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Lord Saatchi: My Lords, I begin by declaring an interest as a director of the Centre for Policy Studies. In that capacity, I congratulate our chairman, my noble friend Lord Blackwell, on calling this timely debate, assembling such a distinguished list of speakers, and his crystal-clear introduction. Having not spoken in the House for a little while, I am looking forward to hearing my successor on our Front Bench—my noble friend Lady Noakes, who is brilliant—wind up the debate and get the better of the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, which is something that I could never quite manage when I did her job.
I find myself perhaps most in tune, among all the excellent speeches that we have had so far, with that of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester. That is to my surprise and, I am sure, much more to his. He said that we should not focus too much on what the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, will know economic textbooks call Q, which is the quantity of money. The right reverend Prelate said the debate should be on a deeper level, and I agree. That said, the distance from Conservative Central Office to the House is such a short one that I hope that noble Lords will forgive me if electoral considerations are still slightly on my mind.
With a general election coming, all of us would like to know, most of all, who will win. If we want to know, we have only to ask ourselves one question, which is, "Who deserves it?". In a holy place, one might ask for forgiveness, and we would want to know who deserved forgiveness. I am told by generals that, in war, you win only if you fight for a noble object. In a court of law, the jury hears the evidence from the parties, then gives them their just desserts. In all those cases, the question is not, "Who will win?", but, "Who deserves to win?". I would like to concentrate on that because in politics, as in law, motive is all.
Today, those on our Benches have a strong motive for wanting people to have more money and more power. Why? Because Conservatives understand how money and power work. The noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, will be familiar with the economist JK Galbraith's explanation that:
The more money people have, the freer they can be. The freer they are, the less need they will feel for the Government's cap-in-hand benefit culture. The more power people have, the more independent they can be. The more independent they are, the less need they will feel for the Government's "big government know best" approach.
What is the Government's motive? They have power; they want to keep it. That is why they have employed nearly a million more citizens directly on the state payroll—800,000 more employees, at an annual cost of £19 billion. Those on the Government Front Bench now employ 7 million people, which is 25 per cent of the working population of Britain. That is power, but they want more, so they have nearly doubled the percentage of the population in receipt of
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state benefits, which is up from 24 per cent to 40 per cent. Most pensioners now need to ask for a state benefit on top of their state pension.
More than half of the population is now financially beholden to the Government. That is how the Government like it, because, as the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, knows, money is power. That is why they take so much of it in tax and then make you queue up to get it back. But as possession is nine-tenths of the law, they make it hard for you to get it, which is why, as my noble friend Lord Higgins discovered during the passage of the Tax Credits Bill, billions of pounds a year of Government benefits go unclaimed by the people who are entitled to them. The Government keep their money.
Why do they do all this? It is because it is in their roots. Like the rest of us they cannot shake off their genetic inheritance. Whether their party is called old Labour or new Labour, it amounts to the same thing, which is why this debate is timely—big government know best. It is no coincidence that this Government's favourite management tool, the five-year plan, was originally an invention of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. On 1 October 1928 the USSR announced the world's first five-year plan. It laid down, for example, that the number of eggs to be eaten per head of population between 1928 and 1933 was to be 155. The allowance of boots was to increase from 0.4 of a pair in 1928 to 0.7 of a pair in 1933. The plan set 50 targets for the whole of Russian industry and agriculture.
We should ask ourselves why a British government, years after the collapse of communism, should be so attracted by the Soviet system. What could possibly be their motive? I would say, exactly the same as its inventor. It gives power to central government. Remember I said that that original five-year plan had 50 targets for the whole of Russia. Today, the Department for Education and Skills has 18 targets, the Home Office has 20, the recent Comprehensive Spending Review had 130 performance targets and the NHS Plan has 400 targets. To manage all that, more managers are required, which is why the Society section of the Guardian, where the Government do their recruiting, now routinely weighs more than the Times and the Sun together. Staff at the Government Car and Despatch Service—a vital body, I am sure—is up 29 per cent. Home Office executives are up 71 per cent. The Immigration and Nationality Directorate is up 126 per cent. The Financial Services Authority now has twice as many staff as the Treasury which created it. Postwatch, the body which supervises the regulator, Postcomm, now has three times more staff than Postcomm itself.
