Emerging Economies

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Monday 14th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for letting me catch your eye, and welcome to the Chair. I also welcome Ministers to the Dispatch Box and congratulate the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) on his position on the Opposition Front Bench.

I have a huge personal interest in the emerging economies, and it is a great joy to be able to speak here tonight. Many years ago, I ran an educational charity giving away new medical textbooks throughout eastern Europe during and after the communist period, and it has been a particular delight to hear the expertise displayed by my hon. Friends the Members for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) and for Reading West (Alok Sharma) in their excellent maiden speeches.

I was in eastern Europe at a time when civil society was the subject of constant political oppression. Economic activity was shackled by commissars and petty regulation, and industry was funded by an open chequebook from Government. The result was colossal debt and economic stagnation. How very different from the situation that faces the UK today.

I know that every Member of this House will join me in saying that it is the greatest honour of all to be chosen to sit in this august Chamber; to have a share, however small, in the supreme sovereign authority in this country; and to walk in these hallowed halls and corridors, as so many extraordinary men and women have done before us. First impressions are not always so favourable; one thinks of Mark Twain, who said—I hope that the House will forgive my accent—“When I first came to Memphis, I found men drinking and gambling, and open prostitution in the streets. It was no place for a Presbyterian—and I did not long remain one.” As for me, I enter this House as I hope I will remain—filled with a sense of due reverence and due responsibility.

I feel doubly privileged, in that I stand here as one of two tribunes for the people of Herefordshire. Truly, Herefordshire is a glorious county, known throughout the world for the quality of its cider, its beef and its soldiers. Such is its beauty that it has been only slightly disfigured by a recent association with the noble Lord Mandelson, who has added “of Foy in the county of Herefordshire” to an already rather extensive title. I alert the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) to that unfortunate precedent. Alas, we still look in vain for the tidal wave of public subsidy that usually accompanies Lord Mandelson wherever he goes.

My constituency stretches from the Black mountains in the west to the Forest of Dean. It encompasses the aptly named Golden valley; the gorgeous Monnow and Wye valleys; and Hereford itself, with its magnificent cathedral and Mappa Mundi. It has apple orchards, lovely churchyards, fine, rolling arable land, wildlife and pasture, stretching all the way down to Ross-on-Wye and the spectacular rock of Symonds Yat.

I am not, in fact, the first Norman to be returned to Parliament from Herefordshire; that honour goes to its very earliest representatives, Rogerus le Rus and Ricardus le Brut, who were summoned to meet at Westminster on 15 July 1290, in the reign of Edward I, barely 200 years after the Norman conquest—the first Norman conquest, that is. At the time, Herefordshire was regarded as the farthest outpost of western civilisation—a status which, some Herefordians would argue, it retains to this day.

South Herefordshire has always been well served by its MPs, and I would like to pay particular tribute to my predecessor Paul Keetch, a Herefordian born and bred, who built up a reputation over 13 years as a fine constituency MP. Hereford city reputedly has the largest container of alcoholic beverage in the world—I should say, outside the Palace of Westminster—at Bulmers, and Paul has worked very hard over many years to protect and support the cider industry, most recently against the ill-advised depredations of the cider duty. I should also like to pay tribute to Sir Colin Shepherd before him, whom many hon. Members will recall for his 23 years of dedicated service to this House. He and his wife, Lady Lou, have been tireless in their support of the county and of its newest MP.

But Herefordshire is not, or not yet, a garden of Eden. On the contrary, it has many social and economic problems that demand vigorous public action. Like other rural areas, it has not been at the top of the Government’s agenda in recent years, to say the least. On the contrary, our schools are the third worst-funded in the UK. Local wages are very low. Farmers struggle with the many inadequacies of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Young people lack decent leisure facilities. The very idea of a functional broadband connection, or even of a decent mobile telephone signal, has yet to be entertained in many parts of my county, and Hereford, a lovely medieval city that received its royal charter in 1189, is being strangled by traffic. Those, and greater support for higher education in the county, will be among my personal priorities as the new MP.

However, we are not sent to this House only to represent our constituents; we are also sent here to play a role in the wider governance of this country. The new Government have made a superb early start in opening up sources of data about spending across the public sector. But what matters is not merely what we think about, but how we think about it. Our task is to remedy not just a colossal failure of governance over the past 13 years, but a colossal failure of thought. Politicians are generally nervous about talking about abstract ideas. In the words of the late great Ernie Bevin—here I will not attempt an accent—“Open up that there Pandora’s Box, and who knows what Trojan ’orses won’t jump out of it.” But of course to dismiss ideas is itself to be ruled by an idea. Ideas are always in charge. So it is important—nay, vital—to choose the right ones.

Now, the idea of revolution is never dear to a conservative, but even Edmund Burke would agree that we need a revolution in how we think about economics in Government. Over the past two decades the British Government have become steeped in a 1970s textbook caricature—a view in which markets are always efficient, prices reflect perfect information, and institutions are nowhere to be found. One would be tempted to call such a view neo-liberal, were we not in a time of coalition government.

Worse than that, the deep assumption remains that human beings are purely economic, rather than social, animals. This dismal gospel regards the human world as static, not dynamic—as a world of fixed social engineering, not one of creation, discovery and competition. In policy terms, this textbook economics takes power away from local people. It encourages centralisation and top-down meddling. It pushes us towards an inefficient, inhumane and factory-style view of public services. It is absurdly risk averse. In its apparent inevitability, it stifles public debate about other, more thoughtful approaches. Above all, it actively undermines the ideas of public service, public vocation and public duty—ideas which, I know, lie close to the heart of every Member of this House.

Now is the moment to re-examine these assumptions. Politics is not a subset of economics, and economics is not a subset of the financial sector. GDP growth is important—goodness knows that is true now—but so are flexibility, resilience and, above all, entrepreneurship in our economy. We need a new economics in our Government, not the desiccated economic atomism of the old textbooks, and we need to see people for what they really are, as bundles of human capability, creative, dynamic and fizzing with imagination and potential.

If we do this, and only if we do this, we can revive our economy on a huge billow of human energy, one that is barely conceivable within our current conventional economic models, and we can help to restore the trust and the mutual respect that our society so badly requires. It was that great—and rather conservative—economist, John Maynard Keynes, who once warned politicians not to be the slaves of some defunct economist. So let us all cry freedom and move on.