Amendment of the Law

George Freeman Excerpts

Tuesday 29th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

With respect to the hon. Lady, that is entirely irrelevant. Her party was in office; her party had the ultimate responsibility for the government of this country—not only in 2007, but for the 13 years before the last election. It is a strange paradox that when Labour Members got into power in 1997, they did the right thing. They balanced the books; for four years, we were not running deficits, as they stuck to our spending plans. The Chancellor was prudent; “prudence” was his favourite word. Then, all of that was deliberately swept away, and they went on a mad spending spree, which directly caused the deficit and the savings that have to made now.

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the honest answer to the question put thrice by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) is that if we were guilty of anything, it was to fall for the same lie that the British public fell for—to believe that new Labour had become the party of economic competence and that in government it could be trusted with the public finances?

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. I think there was an element of delusion in the country inasmuch as people believed that Labour could be trusted with the economy. That was clearly not the case. Older voters I speak to in my party association and more widely in Spelthorne remember the appalling legacy of the 1970s, when exactly the same thing happened. None of this is new; we have seen it all before. Exactly the same thing has happened 30 years later: Labour came into power, made all sorts of spending commitments with the best intentions, but found that we had run out of money. It was that simple. On that note, I urge the House to vote in favour of the Budget motions.

--- Later in debate ---

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

“Rescue, rebalance and recover”. No, Mr Deputy Speaker, I have not got hold of a copy of the late George Best’s doctor’s notes, nor a copy of the advice from the right hon. Member for South Shields (David Miliband) to his younger brother after a mauling at Prime Minister’s questions. I refer to the three words that the Chancellor used at the beginning of his Budget statement last week, which are so important in setting out its significance: “rescue” because the coalition has had to rescue the British economy from a debt crisis that would have seen our interest repayments rising to £70 billion a year; “rebalance” because the Labour party has tested to destruction the thesis that a modern economy can be driven through public spending and an unsustainable boom and bust; and “recover” because without a private sector-led recovery, we are condemned to a decade of stagflation.

Having listened to the debate yesterday and today, I must say that Opposition Members still do not seem to have got the two real golden rules of modern economics. The first is that every pound they commit at the Dispatch Box, claiming it as their own, has to be earned by the private sector before it can be spent on public services. The second golden rule, which we proved in the ’80s and must now prove again, is that cutting taxes on business increases the amount of money available to us in this House.

The truth is that, like a gambler forced to come home one day and ’fess up to his sad family that he has not been working but living off debt and gambling with his credit card, the British economy must now be weaned off the unsustainable boom that was fuelled by cheap credit under the Labour party. As in our personal lives, crises are always opportunities. The Budget was significant to me for this reason above all: it set out carefully the steps towards a sustainable recovery and the rebalancing of our economy. “What”, I hear Opposition Members ask, “will this rebalanced economy look like and where will the jobs come from?” Let me try to explain.

The Budget again contains the seeds of the recovery: in the enterprise investment scheme reforms, in the venture capital trust reforms and in the encouragement for investors putting their own wealth at risk to start small companies, it will first be an enterprise recovery. In the emphasis on the clean economy, high-technology jobs and life sciences, it will secondly be a smart-growth recovery. And in the emphasis on corporation tax reductions and sending a signal around the world that this country is open for business, it will be a global and export-driven recovery.

Nowhere will that be cheered more loudly than in my constituency, Mid Norfolk, and my region, East Anglia, a region that for 30, nay 40, years has been treated by London Governments as nothing more than a commuter reservoir to feed the London economy. Our area has huge resources in offshore energy, in high-tech engineering at the Hethel centre, in the headquarters of Lotus, in Norwich research park, a global centre of food science and agriculture, in the university of East Anglia, a leading, world-class centre of climate science, and 40 miles down the road, in what the Americans would term one cluster, Cambridge university, with all its strengths in science and research. How woeful that over the past 30 or 40 years we have treated the area as a commuter reservoir.

Well, the people of East Anglia are ready to rise to the challenge, and with the investment in infrastructure that this Government have laudably managed to secure from a difficult financing settlement, in terms of dualling the A11 and the money announced last week for regional rail, we finally have some hope that our area will be able to stand again and lead the economic recovery as we have in the past.

Norfolk, as Members will remember and not need me to remind them, was the county that gave us the agricultural revolution, our finest military hero and our first Prime Minister, but it is a county that has been left behind and failed by the model of state dependency which the Labour party has pursued. In championing the high-technology and life science potential of our area, I draw attention to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am proud to have entered the House after a 15-year career helping to start some of those businesses and to help entrepreneurs to take the risk of creating new businesses.

In closing, I want to concentrate on the laudable support given to the life sciences. As we think about the markets throughout the world in which we have the chance to grow our economy, we should look no further than the recent Foresight report, which drew attention to the fact that the world’s population will rise to 9 billion. With that rise will come huge markets in food, medicine and clean energy. Those are the markets of tomorrow, the markets in which this country has the potential to lead; and those are the markets for which this Budget will begin to sow the seeds of a sustainable recovery.

The significance of that point is not just economic. The Budget last week set us on the road to a recovery that we can be proud of—a recovery that will give this country back a sense of purpose throughout the world. What finer mission is there than to be a small nation putting its experience in science, trade and enterprise to the benefit of people in the developing world, giving them the hope that there is a model for them and that they do not have to take 200 or 300 years to reach the privileged position that we have reached? It is therefore with huge pride that I support the Budget and commend it to the House.