Autumn Statement

Douglas Carswell Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I am all in favour of discussing these big strategic questions in a grown-up way, trying to build a consensus across the House, but I see little interest from Opposition Members in doing that. We have made a commitment of £10 billion of additional funding for the NHS over this Parliament—[Interruption.] Yes, we have. It is £10 billion of additional funding by the end of this Parliament. A senior management team in the NHS has drawn up a plan, set the budget and asked for the money. It has been given the money and I think we should allow it to show what it can do.

[Mr Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP)]

The Chancellor’s autumn statement suggests yet more public borrowing, with total public debt due to increase to £1.6 trillion in the new year and £1.9 trillion by 2020, when it will be four times what it was in 2005. Rather than being a reflection on Brexit, is not the accumulation of these unsustainable levels of public debt due to his predecessor’s failure to match words with deeds and get a grip on public spending?

[Mr Hammond]

No. I appreciate that the hon. Gentleman will not have had a chance to read the report, but when he does so, he will see that the big drivers of debt are: the deteriorating forecast for growth, which of course has a big impact; the structural change that appears to be taking place in the relationship between a given level of GDP and tax receipts—I mentioned in my statement that we will have to address that—and the measures that the Bank of England took, which have a direct impact on public debt, but only in the short term, because they do unwind over the course of a few years.

Short Money

Douglas Carswell Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[John Penrose]

For a long time, the funding received by Sinn Féin has been treated as a separate but parallel consideration, subject to a separate resolution of this House. I would expect that to continue and for it to receive separate, special consideration as a result.

[Mr Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP)]

I welcome the Government’s announcement that they will be cutting Short money, and I urge Ministers to stick to their guns and not to retreat. The sight of special pleading from political parties wanting to get their hands on taxpayers’ cash is disgraceful. I urge Ministers not only to slash Short money but to insist that all political parties publish fully audited accounts of what they spend it on, as my party will at the end of this year, so that we can see the hotel bills and precisely what they spend that taxpayers’ money on.

[John Penrose]

I strongly agree with the hon. Gentleman. It is a timeworn phrase but it bears repetition: sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Short Money and Policy Development Grant

Douglas Carswell Excerpts

Thursday 11th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[John Penrose]

It has gone up by 50% when everybody else has had to tighten their belts, and if we do nothing, it will continue to rise further.

[Mr Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP)]

I am delighted that the Government are cutting Short money; few things this Administration have announced have pleased me more. Does the Minister agree that this is public money and that the public will deeply resent it being spent on politicians to do more politics? Does he agree that the rules on Short money need to reflect the fact that the cost of doing politics—of doing policy, research and communication—have come down? We live in a world where Google is at our fingertips, so we do not need researchers. We also have Twitter and blogs so we do not need a whole department of press officers. Does he agree that the public will resent using public money to pay for Spads and shadow special advisers, who have watched too much of “The West Wing”, to sit in Portcullis House at public expense?

House of Lords Reform

Douglas Carswell Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Steven Paterson (Stirling) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, and I will start by reading an amendment that was moved in this place during a debate on the House of Lords by a former leader of the Labour party. It was to add the words,

“the Upper House, being an irresponsible part of the Legislature, and of necessity representative only of interests opposed to the general well-being is a hindrance to national progress and ought to be abolished”.

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments of that former Labour party leader, Mr Arthur Henderson. He tabled that amendment during a debate on the House of Lords on 26 June 1907—never let it be said that Westminster rushes to reform. Predictably, the amendment was defeated, although it was part of a national debate that led to the introduction of the Parliament Act 1911, which made the supremacy of the elected Chamber over the unelected Chamber clear and beyond doubt. That was a very good thing, but we must go further.

I contend that radical change to the constitution is overdue, and that there is no place for a bloated, unelected Chamber of retired politicians, cronies and placemen in the modern day. It is 105 years since the Parliament Act, and I ask the House—not before time—to embrace democracy in all that we do. That means moving to an elected second Chamber and the abolition of what we currently have. Democratic change is normal, and we must move towards that.

