Amendment of the Law

Debate between Frank Dobson and Tobias Ellwood

Tuesday 29th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to participate in this debate, and I am pleased to see so many hon. Members who also want to participate. I have done my best to speak in other Budget debates, and I am under no illusions that this speech will be read or listened to any more than my previous contributions.

This year’s debate has a different atmosphere from previous years. In 2007 and 2008, there was a sense of denial. In 2009, there was a period of inertia as we waited for whoever was going to win the general election—either Labour or Conservative—to grasp the nettle and make the decisions that the country needed. Finally, in 2010, we saw the launch of the long overdue plan. It is only this year, 2011, that we are really experiencing that pain, which has been debated at length today and in the past four days.

The state of the economy clearly dominates our lives. It is complex: like the cockpit of a 747, there are many buttons, switches and levers. Knowing when to pull a lever and for how long affects the overall performance, the direction of travel and the comfort—or, indeed, the displeasure—of the passengers, who rely on a duty of care. There are four principal levers that we have for the economy: fiscal policy, which determines the management of our deficit and our debt; monetary policy and interest rates, which are now set independently; the regulation of the financial sector and the relationship between the Bank of England, the Treasury, and the financial and business sectors; and finally, micro-economic policies—how we approach education, how to get a competitive tax system, and so on. We need to decide how to use all those levers at this delicate time, as we try to mend the economy. We can be dedicated and vigilant pilots, but we will have our work cut out if we are handed a machine that has been battered and bruised by the previous owner. It is exactly the same with the economy.

We have had five days of debate on the provisions in the Red Book. I will not go into the details of all the issues that have been raised. At the weekend, as I was thinking about what to say in my speech today, I watched the rally that was taking place in Hyde park. I saw all the banners; it was like a summer camp for the unions, like a revival for them as they all called for more money for their own area. They wanted more money for pensioners, for health, for education and so on, but no one said where the money was going to come from or how it was going to be generated, and we have heard no such explanation from Opposition Front Benchers today.

The rally said a lot about Labour, in that the Leader of the Opposition is now firmly embedding himself with the unions. Incidentally, I think he was unwise to make comparisons with previous struggles, such as those of the suffragettes or the US civil rights movement, or with the fight against apartheid. It would also have been nice to hear a bit of mea culpa, a bit of recognition that Labour was partly to blame for what is going on.

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the issues to which the Leader of the Opposition referred all had one thing in common with the rally on Saturday—namely, that no Tories took part in any of them?

[Mr Ellwood]

I did not receive my invitation. Perhaps I shall find it in my office when I go back there.

The bottom line is that we inherited an economic nightmare—the worst of the messes in the G20. The gap between the richest and the poorest had grown since Labour came to office, and the size of government had bloomed. In the past decade, the civil service had grown by an additional 800,000 people. I have no idea what those people actually did, but they were in addition to those who were running the country a decade earlier. That is the bloated government that we need to try to get rid of. There was also a culture of encouraging people not to work. It was never easier than under Labour to do nothing and get paid for it. Those are the kinds of issues that we need to tackle.

The number of regulations introduced under Labour was astonishing. We are now faced with about 21,000 regulations, of which about 10,000 were created by the last Government. As I said earlier, Labour was planning huge cuts, had it won the election; it just did not say where they were going to be made. Had it won, it would have received a lot of the grief that we are receiving today, because it would have had to implement very much the same measures that we are implementing.

Looking back at the legacy that we left Labour, we can see that there was an unbroken period of growth from 1992 to 2008. We had growth up to the economic downturn in 2007. The deficit in 1997-98 was £15 billion. By 2007—before the economic downturn—it had already increased to £33 billion. We were not living within our means.