Queen's Speech

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, I shall come to my noble friend Lady Wilcox in a moment. First, once upon a time, the noble Lord, Lord Birt, and I used to meet across a table to discuss the 1994 White Paper on the BBC, and it is a pleasure to be linked consecutively with him once again.

Most of your Lordships’ House will probably have heard before from others’ lips what I am going to say next, but if only one noble Lord present tonight had never heard it before, he or she would alone make it worth saying again. It relates to the levee given by King George V in the palace in 1931, 80 years ago, when the sovereign asked Mr Jimmy Thomas, a member of his Cabinet, whether the international financial situation was really quite as serious as Mr Snowden, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, kept telling him. Mr Thomas replied, “King, it’s that serious that if I were you I’d put the colonies in the wife’s name”. The message of the last Labour Chief Secretary, Mr Byrne, to his successor in the coalition, suggests that he might have given the same advice. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Conservative gains in this election were the largest since those they achieved in the election of 1931. That is what the deficit does to you. The highest compliment that I can pay to my noble friend Lady Wilcox is that I have every confidence in her ability and that of my and her noble friends in the Treasury to sort it out without my direct help. Of course, we shall all very genuinely miss the noble Lord, Lord Myners, who was and is in all senses my former constituent.

That has taken the first of my minutes. My remaining four will be devoted to four brief points or comments. First, after the deficit, on which debt interest is now taking more per annum than is spent in the Budget on schools’ revenue expenditure, the challenge to the Government is unemployment, especially among the young—hence the references to growth.

It is a conventional commonplace that it is SMEs that now generate jobs. Once upon a time, almost 50 years ago, I joined a firm of 10 foreigners to open their business in this country. Fifty years later, that worldwide business is now the largest of its kind in the world still in private hands, so we must have done something right. But what I remember from that original period is Messrs Kaldor and Balogh, perhaps in the context of the SET, making me spend a weekend every month providing proof to the Inland Revenue that I needed to keep all our money in the business, which, as the man building the business, I knew perfectly well already. So my first plea to my noble friends on the Front Bench is that they reduce the burden of unnecessary tasks on entrepreneurs when they need their energy to justify and finance the creation of new jobs.

My second plea is similar. I was proud to serve on a Treasury team of four Ministers under my noble friend Lord Lawson, all of whom in due course reached the Cabinet, two of them reaching No. 11, one of them reaching No. 10, and who helped my noble friend to carry through the massive simplification in the tax system that he achieved. I do not place on the Labour Government the whole responsibility for dismantling that simplicity—though they must carry some, especially in dismantling changes that they had themselves created—but it is high time that we got that simplicity back, even if some of Labour’s complications will make it harder. Simplicity in taxation makes it likely that people will take investment decisions, and better ones, for business reasons rather than for tax ones.

My third plea supports the coalition’s desire to rebalance the economy. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bhattacharyya, on the abilities still inherent in British engineering, on which the noble Lord, Lord Broers, also spoke. Those firms that have survived have done so because they are world-class, which they owe substantially to their R&D investment in technology. I reiterate to the coalition as a whole the advice of my noble friend Lord Waldegrave of North Hill in yesterday’s Times to the new Chief Secretary, my right honourable friend Mr Alexander. My noble friend was a distinguished Chief Secretary, and the first for over 30 years to have run a large spending department before he became Chief Secretary. A critical part of his advice yesterday was to keep a secret reserve in his hip pocket for subjects, like science, that departmental heads might not champion. I acknowledge that I speak as a former departmental Minister at a time when the Chief Secretary took precisely the opposite view.

Finally, a quiet word: the coalition should not believe everything that it reads in the papers, especially if it causes depression. As the first Viscount Slim said in the war, “No news is ever as good or as bad as it first appears”. A noble Lord earlier in this debate referred to rural broadband. I live in Wiltshire, a county notorious for an atmospheric phenomenon called the Wiltshire banana. I live at the end of a lane two miles from the nearest shop. Two hundred yards from our house lives and works the highly respected automotive engineer who won the £25,000 prize given by the Mayor of London for a contemporary “Routemaster plus” design, but who relies on online engineering to design buses for Brazil and trucks for China. Until a year ago, half way—or 100 yards—between us lived another couple. They ran another successful service business reliant on high-speed broadband but could not afford to buy a first home in Britain so moved to France, partly because they could afford a first home there but also because, on technology, they believed the 18th-century English novelist who said, “They order these things better in France”. It turns out that they do not, and rural France’s broadband is much slower than Wiltshire’s, endangering the whole of that couple’s business and their decision to move. It is a crucial imperative for the coalition that it persuades our compatriots at all levels to believe in themselves. As I sit down, with sympathy, I encourage my noble friend Lord Henley to act on that advice at the end of this notable debate.