Queen’s Speech

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, the outcome of the general election came as a massive blow to me, as it did to all noble Lords on the Labour Benches. It was a major defeat for the Labour Party; there is no point trying to dress it up any other way. Even a month on, I admit that it still hurts.

As I began to get involved in competitive sports as a young boy, I remember that my father said to me, “Winning is everything”. But he qualified those remarks by saying, “Winning is everything within the game or within the contest, whatever it is. Once it’s over, your true mark is shown by how you react. Never gloat if you win, never sulk if you lose”. Those words have stayed with me ever since. It is regrettable that my father never had a chance to offer advice to the Prime Minister, because anybody watching Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday will have seen a sneering, patronising display aimed at the interim leader of the Opposition, which I believe did no credit to the Prime Minister or to Parliament.

The inquest within the Labour Party into what happened in the general election is ongoing, but I have no doubt that the main reason for our defeat is the very subject we are discussing today—the economy. Labour never managed to achieve economic credibility in the minds of enough people, and I believe that can be traced back to the period immediately following the 2010 general election. The coalition parties banged on about “the mess we inherited” and it stuck. It stuck despite being completely untrue. That is something about which the Liberal Democrats should be examining their consciences now.

As my noble friend Lord Hanworth said, the economic crisis was not caused by Gordon Brown or the Labour Government. It was a global economic crisis and it was caused by banks, with British banks well to the fore. The only accusation that could be laid at the door of the Labour Government was that regulation of the banks was woefully inadequate. But—and I believe that it is a big “but”—at no time prior to the economic crash did the Conservatives urge the Government to bring the banks under control, so they were equally culpable in that respect. However, Labour never managed to get that crucial point over to the electorate from the beginning. I believe that we had plenty of time to refute the coalition’s mantra and build a convincing economic policy narrative, but for reasons that I cannot quite grasp we never really managed to do so. That failure sowed the seeds of this year’s election defeat and we need to learn that lesson as we begin to rebuild the party as an electoral force.

As I said, I am still hurting—not for myself, but for the millions of people throughout the UK who are going to suffer considerable hardship over the next five years at the hands of a Government who talk about one nation but have neither an understanding of the concept nor any real interest in moving towards it. They talk the talk; I will be interested to see but I do not expect them to walk the walk. Inequality is the biggest and most pressing problem we face in this country today, and we desperately need policies that tackle it and begin to reverse the slide towards an ever more unequal society. I regret that I do not see any evidence that we will get that from this Government.

How can the Prime Minister claim that he wants one nation when his Government are about to embark on £12 billion of cuts in the social security budget? Indeed, along the Corridor his Chancellor has just been outlining the first tranche of some £3.5 billion of cuts, which we are told will amount to a 3% cut in the budgets of unprotected departments. Why were the plans for the full £12 billion not outlined during the election campaign? I suspect that the Chancellor never expected to be allowed to implement such cuts, as the Conservatives had no idea that they would be in a position to govern alone. That explains why there is to be a Budget next month, just four months after the previous one. Unconstrained, the Government are pressing ahead with unalloyed enthusiasm, irrespective of the effect it will have on families, children, the disabled, the unemployed and would-be first-time buyers.

Equally, how can the Prime Minister claim one nation as his aim when during the election campaign he cynically exploited the rise in support for the SNP to help him win power, all the while being fully aware that the outcome made an independent Scotland more likely? How can he claim one nation as his aim when he announces legislation in the trade unions Bill that will make strikes virtually impossible? My noble friends Lady Donaghy and Lord Monks have covered this in some depth and with greater experience than I have, but I believe that some points are worth restating.

More than 6 million people in the country are members of a trade union, yet they are being shackled in a manner not seen since the 1920s. One nation? Then why not apply the 50% threshold to all ballots? But that would mean the election of the Prime Minister’s close friend the Mayor of London would have been invalid. Why should a dispute between employees and their employer be seen as more important than the election of the most senior politician in the capital city? Mind you, the fact that the mayor regards his job as part-time perhaps diminishes my argument there.

The thresholds proposed are arbitrary, unfair and quite unnecessary. Even more so is the 40% threshold in favour that will be required in public sector strike ballots. On that basis, the Prime Minister’s own position is untenable as he and his party managed to gain a mere—I use the term advisedly—37% of the popular vote a month ago, which equates to just 24% of those eligible to vote. One nation? I say, “Hardly”. It is one rule for trade unionists and none for everyone else. How can the Prime Minister claim one nation as his aim when he seeks to require trade unionists to opt into paying the political levy to the Labour Party yet proposes no such requirements on shareholders as regards donations to his own party from business? This is a blatantly party-political move of the sort that discredits politics in its widest sense. This Government are determined to reduce workers’ rights and, indeed, human rights. The latter may not have been in this Queen’s Speech but it will be along soon enough.

Finally, I am disappointed that proposals to deal with tax evasion or avoidance were not included in the gracious Speech. There is a tax lock Bill, but it includes nothing to tackle tax dodging by multinational companies. This week, the International Monetary Fund said that every year $212 billion is lost to corporate tax dodging in developing countries. It believes that the existing global tax rules are,

“obsolete and ineffective in preventing tax abuse by multinational corporations”.

The Minister will recall that I raised these matters earlier this year during the passage of the Deregulation Bill and it is clear that the Government need to do more to tackle corporate tax dodging, because the job is far from done. The Conservative manifesto said that the party would consider the case for making country-by-country reporting public on a multilateral basis. I urge the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, to ask the Chancellor to spell out in the Budget how the Government will go about doing this.