Queen’s Speech

Lord Newby Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, it is of course a pleasure to congratulate the mover and seconder of the humble Address. The noble Lord, Lord Lamont, has been consistent and forthright in his support of Brexit, so I am sure that the election result will have been music to his ears. I wonder whether he broke into song in his bath on Friday morning. I think the nation should be told.

The noble Baroness, Lady Finn, made a polished and erudite speech. I hope we hear much more from her in the new Parliament—not least in respect of her support for the Swansea tidal lagoon. The noble Baroness gained a reputation during the coalition years as a reformer of the Civil Service and the processes of government. I therefore hope that she has volunteered her services to Mr Dominic Cummings as he seeks to revolutionise the processes of the Ministry of Defence.

It is an iron law of politics that most political parties are disappointed by most general election results. The Conservative Party today, however, is in the rare position of not only winning an election but, in doing so, I suspect, exceeding many of its private expectations. I must therefore acknowledge this spectacular election result for the Conservative Party and congratulate the noble Baroness the Leader of the House on her reappointment. While some may argue that the Prime Minister was presented with a largely open goal, given the weakness of his principal opponent, politics, like football, is full of examples of such open goals being missed. But the Prime Minister did not miss, and his healthy majority is his reward.

Anybody who plays any sport or takes part in any competition must accept and play by the rules, but this does not always mean that the rules are right or defensible. In this election, it took 38,000 votes to elect a Conservative MP and 51,000 votes to elect a Labour MP, but 336,000 votes to elect a Liberal Democrat and 866,000 to elect a Green. My party gained 1.3 million votes compared to the 2017 general election. The Conservatives gained some 300,000 votes. We lost a seat; they gained 47. This is a rotten, rotten system. It makes a mockery of any claim that Britain is an exemplary democracy. It should be changed.

I was temporarily cheered to read in the Conservative Party manifesto that it wanted to ensure that

“every vote counts the same”.

Sadly, this was a reference to implementing the constituency boundary review and not to the more fundamental need for electoral reform.

The composition of the Commons has changed but the principal challenges facing the Government and the country have not. It seems to me that there are three overarching dilemmas with which the Government must now grapple. The first is how to get Brexit done in a way that does the least damage to our economy, security and influence. The key trade-off, which now can no longer be avoided, is between taking back control of our trading and other relationships, and keeping access to EU markets and security systems. One thing is clear: the aspiration of having your cake and eating it is about to be dashed.

The second challenge is how to increase expenditure on the NHS, infrastructure and other areas of public expenditure while keeping taxes down or even reducing them. Again, the Prime Minister’s preferred approach is to get the best of both worlds and do both, but that is simply impossible.

The third challenge is how to bring the country together. This is a particularly acute problem in respect of Scotland and Northern Ireland.

So, how does the Queen’s Speech seek to address these three challenges? On Brexit, the Government are adopting a macho approach. There will be no extension of the transition period beyond the end of year, and while a commitment by this Prime Minister is sometimes only an aspiration that dissolves under pressure, let us take the Government at their word. If successful, they can negotiate a Canada-style trade agreement. This means that we will have reached a free trade deal on goods, where we have a deficit, but no equivalent deal on services, where we have a surplus. This makes no economic sense. It will require customs forms and checks. If these are somehow to be avoided on the island of Ireland, they will have to be imposed down the Irish Sea. No sector of the economy can possibly gain from these arrangements and any offsetting gains from trade agreements with the US and elsewhere are, at best, much less beneficial and many years away.

On the public finances, as a Yorkshireman, I am delighted that the Government have just discovered that the north and the Midlands are in desperate need of new public investment. We welcome government promises that the north is about to enter a new golden age in which government largesse pours forth in unparalleled volumes, and I very much look forward to seeing its beneficial effects in Ripon.

The Government also promise large additional expenditure on the NHS and education, which is indeed overdue. But we have read the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ conclusion that the Government’s plans for funding such expenditure are literally incredible. Either any pretence of fiscal responsibility must go, or taxes must rise. The Queen’s Speech is silent on which it will be.

On bringing the country together, greater regional investment would clearly be helpful and welcome, as would reversing the growing prosperity gap between London and the south-east on the one hand and the further-flung regions on the other. However, even if the Government were to redirect significant investment northwards, I fear that Brexit will make narrowing the prosperity gap much more difficult because the kind of deal envisaged by the Government is likely to hit large manufacturers with integrated supply chains—companies typically situated many miles from London—particularly hard. It is also likely to suppress, rather than encourage, the level of investment needed to bring greater prosperity, particularly in manufacturing regions.

Beyond England, it is possible that the election results have jolted the DUP and Sinn Féin into action to reinstate the Northern Ireland Executive, which would of course be most welcome. But again, the Brexit deal, which is going to place a customs border somewhere, will inevitably increase the attractiveness of a single state in Ireland and will increase demands, possibly in the near future, for a border poll on the issue. Moreover, relations with Scotland and its people look set to become more fraught, rather than less.

The Prime Minister might portray himself as a one-nation Conservative, but I fear that the one nation he has in mind is England, not the United Kingdom. In the face of these challenges and the Government’s response to them, how should we in the Lords react? We clearly must accept the result of the general election and not seek to thwart its outcome, but this does not mean that we should abandon our critical faculties or our constitutional responsibilities to hold the Government to account and to exercise our judgment in improving legislation where we think it is in the public good.

I wholly accept that with a large majority, the appetite in the Commons for accepting amendments that we pass may—initially, at least—be very limited. We will therefore have to choose our battles carefully, but in my view that does not mean that we should retreat entirely from the field. I suspect, for example, that your Lordships’ House will wish to give very close scrutiny to any constitutional changes the Government may bring forward—in particular, any proposals to tilt the balance of power towards the Executive and away from Parliament or the courts. The Conservative manifesto talks of the need to

“come up with constitutional proposals to restore trust in our institutions.”

But that trust will be restored only if those who run these institutions are seen by the public to be worthy of that trust. As we enter this new Parliament, we must re-dedicate ourselves to doing everything in our power to re-establishing that trust.