Economy: Growth

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, I shall not surprise the House by saying that the analysis of the noble Lord, Lord Flight, is totally the opposite of mine. His is the ideological analysis that lies behind the present Government, a Government who are driving the economy to the wall. Perhaps he and I could have a bet on it.

The noble Lord compared us to Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s logic is effectively to be understood as part of China. It is an enterprise zone for the Chinese economy to some extent and it has a degree of inequality that even the noble Lord, Lord Flight, I assume, would not advocate for this country. The model set by our country with its history, as a northern European country playing a successful part, along with Germany, Holland, Sweden and others, in European society, is not one I hear spoken of as part of the ideology coming from the other side. In fact, the noble Lord’s speech could be summed up as: private sector productive; public sector unproductive. Are people in education not productive? Are people in health not productive? These are caricatures.

I recognise that a question has to be put to the Labour Party and people such as me: what is the alternative? To the wonderful march on Saturday, in which 500,000 people took part, the Government’s response was that we did not put forward an alternative. I do not think that putting a sticking plaster on the present arrangements is the solution, whether it be the operation of the auditors—a mutual admiration society as analysed in our own Economic Affairs Select Committee report published yesterday—or typical boards of directors or the merchant banks. As was pointed out by my noble friend Lord Eatwell the other day, boards of directors in this country do not represent anybody apart from themselves. The churning of shares means that the idea that shareholders are in some meaningful sense the people to whom the board is accountable is fanciful. That the boards’ remuneration committees have pushed up directors’ salaries such that the gap between their pay and that of the average worker is 10 times greater than it was 20 years ago is a scandal. In my view, it is based on fraud in some cases and a lot of these people ought to be locked up. So mine is not exactly the same line of thought as that of the noble Lord, Lord Flight.

In the middle of all this, what is it that Britain is lacking in the four cylinders of its motor car engine firing at the moment? Let us look at the way in which the German economy operates, with its supervisory boards—which I advocate for this country. Let us take a fundamental look at the Victorian company law which we operate even now, more than 150 years since it was written; it is essentially the same. I offer an anecdote. A CEO of a company in this country went to Sweden and the first question put to him was: “How is this takeover, if it goes through, going to help our world market share?” That is not the experience of board members in this country. They are part of a cabal, answerable only to themselves.