Industrial Strategy Consultation

Debate between Christian Matheson and Lindsay Hoyle

Monday 23rd January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Last but certainly not least from the Opposition, I call the voice of Chester, Mr Chris Matheson.

[Christian Matheson]

I would hope not least, Mr Deputy Speaker.

The Science, Engineering and Manufacturing Technologies Alliance has calculated that there is an annual shortfall of 50,000 skilled engineers and that this will aggregate to about 800,000 by 2020. How does the Secretary of State plan to close that gap? While he is at the Dispatch Box, will he take the opportunity to scotch the recent press reports and confirm that all the steel in HS2 will be made at UK plants, including Shotton, where many of my constituents work?

Christmas Adjournment

Debate between Christian Matheson and Lindsay Hoyle

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

Should fate ever somehow decree that I end up as a member of a council in Somerset, I shall make it my absolute priority—horses’ heads or no—to stay on the right side of the hon. Member for Bridgwater and West Somerset (Mr Liddell-Grainger).

This has been a tumultuous year culturally and politically. With the assassination of an ambassador and a further apparent terrorist atrocity yesterday, it seems we are finishing on a stark but familiar low. The attack in Germany drives home to me the fact that, to coin the phrase of the moment, we have more in common with our European partners than divides us. I fear that the current stand-off over Brexit and the forthcoming negotiations will drive us further apart from our neighbours, when these are surely times when those nations committed to the cause of democracy, freedom and pluralism must stick together and find common ground, rather than hunker down in an introspective bunker, focused on the challenges of Brexit while the big global challenges and threats remain.

The main debate in the EU negotiations seems to be one of immigration versus free movement and access to the single market. I am in favour of the free movement of labour; I am just not in favour of the free movement of unemployment and the free movement of exploitation. Over a decade ago, as a trade union official, I saw construction workers being brought in from abroad and used on big construction projects; names such as Staythorpe power station or Lindsey oil refinery spring to mind. Those immigrant workers would be used by the prime and principal subcontractors to drive down wages in a sector where skilled, well-paid jobs provided a good standard of living and were negotiated nationally between the unions and employers, and where the system worked.

All of a sudden, wage rates were falling in a race to the bottom, which even good employers—the majority of employers—were forced to join to stay competitive. The difference was kept by the corporations and their bosses in the form of bigger profits, rather than being shared out among the men and women doing the work. Bogus agencies were set up in eastern Europe, advertising British jobs at below UK agreed rates of pay—again so that the money could be siphoned off from the workers and those at the top could keep a bigger slice for themselves.

It is unsurprising that so many working-class people voted to leave the EU, when that was their most visible personal experience of it, albeit it was not necessarily the EU that was at fault but the system of globalised capitalism we are seeing today. My solution would be simple: retain free movement in a qualified manner. If someone has a job, they can come and work here, but the job must be advertised in the UK and in English, and it must pay accepted UK rates. I suspect that the rest of the EU may soon find itself moving towards such a system anyway.

The Euro-referendum and, it would seem, events elsewhere, have brought into focus another new aspect of the state of politics, exemplified by the word of the year: post-truth. In the UK, there was no better example of that than the red Vote Leave bus, with its siren promise of an extra £350 million a week for the NHS—a promise it took Nigel Farage barely 12 hours to admit was false, on breakfast TV.

Members of the House who associated themselves with that promise have never apologised or faced the appropriate obloquy for their association with it. I have to say, Mr Deputy Speaker, that I sought guidance from Mr Speaker and the Clerks as to how I might criticise Members such as the Foreign Secretary for their association with the bus and the claim. I learned that the rules of the House preclude me from calling Members such as the Foreign Secretary deliberately mendacious. Were I allowed to do so, I would, indeed, suggest that these Members were deliberately and wilfully mendacious in the pursuit of short-term political gain—a practice that is known in Cheshire as being a snollygoster. Of course, the rules do preclude me from that, so I will not be making any such allegation.

Post-truth politics is dangerous because it devalues our political system, corrodes the quality of our democracy and diminishes public trust in our institutions. It has a broader effect too—a cultural effect, because as well as undermining honesty and trust and celebrating deceit, it celebrates ignorance and stupidity in saying that learning is not to be valued and has nothing to contribute. So when the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) told Faisal Islam on “Sky News” that he had “had enough of experts”, it was a breathtaking attack on progress, an attack on scientific and cultural learning, a devaluation of the intrinsic importance of the—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. You are mentioning Members. Did you give notice that you were going to mention Members in the Chamber?

[Christian Matheson]

I apologise, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will bear that in mind and amend my comments suitably as a result.

When Members say that they have had enough of experts, that is an attack on progress—a devaluation of the intrinsic importance of the accumulation of knowledge as a good thing that has benefited, and will continue to benefit, humanity across the ages.

I say this clearly to the House: please reject the dishonesty of post-truth politics but reject also its regressive and reactionary message that ignorance and dishonesty are somehow a good thing. Post-truth did not put a man on the moon or develop the Hubble space telescope, post-truth did not invent the internet or the worldwide web, and post-truth will not find a cure for cancer. If we in this place cannot address an argument with fact, it may be time to reassess whether our views are correct and sustainable.

As we look forward to the new year, I make a further plea to the House to reject the notion that the 52% vote to leave is somehow the will of the people. It is the will of the majority of the people and it must be respected— we must deliver the exit from the EU agreed in the referendum—but it cannot be portrayed as the will of all the people. The views of the 48% must be taken into account in how we exit the EU; they cannot be ignored or airbrushed away. I fully support and pay tribute to hon. Members on my Front Bench who are trying to bring the country together and make efforts to represent the 100%, because I fear that, in addition to the perils of post-truth politics, we face another threat—one of cataclysmic disunity. The referendum was brought about by this Government to halt long-running rifts over Europe in certain parts of the House, but those rifts have now been transferred to the whole country, and have fed narrow nationalism in certain parts of it. Narrow, petty nationalism cannot be the solution to any problem that we face in the world today.

I am certainly not imagining a nation where we all agree and everything is fine and dandy, but a basic consensus about how we do politics has been attacked, as exemplified by recent media attacks on High Court judges and their integrity. We are stronger when we stick together. I have never known our country to be so deeply and unpleasantly divided. We have heard so much about putting the “great” back into Great Britain; perhaps now, with all the external threats and challenges we face, it is time to put the “united” back into the United Kingdom.