Queen’s Speech

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, in common with my noble friend Lady Fookes, I can look back at over half a century of Queen’s Speeches, and they have various things in common. They all remind me of that Punch cartoon of the curate’s egg: they are good in parts. They are rich in aspiration, prolific in generalisations and generally fairly poor on detail.

I had proposed to speak about the constitution, on which there is that wonderful sentence:

“My Government will strengthen and renew democracy and the constitution.”

Well, you cannot object to that, but detail is there not. I was going to talk about that tomorrow, but my noble friends will understand when I say that that my wife has her second jab on Friday morning and the LNER trains are all to pot, so I cannot go back to Lincoln later than tomorrow, and so I will have to try to entertain your Lordships tonight.

The whole of this Queen’s Speech is, of course, in the shadow of Covid. I direct my brief remarks to two aspects, one general and one specific. First, on the general, I am sorry that my noble friend Lady Foster has left the Chamber, because she was very eloquent on the subject of travel. I believe that we have to concentrate on this country and making it safe. With all these variants in various parts of the world, we must be excessively careful as to how we compile any green lists. We have to make sure that, in this particular case, it is the United Kingdom first. It may be sad if people are not able to have the holidays they normally would—but not half so sad as a fourth lockdown, which would be totally devastating to our economy. I beg the Government, and my noble friend in particular when he replies, to reassure us that there will be ultra- caution on the travel front.

My specific point is one I have raised in your Lordships’ House before, and it concerns some of the most vulnerable people in our country. I refer to those who live in our care homes. I have raised several times with my noble friend Lord Bethell, and indeed other Ministers, the question of those who work in care homes. I have cited one example of a great friend of ours, whose mother is 99 and in a care home. Of course, she has had her vaccinations. Our friend has to put on, very properly, protective clothing and all the rest of it when she goes to see her, and she was not able to hold her hand until very recently—and yet, at least 30% of the workers in that care home have declined vaccination. I believe that the Government have to be a little bit authoritarian here. After all, they have been authoritarian in many other ways—we have not been allowed to have people in our homes or to do many things we would ordinarily do. It is crucial that we make sure that this sector of the community is given the full protection it needs and deserves.

I agree with something else my noble friend Lady Foster said earlier, when she talked about getting back to normal. There is nothing I want more than getting back to normal in your Lordships’ House. It is absolutely appalling that so few of us can be in the Chamber. I understand that the Commons intends to be normal after 21 June—well, so should we. The place of a parliamentarian is in Parliament, not on Zoom. Although I warmly congratulate both the maiden speakers today and hope to see much more of them, I was delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, spoke in the Chamber and I was sad that the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, delivered his excellent speech on Zoom. We are colleagues; we are parliamentarians. We have to be together, working together. It is essential that we do, because otherwise the country suffers. Parliament is essential to the well-functioning democracy talked about in that vague sentence. I say to my noble friends in government: we have to get back to normal to hold you properly to account. If we do not, the country will be the poorer. If there are people working in Parliament who have not been given their jabs, they should be given them as a matter of total priority.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in this debate. The gracious Speech outlined a number of policies, but what hit me particularly was that it underlined a great vision—for jobs, full employment, lifelong training, the younger generation moving from Generation Rent to Generation Buy, and prosperity.

On the economy, let us not forget that we are in a very fortunate position. Last year our economy was devastated by Covid. We faced the most serious loss of output for 300 years, and the real prospect of mass unemployment. The Government acted promptly and quickly; we can now expect growth this year of over 7%—just in the Budget, it was forecast at only 4%. This is an extraordinary achievement. I believe the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Governor of the Bank of England deserve great credit and our thanks for their courage and judgment.

I am the 85th speaker in this debate and I wish to be brief. I strongly agree with the levelling-up agenda in the Speech. It provides a lifetime skills guarantee and massive investment in further education and improving communities, not just providing ladders to escape but reviving those communities. There are certain things which only the Government can deal with and which the private sector cannot: one is climate change; another is the pandemic. Much as with national insurance, which we introduced at the beginning of the 20th century to cover unemployment benefit and then the creation of the NHS, people welcome greater public resources being moved into training and rebuilding communities, almost as a form of social insurance. We may well be at a turning point in our society, much as we experienced under Prime Ministers Attlee and Thatcher.

However. getting the public sector right is only half the story. The other half is getting the private sector right. As the infrastructure is rolled out, we must ensure that we have a private sector of investment and businesses ready to take risks. For that, we must ensure that we have a market economy that is in good health, in which markets are transparent but not overregulated and certainly not subject to high taxes. Low taxes, as has been mentioned by a number of speakers, are key to an enterprise economy. The great challenge facing the Chancellor is how to restrict the growth of public spending without increasing taxes at the same time, which will undermine it.

My second point concerns the importance of the detail of policy implementation and not simply policy in terms of ideas, framework, and design. This was mentioned in the context of further education by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and by my noble friend Lord Cormack, who is not in his place at present—

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

Here he is.

[Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach (Con)]

He is behind me. Thank you—the invisible man.

If I learned one lesson being in No. 10 for five and a half years as head of the policy unit, it was the difference between the design of a policy, the ideas in a policy and the implementation of a policy. I saw it in the privatisation of gas, electricity and so on, and in education reform. In the gracious Speech we have a terrific statement of intent. To make it happen, we need implementation.

Are there any risks which could undermine everything in the gracious Speech? There is one: inflation. The Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility are quite relaxed about it, but I am not so sanguine. Globally, we are seeing a tremendous boost to the economy. We are seeing bottlenecks and shortages, as was mentioned. The monetary aggregates are increasing too much, and the fiscal and monetary boost is enormous. Inflation is not mentioned at all in the Queen’s Speech, but a pick-up in inflation such as that which we saw in the 1970s is the one thing that could undermine the great economic proposals in it. It is therefore time to tackle that subject, and not to delay.