We must bring the governance of the United Kingdom into line with the 21st-century standards of democratic accountability to be found across the developed world—we would all like to think we are part of that. In 2016 we have a Tory Government who are committed to the protection of this unelected, unaccountable, political establishment, and whose only desire to reform the House of Lords stems from the Lords’ own efforts to stymie and oppose Government legislation. That problem was created because the previous Government were so effective at stuffing the place with their own appointees, and this Government would rather stuff more voting fodder into the already bloated second Chamber in order to get their way. Perhaps they are not content with the fact that the UK has the second largest appointed parliamentary Chamber after the Chinese National People’s Congress, and they want to show the world that when it comes to undemocratic and unaccountable government, nobody does it better than the UK.

In 2015, 45 new peers were appointed to the House of Lords, including 26 on the Government side. Make no mistake, the House of Lords is not impotent, despite the fact that the Parliament Act 1911 has only been used, I think, seven times. The Chamber possesses the ability to halt legislation that affects no fewer than 64 million people. That is not the democratic will of the people; it is the will of 821 unelected, permanent peers, 92 of whom hold their seat for their entire lives simply through an accident of birth.

[Mr Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP)]

A small clique in Downing Street gets to determine who sits in the Lords. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that gives rise to a fundamental unfairness and means that there is no correlation between the number of votes cast and the composition of the Chamber? For example, it is possible for a party to get 4 million votes in an election, but have zero appointed peers. Is that fundamentally unfair?

[Steven Paterson]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point, and I think that it is fundamentally unfair and that we must move to democracy. Appointing peers is ridiculous and disgraceful in this day and age.

Royal Bank of Scotland

Douglas Carswell Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Quin]

I will make a negative point and a positive point. On the negative side, I do not think that tackles my concern that smaller banks would have higher costs of capital and scarcer resources, making them less able to lend to smaller businesses. I think the hon. Lady would agree—my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove certainly would—that there is still a huge crisis in confidence in the major banks, and the last thing a lot of small businesses want to do is ask for a loan, because they are worried about the rug being pulled from underneath them. That process is going to take years to address.

Internationally, I do not think that the United States, given its overall funding strategies and the use of capital markets by corporates, presents Europe with a useful analogy. The caja banks in Spain were regionally focused and regionally driven, and they made huge investments in regional projects, but they have been a disaster and brought the Spanish economy crashing down. I acknowledge the historical success of Sparkassen and Landesbanken in Germany, but I fear that what happened to them during the crisis could happen elsewhere. The inability of Landesbanken to get local lending projects that more than met its cost of capital meant that it ended up taking on very risky investments in Europe, which helped to precipitate the Eurozone crisis

[Mr Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP)]

And bonds.

[Jeremy Quin]

As the hon. Gentleman says, the wrong kinds of bonds in the wrong kinds of markets also inflated the credit bubble.

I fear that there are no overseas alternatives that would act as a panacea. There is no reason why we should not do something by ourselves, but I am worried that it would be a distraction at a time when we really want money to be flowing out of banks and into the real economy. For that reason, no matter how lonely it makes me, I oppose the motion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP)]

Madam Deputy Speaker, I will take your advice exactly and speak for only a couple of minutes.

[Helen Goodman]

He has only just come in.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. If the hon. Gentleman had only just come in, I would not be calling him to speak. It is very kind of the hon. Lady to offer advice from a sedentary position, but it is not appropriate. I call Mr Carswell.

[Mr Carswell]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) on securing this debate. She spoke incredibly eloquently—well done.

I am afraid that I cannot support the motion as it is far too prescriptive. It presumes to know what shape banks should take in the future. The German regional banking model, of which much has been said, could well be the future, but I am not sure that even Germany will necessarily have a German model of banking in 10, 15 or 20 years’ time. Equally, new technology might mean that we are able to do many of the things that banks currently do using platforms, which do not come with costly bonuses and buildings.

I very much favour the idea in the motion of a new model of banking. Since 2007, there has not been significant reform. Almost nothing has been done to rein in the worst excesses of fractional-reserve banking. It is this ability to conjure credit out of nothing that creates chronic malinvestment and credit bubbles in the wider economy and makes banks intrinsically unstable and in need of bail-outs—incidentally, I have consistently opposed those bail-outs.

In my paper “After Osbrown”—I do not intend to rehearse all the arguments on this occasion—I outlined the new model banking that I wished to see. After the Osbrown monetary and banking consensus has failed, and been seen to have failed, we will need change, but neither nationalising the banking system and the money supply nor imposing grand designs on the nature of banks, regional or mutual, are the answers. Claims that we need more retail banks as they are supposedly a safer bet than investment banks need to be taken with a large pinch of salt given that it was Northern Rock, a retail bank, that failed. I suspect that we will see dramatic change in financial intermediation and in the nature of money itself.

