Foreign Ownership of UK Assets

Lord Judd Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, if I am allowed to say so, how good it is to have the experience, wisdom and common sense of the noble Lord, Lord Monks, at our disposal. I enjoyed every word of that speech and found myself relating to it very closely. I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, for having introduced this debate today and shared with the House a great deal of the anxiety that is out there among thinking people in our society.

I have had a long association with LSE myself and have always found it enjoyable that we have in our family the noble Lord, Lord Desai. There is never a dull moment; one is never quite sure where he will be coming from intellectually and analytically. I hope he will not think I am pushing it too far if I recall here something he once said to me in a cheerful, exuberant way. He said, “Of course, I am the last Marxist at LSE”. I would say now that he was the first marketeer at LSE and it is very interesting how people make this transition. He is not alone and I suggest to him that it is something about absolutism. I of course come unashamedly from the nonconformist, Fabian tradition, which is all about search. Perhaps I may remind him that the motto of LSE is “Rerum cognoscere causas”—not “Here are all the answers” but “We are looking for what is causing a situation”.

I find it very interesting that there is no shortage of people wanting to come and make their business here or to invest here. But I ask myself, as indeed our noble friend Lord Monks was asking: what lessons have we learnt from how we came here? Some of the lessons do not perhaps lie in the immediate sphere of economics at all. They lie very much in the realm of education, as has been mentioned. There has been a total failure of creativity in Britain, apart from in the arts. In the arts, we lead the world—nobody rivals the United Kingdom in them. But somehow, in the realm of applied knowledge, there has been, as I say, a failure of creativity and the imagination. The failure is not in imagination or creativity but when something goes so far, there is no one who then seizes it and says, “Right, this is where we’re going with it”. We have to get that back.

It is about character building and the rest and, if I am, as an older man, allowed to say so, I am very fearful about that. We have got into a trap of taking a completely quantitative approach to education by measuring it all the time, as distinct from asking what it is inspiring and achieving. Originality is not being given enough attention. I am rather worried. I take my family—my children and grandchildren—very seriously. When I see our country basing itself on a future of energy largely generated by nuclear power, I say to myself, “Am I confident about this future?”.

I have nothing but respect for the Chinese. I first went to China in 1956, spent five weeks there and came back deeply impressed. That was before it had broken with Russia. I found myself—perhaps I eagerly sought to be there as a young man—on “In Town Tonight” and was probed about my reactions to China. I said, “It is not communism that worries me about China, it is the nationalism. That country is thinking long, and it is thinking about Chinese influence and predominance in the world”. My goodness, I think very often of the impressions I formed then.

It seems to me that, with all the uncertainties of the politics of the Far East and the Pacific, to have our steel industry to a very large extent dependent on the Far East is—I put it no stronger than this—a rather intriguing situation, and one about which I do not think one can sleep easily at night. I am sure they will make a great success of it in the short term, but who knows what will happen in the long term and where the power lies?

When I was a young MP, I used to see that in my constituency of Portsmouth, because we had been highly dependent on the Navy. Ministry of Defence employment was reducing and we needed another source of industry. Because there had been very high skills in the dockyard, all sorts of industry came along. I saw from practical experience, when times got tough, when the going got hard, which places that industry disappeared from most quickly. We were ancillary, something they had gone for and taken over. They were not rooted in the area.

We have to take that seriously in this situation as well. It is the same with the steel industry. Let me be candid with the House: I have a capitalist wing of my family. A branch of my family dealt in steel—it was not very big, but it was big in steel. Members of my family were terribly interested in developing new types of steel. They were engineers, and they used to travel around the world getting and discussing their orders. They sometimes got pretty sick of doing it, too. What was true about them was that they were part of Sheffield. They had been involved in libraries, wings of hospitals and education, not just to get an advertisement up but because they cared. It was a community.

The other major thing that I wanted to say in this debate—I thank my noble friend for having introduced it—is that what has gone wrong in Britain is that we have allowed ourselves to go down a certain road. I say in all seriousness to my good friend, my noble friend Lord Desai, that he should be careful in separating the economy from the people. I became a member of the party that I am in because I believed that the economy and the people were one and the same thing. We looked at the health of the economy in the long run and at the health and well-being of the people in the long run, and we had a commitment and attachment to the people, which was fundamental. I do not think we have that in the direction we have taken. When it comes to the situation in which British managers and workers on a railway being run outstandingly well want to bid because they are told that the line must be privatised but are told that they cannot because they are British—but goodness knows who from abroad is allowed to bid and come in—the situation has gone dangerously barmy, and it is time that we redressed the balance.