Debate on the Address
Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Mike Kane(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)
I am grateful to you for calling me, Madam Deputy Speaker, on the first of our six days of debate on the Loyal Address. Some very good speeches have been made, covering a wide range of matters. I am particularly pleased to follow the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley): I agreed entirely with a great deal of what he said. However, I think it a great pity that his party did not include a day’s debate on foreign affairs and defence matters in its programme for these six days of debate. I think that we shall have to rectify that. I shall ask those on my party’s Front Bench whether we can have a general debate on foreign affairs. We seem recently to have got into the habit of hearing statements on specific matters, but it has been some time since we had a general debate.
The hon. Member for York Central rightly reminded us that we are approaching two important anniversaries, of the first world war and of D-day. We should bear in mind the state of flux that world affairs were in after the two world wars. As was pointed out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway), probably not since those days has the world situation been so fluid.
The hon. Member for York Central also referred to our problems with the attitude of the Soviet Union—or the Russian Federation, as it is now called—to increasing its hegemony around the world after seizing Ukraine. I shall make only one point about his critique of the Russian Federation. He said that the Russians were more economically independent than they used to be. Let me remind him that, as I have said before in the House, they are more internationally dependent on the world’s economic situation today than they have ever been. The rouble is more internationally tradable, the Russians now have a stock exchange, and they require more international development to develop their huge oil resources. They need big firms such as BP to be able to develop those resources in some very difficult exploration areas. There are levers that we can use in relation to the Russian Federation, and I think that we need to use them.
However, the hon. Gentleman was right to observe that the world is in a state of flux. As I said in my intervention during the speech of my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South, the situation in Russia is fluid, and the situation in Syria is very fluid. I think that the House, and my party, will need to revisit the subject of what assistance we can give the Syrian opposition. Like my right hon. Friend, I was one of the signatories of the letter that was published in The Daily Telegraph today, calling for the whole matter to be re-examined. We know that 100,000 people have been killed in Syria, that probably well over a quarter of a million have been displaced, and that there is a huge volume of misery in the country. People are being starved, maimed and killed. That situation cannot continue indefinitely: we cannot allow the evil Assad regime to go on behaving as it is.
Our troops are pulling out of Afghanistan. It will be interesting to see whether a democratic Government succeed there, and whether the gains that we have made in terms of women’s education and a whole range of infrastructural changes proceed or whether the country returns to its previous state. One of the things that the Queen’s Speech lacked was any reference to conflict countries, their abilities, and how we deal with them in the aftermath of conflict. My right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South raised the interesting issue of what is happening in the aftermath of the Libyan problem in which we intervened. A huge range of weapons are now going into Maghreb and Sahel, and that has given rise to a large number of problems in Africa and elsewhere.
I did not want to concentrate on foreign affairs today, although it is my wont to speak about them in the House. I really wanted to focus on economic matters. I think that the coalition Government’s economic policy has been successful. We have reduced the deficit by a third, we have created 1.6 million jobs in the private sector, and, even more pleasingly, we have created a record number of apprenticeships. I am especially pleased to note that 570 apprenticeships have been created in The Cotswolds in the last year. That is excellent news for my constituents.
I am particularly keen on the subject of exports and foreign direct investment in this country. After all, there are only so many goods and services that we can sell to ourselves, and if we want to continue on our current path of excellent economic growth, we must increase exports. I was pleased to see that in 2013 the UK’s goods exports amounted to £304 billion, which was a record high. The jump in exports reduced the trade deficit from £9.8 billion in November to £7.7 billion. However, that is only a drop in the ocean. We must continue to work to increase our exports. I am pleased that the Prime Minister has led trade delegations to China and to other countries all over the world. That is very good news, and it demonstrates the Prime Minister’s dedication to increasing our exports.
We need to look closely at the job that is done by UK Trade & Investment. UKTI has been transformed under Lord Green, and I am sure that Lord Livingston will build on those achievements, but there is still much to be done. The Chancellor has set this country the challenging target of increasing the value of exports to £1 trillion by 2020, and ensuring that an extra 100,000 businesses are exporting by that date. We shall have to motor fairly well to achieve that. We shall need to do what the British Exporters Association has done and is doing, and help small and medium-sized companies to export.
UK Export Finance should be able to provide a boost for British exports. It has challenged its former excessively rigid structure, and its new flexibility has enabled it to invest £5 billion in its export refinancing facility. That will provide a huge boost for exports. I am particularly pleased that there is a small business, enterprise and employment Bill in the Queen’s Speech. It will deal with one or two long-standing problems that we need to address. We need to help small businesses and this Bill will do precisely that. It will help small business get into the business of public procurement. For too long public procurement has been difficult—indeed, often impossible —for small businesses because the Government contracts are so complicated and so weighted against small businesses. I hope my hon. Friends on the Front Bench will be able to cure that through this Bill.
Also in that Bill is a very welcome step to deal with zero-hours contracts. The real mischief I hope that the Bill will address is not the zero hours themselves, but the ability for an employer to prevent an employee from taking another job on a day on which the employer says there is no work. If there is no work for somebody on a zero-hours contract, they should be able to go off to another employer and seek work. I hope the Bill will address that.
Returning to exports, it seems that many SMEs do not know about the work of UK Trade & Investment. I was appalled to see in an article in The Daily Telegraph on 10 November 2013 by Alan Tovey that 69% of SME exporters were unaware of UKTI’s work and two thirds did not know about UK Export Finance. If so few exporters know about that, how can we expect to meet the exacting targets that the Chancellor has set?
We need to promote the British brand across the world. As I have said, the Prime Minister has led delegations to China, India, Africa, South America, the middle east and elsewhere, and that is an excellent start, but the only way we are going to secure truly sustainable growth is by increasing exports and foreign direct investment.