At the heart of the capitalist system is capital allocation, which does not use the pricing mechanism to allocate capital. That inconsistency cannot last much longer. We need fundamental reform to break up cartel banking. We must break up the cosy cartel presided over by central banks. We need to unwind quantitative easing, which is a subsidy for bankers. Thankfully, that will come about not as a result of politicians, House of Commons motions or ministerial insights, but because of technological change. Holding on to RBS shares will do nothing but hold up the changes that technology and market forces need to bring about.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Douglas Carswell Excerpts

Monday 13th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP)]

I, too, will vote for this Budget. Tomorrow’s vote is a binary choice and although I have reservations about some of the Chancellor’s proposals, on balance I support the measures. We must never return to Ed Balls economics.

I support a number of measures. I unequivocally back the idea of having a fiscal charter, to echo the point made by the hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng). It is a commitment to run a budget surplus by 2019-20 and to retain that approach in subsequent years unless growth is less than 1%. The principle behind that idea is exceptionally good; as a country, we cannot go on living beyond our means. I believe I am right in saying that we have only had budget surpluses in six of the past 40 years. That is unsustainable and also deeply unfair on the next generation. If we keep on running up these debts, someone will have to pay them, and it is deeply unfair and irresponsible of us to pass them on to the next generation. I only hope that the Chancellor manages to meet his own fiscal charter objectives. He has introduced, I think, five Budgets and in each one he has pushed back the date by which he hopes to balance the books.

I also support the proposal to remove the climate change levy exemptions for providers of renewably sourced electricity.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I am particularly gratified to hear the hon. Gentleman espousing the cause of sound finance. I just wonder how he feels being surrounded by people who deny that there is any need to reduce the deficit.

[Mr Carswell]

I will come on to say a little about my views on the unreformed Opposition. In fact, I will make them a proposal at the end of my short speech.

My party loves new energy technology. However, there is something we find objectionable: if the technology is so wonderful, why does it need to be subsidised? Removing some of those subsidies is a good thing, particularly when they push up the cost of energy, but the Government lack a fully coherent free market energy policy that allows real choice and competition.

I also cheer Government changes to vehicle excise duty. The new tariff will reflect changes in technology. Given that most new cars’ carbon dioxide output is below the old CO₂ low threshold variable, vehicle excise duty is fast becoming a subsidy from poor people, who cannot afford new cars, to rich people, who can. VED will also be used for the creation of a road fund in 2020-21. That is a very sensible move, as it means that taxpayers will see directly where their VED goes and the tangible benefits that come from it.

I also support raising the personal allowance to £11,000 by 2015-16 and to £12,500 by 2019-20. That should be welcomed as a tax break for everyone who works. Indeed, I hope that at some point we will be able to raise the threshold even higher, to £13,000.

I also support welfare reform. When the tax credit system was put in place, I do not think that we ever expected that it would allow big corporate interests to rely on the taxpayer to subsidise their payrolls, and yet in effect that is what has happened. I fear that tax credits may have contributed to wage compression. Welfare reform is possible and necessary, but it is also very important that, as the Chancellor has said, we are prepared to raise the minimum wage to try to offset some of the impact of that reform.

Having outlined where I support the Government, I am afraid to say that there are one or two measures about which I have some concerns. I am particularly concerned about limiting public sector pay increases to 1%. I fear that that may not be politically sustainable over the next four years. There was a pay freeze in the public sector between 2010 and 2013. Since 2013, pay rises have been limited to 1% and, given that inflation is often above 1%, that has, in effect, amounted to a pay cut. If the economy grows in the way that the Chancellor expects it to, I am not sure that four more years of 1% is sustainable.

I also have some doubts about the Chancellor’s fiscal projections; I fear that there is a degree of fiscal complacency. In its manifesto, my old party told us that it would run a budget surplus from 2019, which is only four years later than promised five years ago. In fact, that target has now been pushed back to 2020.