To devise, monitor and report on all those targets, the Government need bodies, units, tsars and inspectors. So, some of these new hirings are for a new inspectorate, OFFA, the Office for Fair Access, which is currently recruiting 300 inspectors to combat suspected fraud by students seeking to avoid the Government's new university fees. Consider the health service. If you are a doctor, here are some of the bodies which have been giving you helpful assistance: the National Institute for
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Clinical Excellence, the Modernisation Agency, the national service frameworks, the Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection, the Commission for Health Improvement, the Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Health, the Patient Advice and Liaison Service and the Independent Complaints Advocacy Service.
To supervise all of this, you need forms. You need forms with boxes, forms with ticks, forms with crosses, long forms and short forms. If you are a policeman, you fill in a form if you speak to someone in a street. If you are a theatre director, a report form is required on access by demographic and ethnic groups. If you are a taxpayer, you have to navigate forms on 250 complex tax allowances, indexations, tapers, thresholds, reliefs, exemptions and disregards, etc. But if you are over 65, at last you can relax. Your claim form for a pension top-up will come with a helpful 48-page explanatory booklet. Soon there will be a form to check that you are brushing your teeth with the correct circular movement.
Nevertheless, the Government like it that way. This is their motive. It puts them in charge. It makes them the centre of attention. The noble Lord, Lord Butler, the former head of the Civil Service, who I am sorry is not in his seat, said that,
The noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, said that this sort of power,
He is right. The people are dependent children, with the Government their master. The complicated tax/benefits system is the chief instrument of the Government's power.
Our Benches want an end to all this, because it is a drift towards a crushing bureaucratic, form-filling, red tape, regulatory, PC nightmare. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, asked what our Benches would do about it. I can help him in two respects. My first example is poorer people, as was that of the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell. This side of your Lordships' House knows that it is unjust that people living below the official poverty line should pay income tax. They should stop. Why? Because they cannot afford it. They should keep more of what they earn. Why? Because they need it. Secondly, our Benches also know that it is unjust that older people who have paid tax for 40 years should continue to pay income tax until they drop down dead—and then pay more in death duties, which are cosmetically now renamed "inheritance tax", on anything that is left. Why? Because they have paid their dues. It is enough. Over-65s should keep more of what they earn. Why? Because they have earned it.
The record shows that the driving motive of conservatism—and I hope my comments have the blessing of the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher—in the two centuries from Burke, through Thatcher, to Howard, has always been a belief in self-determination, individuality and independence, as many speakers on these Benches have said. In a
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remarkable essay in 1708, An Answer to the Question: "What is Enlightenment?", Immanuel Kant declared that,
To be grown up, he wrote, is not to abdicate one's responsibilities to others, not to permit oneself to be treated as a child or barter away one's freedom. Unless a creature can determine itself, he said—just as the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, said—it is not a moral being. Autonomy is the basis of all morality. Kant was definite on that point. He said that a paternalist government, based on,
"the benevolence of a ruler who treats his subjects as dependent children . . . is the greatest conceivable despotism and destroys all freedom".
Like Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson and all the great champions of liberal democracy, Conservatives despise such a system.
So today, I should tell the right reverend Prelate, our Benches have as good a motive as any in our history. We want to alter the balance of power between the state and the individual, so that people have more money and more power and the Government have less. We want the people to be big and the state to be small. We want the Government to leave people alone, get off their backs and out of their way.
Beatrice Webb, who, as the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, knows, was the founder of the London School of Economics, used to say that people fell in love with funny things. She said:
Conservatives fell in love, too, with the exact opposite. Most of all, Conservatives want a free man to be able to say, "I am the captain of my soul".
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