Business of the House

Kelvin Hopkins Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

First, may I welcome my hon. Friend to his place? I know he will be a very effective representative for his constituency, and it is clear that he has already started in that vein. My advice to him is that, while he could table questions or secure a debate, going directly to the organisation itself can, in my experience, be a very effective way of delivering results more quickly, and I urge him to do that.

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

Britain has a persistent and enormous trade deficit with the rest of the European Union, amounting to more than £1 billion a week and equivalent to 1 million lost British jobs. That is being driven by the overvaluation of the pound against the euro, the exchange rate having risen by a third since the post-crisis drop. May we have a debate on this serious economic misalignment and the damage it is inflicting on British manufacturing?

[Chris Grayling]

One of the great myths in this country is that manufacturing collapsed under a Conservative Government. In fact, it was during the 13 years of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that manufacturing in this country fell by almost a half as a proportion of our national income. We have spent the past five years trying to turn that around. I am very pleased that this country now makes more cars than the whole of Italy. There is a lot still to do—we have a lot of mess to clear up—but people should not think that the problems of our trade deficit and our manufacturing sector were caused by Conservative Members; we are the ones who are trying to fix them.