This year, we will still manage to accumulate a deficit of £70 billion and we still have a bigger primary budget deficit than Greece. The budget deficit last year was 5.7% of GDP, which was higher than that of any country in the eurozone apart from, I think, Spain and Cyprus. UK national debt stands at £1,600 billion, which is £950 billion higher than when the Chancellor first took office. That is not an impressive record. Servicing that debt costs £40 billion a year. Think of what we could do with £40 billion—that is more than the entire defence budget. Think of the tax breaks we could give people and, more to the point, think of how much greater that sum will be when interest rates go up.

I will support this Budget, and I look forward to the Finance Bill that follows. If Her Majesty’s Opposition will repudiate Ed Balls economics and table sensible amendments, I will be delighted to support them, bearing in mind that the Government have a rather slender majority. However, there must never be a return to the recklessness of the Parliaments between 2001 and 2015.

As the UK Independence party’s sole Member of Parliament, I will support classical free market liberal economics. From that point of view, this Budget is not perfect, but it is infinitely preferable to the alternatives.

Greece

Douglas Carswell Excerpts

Monday 29th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

It is not a great secret that we have not been entirely enamoured of the foreign policy pursued by the Syriza Government, but that has not affected these decisions.

[Mr Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP)]

The Chancellor has consistently called for more euro integration. He has lauded the remorseless logic of monetary union and called for fiscal, banking and economic integration. Only last month he called the euro a success. Does he still want Greece and others to wade further into this monetary mire? Might it not be right for the Government to support other member states having the currency freedom that we in this country enjoy?

European Union Referendum Bill

Douglas Carswell Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2015 Commons Chamber

Reference was made earlier to the position of Norway and Switzerland. One of the great failings of those who believe that we should be outside the European Union is that they have failed to define what we are going out to.

[Mr Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP)]

Free trade.

[Mike Gapes]

The free trade that Switzerland and Norway have with the European Union is dependent on their complying with rules and regulations that are determined within and by the European Union member states, over which Switzerland and Norway have absolutely no say.

Financial Services Industry

Douglas Carswell Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP)]

I am grateful to the Minister for taking part in this debate, following the previous long and onerous one.

This issue is desperately important: the need for more competition in financial services is urgent. Choice and competition are always and everywhere a good thing. They drive up standards, force innovation and always manage to give customers better value. In many areas of our lives, we take choice and competition for granted—we assume that they happen naturally—but I simply do not think that there is enough choice and competition when it comes to financial services. In fact, financial services in this country have in many respects become something of a cartel, in which the different provider interests do not have any incentive to give the customer what they want, or to innovate and do better.

Historically, there has been a great loss of diversity in the financial industry in this country. We have a handful of banks in the UK today, but my researcher tells me that there are 417 savings banks in Germany. There has been a steady process of centralisation over the past few generations. Within living memory, cities such as Leeds and Norwich were financial centres in their own right; today, London predominates. We used to have many more types of governance structure in banks and financial institutions, with many more credit unions, partnership banks, friendly societies and old-style building societies. Banking is now dominated by big corporate plcs, which is a model that detaches management from ownership. Today, 77% of the current account market is dominated by the big four banks.

It is interesting to ask whether that is a natural process that has happened because of market-driven consolidation. I think it is a consequence of a regulatory system that has created and enforced homogeneity not just of providers but of products. It is has led to a system in which compliance is elevated above the need for customer service. I cannot help noticing that growth in many financial institutions and businesses has happened through acquisition, rather than through increasing the number of happy customers.

It is worth asking whether regulation has proved to be a barrier to entry in financial services. We commonly hear the complaint that people with money to invest are looking for a way to save it with a good rate of interest, and at the same time it is often said that businesses complain that they cannot get credit. In a normal market, the former would be put together with the latter and those who want to lend at a competitive rate of return would lend to those who want to borrow. Might it be that something about the regulatory system in this country is preventing that from happening?

The old Financial Services Authority issued some 6,000 pages of regulation between its inception and the financial crash. It is fair to say that the new regulators are carrying on with the blizzard of regulations. There are thousands of pages of compliance. Ultimately, I suspect that that is an attempt to restrain the worst excesses of some aspects of fractional reserve banking and to mitigate risk by decree or fiat. I wonder whether one consequence of that regulation is that it prevents us having new competitors, a broader spectrum of products and a broader range of providers.

It is no surprise that Metro bank, which I believe is the first new high street bank to open in this country in a generation, is so customer focused. We need to do far more to ensure that there are more banking start-ups. I will go on to elaborate on what I mean by that. We need to do more to ensure that regulation encourages banking innovation. We must allow the changes that the internet will bring about in banking to happen and ensure that regulation does not inhibit those natural, organic changes.