I was fortunate enough to go to China recently with a number of colleagues, where I learned about President Xi Jinping’s new economic plan up to 2020. It is worth setting out the facts because they are truly staggering, and in recent years the Chinese have never failed to implement an economic plan. This new economic plan aims to increase GDP per capita from its current $6,000 to $10,000 over the entire population of 1.25 billion people. In order to achieve that, they will need an annual growth rate of 6.7%, but, even more staggeringly, they will need to bring 10 million new people into the work force each year. That gives the UK huge opportunities, because the Chinese are buying up brands such as House of Fraser and they are moving up the value chain in respect of those brands so that they can both manufacture and market products under those brands. That gives our exporters a real opportunity.
We have another opportunity in China and elsewhere in the world. During my visit to China, I was delighted to be able to continue my help for the Royal Agricultural university in my constituency, which has formalised links with three Chinese universities. During a visit to Zhejiang university in Hangzhou city I was delighted to discover that it has just signed a memorandum of understanding with the London School of Economics. Britain has always been one of the leading innovator nations in the world. If we are to continue to compete in the global race, we have to rely on our best and brightest students. Equally, to keep our universities in that race, we need them to collaborate with the best universities around the world and to participate in cutting-edge research.
Britain invented the telephone, the computer, the internet, railways and in 2004 we invented the new wonder-material graphene at Manchester university. I hope that does not become yet another example of a great British invention which is commercialised by other countries. When intellectual property is developed in this country, we need to work to ensure that the law is strong enough to protect it around the world so that we may benefit from it. To this end, I was particularly pleased to visit the top executives in China Telecom to discuss their new music-streaming down the telephone, for which the growth numbers are exponential. To protect their own intellectual property rights in China, they have a team of lawyers. That is potentially good for British investors. We should be encouraging all developing countries to strengthen their intellectual property rights laws and enforcement, so when we invent things we can develop them and export them to those countries with confidence.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown
The hon. Gentleman rightly gives a plug to his university. That was a fantastic invention and I do not think the world has yet truly seen the transformative effects it will bring, but what is slightly worrying is that the Chancellor announced that we were going to put £50 million into developing the product, yet the South Koreans put £190 million in and the Europeans are putting in £1 billion. This invention will transform most electrical products and most people have never even heard of it. We must concentrate on where we are going in the future and I hope we will make the best of that transformative product.
Not just China is expanding at a huge rate in south-east Asia. Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and others are all experiencing very high levels of growth. Brazil, too, offers us a particular opportunity to help British exporters as a result of its hosting the World cup and the Olympics—we benefited, too, from our own Olympics.
However, to be able to expand into the world’s growing markets, we need to be able physically to get to them first. Businesses are calling out for increased airport capacity. I recently hosted a delegation from Hubei province in China. The only way to get to that province from this country is via a stop-over in Paris. We need to encourage our airlines to fly to more secondary destinations in China and elsewhere. The Germans, the French and the Dutch are all doing that, and we must do so too if we want to get our business men there—and, even more importantly, if we want to get their business men here. By pure chance I happened to sit next to a Chinese banker who wants to invest between £100 million and £1 billion in the banking sector in the City of London, yet he does not have a direct flight connection to London to get his people here to discuss that investment. If we do not pull our socks up in tackling these sorts of things, we will lose out in the world race. I say to the House that when the Sir Howard Davies commission makes a decision after the next election, whichever party is elected—I hope it will be mine—let us implement that decision quickly, whatever it is and however controversial, and let us hope that the Opposition support that decision.
The UK needs to tap into high-growth markets and diversify away from stagnant EU economies. In the last decade the UK has exported more to Ireland than Brazil, Russia, India and China combined. There are already signs that that situation is improving, however. Since 2010 exports to China have increased by 91% and to Russia by 118%, admittedly from a very low base, whereas in the three months to December 2013 the UK export of goods to the EU fell by 6.1%. Although it is easier to export to the EU market, we need to encourage our British companies to look out and go to the rest of the world.
I cannot finish my speech without a word on Europe and the recent elections. At least one quarter of the peoples around Europe voted for reform of the EU. Even the French President is now saying we should have a reform of the EU, and that should signal to the Eurocrats in the Commission that we need reform. I thought that it was breathtaking hypocrisy on the part of the Eurocrats in the Commission to start telling us that we should increase our taxes. They have clearly learned nothing from those elections, and we have to persuade them that we must reform the EU.
The British people will take note of what is happening in Europe and if there is no reform and we do not get a renegotiation on some of the key matters, it is possible that the British people, in a referendum, will vote to leave. Regardless of whether we get an in/out referendum in 2017—I hope we do and I hope we get a Conservative Government to achieve that, as only a Conservative Government will achieve it—we will have a referendum on Europe sooner or later, because in the previous Parliament we all enshrined in law an Act that gives a referendum when we transfer major powers in a treaty. You can bet your bottom dollar that the Eurocrats in the Commission will come up with a major treaty within the next five to 10 years and so there will be a referendum on Europe. Unless Europe amends its ways and unless we see that renegotiation, the British people will vote in a way that may well be anti-Europe in that referendum.
Like others, I knocked on a lot of doors in the European election campaign and I found that one major issue was migration into this country. Somebody made a powerful intervention on the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) suggesting to him that it is not about who comes to this country, whatever race or creed they are, but about the pace of change—it is not racist to say that. A lot of constituents fear too many people coming at once, which puts pressure on our services—our schools, health service and social services. That is why we need a renegotiation, so that we can repatriate some of the migration powers to this Parliament and start to control the pace of change.