachers, fewer
policemen". By all means start looking at the back office,
all those sorts of things of which I spoke in a former committee.
By all means look at streamlining systems, look at changing the
way that you produce public services for sure, but please do not
cut at the coalface. That goes for a teacher, it goes for a policeman
and it goes for a nurse. I want to see in the same breath as those
important people in our society those who work in the trade promotion
and investment promotion side of this nation. We have to see them,
whether they are working on the ground in an emerging market or
whether they are working in a regional country of the UK getting
businesses to do it. They are as important to this country as
a nurse and a teacher and a policeman because if they do not do
the job and businesses do not earn the money they will not pay
the taxes and you will not get any nurses and teachers and policemen.
More than anything else, therefore, I would ask,—and I have
got representatives of all three parties here—when the call
comes (and it will) to cut services and raise taxation, please
put the work of UKTI up there with the work of a teacher.
Q170 CHAIRMAN:
And you would say that broadly the UKTI structure and model is
working quite well? It could be improved, everything needs to
be improved, but you would not change the basic model?
LORD
JONES OF
BIRMINGHAM:
I would not. I would put more resource into it, especially on
the ground in overseas markets, especially into other sectors
than they are allowed to do because of the money at their disposal.
I would not change it. The ability to get people to follow an
understood vision and be led forward happened before I or Andrew
Cahn. It happened with me there. I understand, although it is
second-hand, that Lord Davies is doing exactly the same. What
we should do is not chop and change and have people going forward.
There will be some places in the world where they could do with
a few more people. By the way, if that means that you are going
to say, "Those people can come but they have to come off
a head count in London", change the system. There is nothing
wrong with that, but do not just cut people at the coalface.
Q171 CHAIRMAN:
Thank you very much indeed. We are very grateful for your time.
LORD
JONES OF
BIRMINGHAM:
My pleasure.
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