I am full of praise for the Minister’s magnificent idea in her former incarnation about allowing greater portability of bank accounts. I strongly support that. It is a wonderful scheme. I would love to hear a bit more about it. To put it a different way, since 2008, the percentage of personal current account holders who switch banks has grown. I would love to hear the Minister talk about ways in which we can encourage that. I am not certain what the correct percentage ought to be in a properly competitive market, but I imagine that it would be a good deal more than the current 3%. In any properly competitive market, there ought to be quite a high level of customer turnover. Should it be closer to 5% or 10%? I would love to hear the answer.

I would also love to hear whether the Minister has any sympathy with the idea that the regulatory system needs to encourage more banks to enter the market. The Prudential Regulation Authority has responsibility for that, but is it making it easier for start-ups—the equivalents of Metro bank and Handelsbanken—to come into the market? Are we making sure that capital requirements, although important, do not inhibit change?

On a slightly different note, I would love to hear whether we could review the regulatory system not only to allow new banks, but to allow new kinds of banking. We are all familiar with the idea that we can use our mobile phones to pay for things. That would have seemed like science fiction or magic 20 years ago and perhaps even 10 years ago. Similarly, might we not be able to have banking without banks—without those costly institutions that require big buildings and big bonuses? Might it not be possible to have banking through a company like O2, Google or Facebook? Those organisations have a huge customer base and know a great deal about their customers. Could we have a regulatory system that would allow a Google, a Facebook or an O2 to get a banking licence if they wanted to? It is key that if a company like that wants to acquire a banking licence, we make sure it is able to do so.

I fear that the regulatory system we have is very good at preventing new competition. That is one reason why the existing players tend to have such a close, symbiotic relationship with the regulator. There tends to be a revolving door between the regulator and the big corporate banks. I fear that corporate gigantism is a product of corporatist regulation. The regulatory system that we have is very prescriptive and detailed. It talks not simply about the outcome, but about the process that needs to be followed. I am not sure that that is a good way of regulating financial services. We must bear it in mind that Northern Rock was a highly regulated institution. The model in this country encourages financial institutions to create large compliance departments and to acquire armies of compliance officers, but those people often fail to ask the most basic questions about reserve ratios.

In financial services there is an inevitable correlation between risk and reward, and rather like the laws of gravity, if we try to create a regulatory system that defies the correlation between risk and reward, ultimately it will become unstuck. The basis for the investment industry is that correlation between risk and reward, yet I fear—particularly in the fund management industry—that some regulators try in effect to stipulate the investment mix, which has a big impact on that correlation between risk and reward.

The Building Societies Association and the Association of Financial Mutuals have made sensible suggestions about various aspects of our regulation, and interestingly they seem to recognise that our regulatory system prevents competition—it favours big corporate plcs and established players, and it does not help the mutual funds. They have come up with proposals to remove restrictive barriers to raising capital from mutuals, to change the regulation system that favours big corporate plcs, and to encourage market diversity. I would love to hear whether the Minister has sympathy with those ideas, and if so what we could try to change. The Competition and Markets Authority sounds like a wonderful idea—it is a wonderful name: who could be against it? It investigates cases where competition rules have been breached, and rightly so. Might it be, however, that Government regulation and Government fiat is doing more to restrict competition than any of the providers?

At various times in recent years there have been instances of alleged mis-selling in the financial sector, and people have been sold products on the basis of misinformation or facts that they regarded as misinformation. A constituent of mine was recently involved in the interest rate swap mis-selling scandal. That is not the first incident, and I fear it will not be the last. Every time there is an incident of mis-selling in the financial industry in this country, we ask about changing the rules and regulations, and rightly so, but we should not lose sight of the fact that the best regulator ought to be choice and competition. Happy customers ought to ensure that mis-selling does not happen, and behaviour that leads to mis-selling will be much less likely in a market focused on customer satisfaction, rather than simply compliance. We should not ask, “Are we able to do this?”, but “Does the customer want us to do this?”

