Queen’s Speech

Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts

Monday 26th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Low of Dalston (CB)]

My Lords, in a debate that took place last year on the outcome of the referendum, I said:

“Of one thing we can be reasonably certain: that no Prime Minister is going to call another referendum any time soon”.—[Official Report, 6/7/16; col. 2075.]


We can now add to that that no Prime Minister is going to call another snap election any time soon.

I am afraid that I did not find myself altogether in sympathy with the mood of the House at the beginning of the debate on the humble Address last Wednesday. Given the manifest deficiencies in leadership and personal style displayed by the Prime Minister in recent months, I could scarcely credit the panegyric delivered by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth—for whom I normally have the greatest admiration—in moving the Motion for an humble Address, to the obvious approbation of the House. He described the widespread criticism of the Prime Minister as “vile attacks”. Really? By Matthew Parris, Michael Portillo and the noble Lord, Lord Patten? If I was Theresa May, I would think that the moment I received ringing endorsements such as that from the Tory grandees was the time I really needed to start worrying.

If one considers the colossal misjudgments of the last two Prime Ministers and the way that they threw everything up in the air, it is surely no longer possible to sustain the pretence that the Conservative Party is self-evidently more effective than the Labour Party as a vehicle for governing the country. But I reckon that Theresa May is probably safe until the Conservative Party can make up its mind on what to do. Mind you, the DUP is a potentially dangerous wild card, and the tussle over Brexit is likely to get quite bloody.

It is remarkable how, out of millions of individual voting decisions, it is possible to distil a national mood—but a hung Parliament is probably a pretty fair reflection of it. For a change, there was a real choice, not just one between minute variants of a fundamentally consensual centre. People were obviously no longer willing to buy neoliberal austerity. They were attracted by the alternative that Labour offered, which was described as “hard left” but was in truth fairly standard social democracy, and somewhat less far-reaching than the manifesto on which the Attlee Government were elected. But people were hesitant about making a full-blooded commitment—hardly surprising in view of all the obloquy to which Labour was subjected.

I was not much in sympathy with the reaction of the House to Jeremy Corbyn, either—as much from his own side as from the Government’s. He is obviously still regarded as beyond the pale of the narrow consensus of acceptable views around which the two main parties collude. But people should realise that the centre of gravity has shifted—in defiance of the political establishment, the media and the commentariat. It has taken some time for the worm to turn, but it is clear that people are no longer seduced by the supposed common sense of living within our means, which has underpinned the draconian regime to which they have been subjected since the crash. Labour has offered an alternative, but I wish it had done more to establish in people’s consciousness the alternative common sense on which it will need to be sustained: borrow while interest rates are low and invest in infrastructure, thus giving people work, getting them off the dole and being productive, fuelling growth by spending and creating demand for consumer goods, and paying taxes and boosting receipts for the Exchequer.

What is the result of all this austerity? A great deal of personal misery to begin with. One in four children lives in poverty in the United Kingdom today, taking the total to 4 million. Food bank use continues to rise. The Trussell Trust gave out more than 1 million emergency supplies of food to people in crisis in 2016-17—and the Trussell Trust accounts for only half of all food banks. The social security system is increasingly inhuman and self-defeating. Tougher PIP criteria mean that people lose their Motability car and end up on the dole. People are sanctioned for unavoidably missing appointments. The film “I, Daniel Blake” is all too true to life. The iniquitous work capability assessment finds people fit to work who are patently unfit and who, coroners find, are taking their lives as a result. I could give many more examples, but there is no time.

All this misery, and we have not even balanced the books. These are not the results of idiosyncratic, ad hoc decisions; they are the result of conscious, strategic decision-making such as the decision to cut a further £12 billion from welfare, having already cut nearly £20 billion in the last Parliament. Even more fundamentally, they are the result of a 40-year project to hollow out the public realm and systematically shrink the state back to 36% of GDP or less. Current spending is now just under 38%, with the 36% target reaffirmed in the March Budget to be reached in 2020. This means a level of public services far below comparable European countries—44% of GDP in Germany and 50% in Denmark.

The process is meticulously documented by Polly Toynbee and David Walker in their recent book Dismembered: How the Attack on the State Harms Us All. The NHS is in crisis, public services are in crisis and local services cannot cope. We know this from the Grenfell Tower fire, which is emblematic of all that is wrong. Local government, which provides many of these services, will have lost 60% of its funding by 2020. The election and the Grenfell Tower fire should serve as a wake-up call that we need to change course.