Comprehensive Spending Review

Debate between Lord Marlesford and Lord Peston

Monday 1st November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford]

I was brought up on the great Kalecki and my recollection of one of his fundamental theses was that the only rescue and hope for capitalism was armament and war. That has not been proved true.

[Lord Peston]

That is not true—that was not his view. What is interesting, if I may give a lecture on the history of economics, is that we can distinguish Kalecki from Keynes, although Kalecki made the great mistake of publishing in Polish and therefore was never fully appreciated. Keynes was attacked, particularly by the American right, for being left wing, but he really believed that capitalism could be saved and advocated his policy so that we could go back to capitalist free enterprise. Kalecki believed that the ideology of capitalists was such that they would prefer to destroy the system rather than to allow Governments to intervene to save it. I am glad that the noble Lord is aware of Kalecki; the sadness is that his name still rarely appears in any of the economic textbooks.

I refer again to the problem of what we should be doing. The noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, said that none of us was telling him what he ought to do. I shall not send him a bill when I do tell him. I am a Back-Bencher so I speak only for myself. The first thing that I would do to save money, after what one of our major newspapers called the fiasco of the defence review, is to redo that review and realise that our whole future on the defence side depends on conventional weapons. We should announce immediately that we have no intention of wasting any money on the renewal of Trident; our nuclear deterrent is not a deterrent, because no one can tell us whom it deters and, in any case, it is not independent. What this country needs is a much improved set of conventional armed forces. The Government should go back and think about that.

My second recommendation to the Government is to abolish immediately the raising of VAT at the beginning of next year. It is the last thing that the economy needs. I speak only for myself; I have no idea whether others are deeply committed to raising VAT. My view is that abolishing the increase is the stimulus that the economy needs.

Thirdly, the Prime Minister, instead of looking for headlines in his attack on the European Community by telling us that he is a Eurosceptic, should realise that the biggest waste of money in the whole of Europe is the common agricultural policy. If he had any backbone, he would seek a row with the Europeans to abolish that policy. That would save us enormously more money than the trivial sums that we are talking about.