I am afraid it is impossible for us to consider competition in the financial industry without considering the EU dimension—it is a sad reflection of how hollowed out our democracy has become that Ministers can really only reiterate the EU’s position on many of these issues. A couple of weeks ago Lord Hill issued a Green Paper on the capital markets union—another incident of further integration—and the Juncker Commission is pushing for standardisation in European capital markets. On the face of it, the aim is noble and it is a good ambition to remove the systemic risk in European capital markets. However, I fear that it has led to an alphabet soup of regulation in the form of the European system of financial supervision, and to unintended consequences. I will therefore touch on three rules that I think introduce such unintended consequences.

The first is the solvency II directive, which was enacted in January this year and regulates insurance companies across the EU. It is important for the House to understand that the insurance model ought to be an inherently stable model in the financial industry. It is no coincidence that during the financial crisis insurance companies tended to be pretty stable, which is because they tend to have a steady flow of income from premiums. Solvency II has the effect of imposing capital requirements on insurance firms, which would favour investment in sovereign bonds over corporate debt. I fear that would mean that there was less capital for companies—less choice, less competition and more homogenous products in the EU.

The second directive having unintended consequences is the markets and financial instruments directive II. Again, it aims to reduce risk, but as so often when one tries to remove the correlation between risk and reward through fiat, all sorts of unintended consequences are created. I fear that this will hinder the allocation of capital in markets in Europe. It will hinder the innovation in financial products.

The name of the alternative investment fund managers directive implies that left to their own devices there would be alternatives. I think the directive would inhibit the development of alternatives: the development of choice and competition in the financial markets. It would make it more likely that there would be homogeneity in the marketplace. I would be interested to hear if the Minister thinks that EU rules will help or hinder the development of competition in UK financial markets.

In conclusion, in most aspects of our lives we take choice and competition for granted. We take it for granted when we go shopping, when we buy groceries and shop around for holidays and entertainment. It is that choice and competition that I think makes life better, that improves standards and makes the world today so much better than it was a generation ago. We need to extend choice and competition into the financial markets too, and into financial services. Ever since the financial crisis, free market popular capitalism has been given a bad name. Free market capitalism needs to be given a good name again.

One key to doing that is to recognise that sometimes in financial services in this country there has been a cartel. One does not have to be Russell Brand or a leftist to recognise that there is a cartel in the financial services industry. We need to respond to that by breaking open the cartel, by allowing choice and competition and, in doing so, giving free market capitalism, the honest market and the financial services sector in this country a good name again.

I am sure the Minister agrees with me on this and I will be fascinated to hear what she thinks we need to do to ensure that we have proper choice and proper competition in our financial services industry once again.

[Mr Speaker]

I call the Minister.

Money Creation and Society

Douglas Carswell Excerpts

Thursday 20th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Steve Baker]

I am conscious that I have already used slightly more time than I intended, and I have a little more to say because of these interventions. All these subjects, as my bookshelves attest, are easily capable of being explained over hundreds of pages. My bottom line on this is: I want to live in a society where even the most selfish person is compelled by our institutions to serve the needs of other people. The institution in question is called a free market economy, because in a free market economy people do not get any bail-outs and do not get to live at somebody else’s expense; they have to produce what other people want. One thing that has gone wrong is that those on the right have ended up defending institutions that are fundamentally statist.

[Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing this important subject to the attention of the House. Does he agree that, far from shoring up free market capitalism, the candy floss credit system the state is presiding over replaces it with a system of crony corporatism that gives capitalism a bad name and undermines its very foundations?

[Steve Baker]

I am delighted to agree with my hon. Friend—he is that, despite the fact I will not be seeing Nigel later. We have ended up pretending that the banking system and the financial system is a free market when the truth is that it is the most hideous corporatist mess. What I want is a free market banking system, and I will come on to discuss that.

I wanted to make some remarks about price signals, but I will shorten them, and try to cover the issue as briskly as I can—it was the subject of my maiden speech. Interest rates are a price signal like any other. They should be telling markets about people’s preferences for goods now compared with goods later. If they are deliberately manipulated, they will tell entrepreneurs the wrong thing and will therefore corrupt people’s investment decisions. The bond and equity markets are there to allocate capital. If interest rates are manipulated and if new money is thrown into the system, prices get detached from the real world values they are supposed to be connected to—what resources are available, what technology is available, what people prefer. The problem is that these prices, which have been detached from reality, continue to guide entrepreneurs and investors, but if they are now guiding entrepreneurs and investors in a direction that takes them away from the real desires of the public and the available resources and the technology, we should not then be surprised if we end up with a later disaster.

In short, after prices have been bid up by a credit expansion, they are bound to fall when later the real world catches up with it. That is why economies are now suffering this wrecking ball of inflation followed by deflation, and here is the rub: throughout most of my life, the monetary policy authorities have responded to these corrections by pumping in more new money—previously through ever cheaper credit, and now through QE. This raises the question of where this all goes, and brings me back to the point my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) provoked from me: that this might be pointing towards an end of this monetary order. That is not necessarily something to be feared, because the monetary order changed several times in the 20th century.

We have ended up in something of a mess. The Governor said about the transition once interest rates normalise:

“The orderliness of that transition is an open question.”

I believe the Governor is demonstrating the optimism appropriate to his role, because I think it is extremely unlikely that we will have an orderly transition once interest rates start to normalise. The problem is basically that Governments want to spend too much money. That has always been the case throughout history. Governments used to want to fund wars. Now, for all good, moral, decent, humanitarian reasons, we want to fund health, welfare and education well beyond what the public will pay in taxes. That has meant we needed easy money to support the borrowing.

What is to be done? A range of remedies are being proposed. Positive Money proposes the complete nationalisation of the production of money, some want variations on a return to gold, perhaps with free banking, and some want a spontaneous emergence of alternative moneys like Bitcoin.

I would just point out that Walter Bagehot is often prayed in aid of central banking policy, but his book “Lombard Street” shows that he did not support central banking; he thought it was useless to try to propose any change. What we see today is that, with alternative currencies such as Bitcoin spontaneously emerging, it is now possible through technology that, within a generation, we will not all be putting our money in a few big mega-banks, held as liabilities, issued out of nothing.

I want to propose three things the Government can practically do. First, the present trajectory of reform should be continued with. After 15 years of studying these matters, and now having made it to the Treasury Committee, I am ever more convinced that there is no way to change the present monetary order until the ideas behind it have been tested to destruction—and I do mean tested to destruction. This is an extremely serious issue. It will not change until it becomes apparent that the ideas behind the system are untenable.

Secondly, and very much with that in mind, we should strongly welcome proposals from the Bank’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, that it will commission “anti-orthodox research”, and it will

“put into the public domain research and analysis which as often challenges as supports the prevailing policy orthodoxy on certain key issues.”

That research could make possible fundamental monetary reform in the event of another major calamity.

Thirdly, we should welcome the Chancellor’s recent interest in crypto-currencies and his commitment to make Britain a “centre of financial innovation.” Imperfect and possibly doomed as it may be, Bitcoin shows us that peer-to-peer, non-state money is practical and effective. I have used it to buy an accessory for a camera; it is a perfectly ordinary legal product and it was easier to use than a credit card and it showed me the price in pounds or any other currency I liked. It is becoming possible for people to move away from state money.

Every obstacle to the creation of alternative currencies within ordinary commercial law should be removed. We should expand the range of commodities and instruments related to those commodities that are treated like money, such as gold. That should include exempting VAT and capital gains tax and it should be possible to pay tax on those new moneys. We must not fall into the same trap as the United States of obstructing innovation. In the case of the Liberty Dollar and Bernard von NotHaus, it seems that a man may spend the rest of his life in prison simply for committing the supposed crime of creating reliable money.

Finally, we are in the midst of an unprecedented global experiment in monetary policy and debt. It is likely, as Philip Coggan set out, that this will result in a new global monetary order. Whether it will be for good or ill, I do not know, but as technology and debt advance, I am sure that we should be ready for a transformation. Society has suffered too much already under the present monetary orthodoxy; free enterprise should now be allowed to change it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Meacher]

Again, that takes me down a different path, but there is considerable read-across.

[Douglas Carswell]

The right hon. Gentleman has been absolutely magnificent in diagnosing the problem, but when it comes to the solution and passing power away from banks, rather than passing the power upwards to a regulator or to the state, would he entertain the idea of empowering the consumer who deposits money with the bank? Surely the real failure is that the Bank Charter Act 1844 does not give legal ownership of deposits to the person paying money into the bank. The basis of fractional-reserve banking is the legal ownership the bank has when money is paid in. If we tackle that, the power will pass from the big state-subsidised corporations and banks outwards to the wider economy.

[Mr Meacher]

I have great sympathy with what the hon. Gentleman is saying—