Economic Growth

Stephen Kinnock Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Burnley (Antony Higginbotham).

Even by the standards of this shambolic Government, this King’s Speech is a wafer-thin effort. That might be forgivable if we were living in a country where public services were in good shape and the economy was going gangbusters, but we are not. The reality is that, after 13 years of Tory neglect, Britain is breaking and nothing works any more. There is an NHS waiting list of 7 million, schools are literally crumbling and trains are unreliable, extortionately expensive and packed to the rafters. Some 90% of crime is going unsolved, with dreadful conviction rates and victims facing three-year court delays, while raw sewage is being pumped into our rivers and child poverty has tripled since 2017.

This is an utterly shameful record, but it is not only our public services that the Conservatives have broken. They have also taken a wrecking ball to our economy, with a kamikaze Budget that cost £30 billion, and it is working people who are paying the price, with mortgages up almost £3,000, rents up 40% and the weekly food shop up 11% on last year. Their approach to the economy is plain to see. Low public investment has led to the UK having the lowest private investment in the developed world. A sclerotic planning system and rampant nimbyism have hindered house building and stymied our wind farm development, and the abandonment of our manufacturing sector has led to the UK being the most regionally imbalanced economy in the developed world.

If we are to clear up this Conservative mess, we are going to need a decade of national renewal delivered by a mission-driven Labour Government. So Labour’s first two missions are to deliver the highest sustained growth in the G7 and to make Britain a clean energy superpower. The crucial point here is that these two missions go hand in hand. They will be the mutually reinforcing drivers of the green jobs revolution that Labour will deliver.

Just look at the opportunities in floating offshore wind in my Aberavon constituency. FLOW is a prime example of where Wales’s geography offers huge competitive advantage, with the potential to create 16,000 jobs, deliver energy security and lower household bills. But we need central Government to match these ambitions, delivering on the full potential of 20 GW of clean energy by offering a fair strike price for developers in return for ensuring that the manufacturing supply chain jobs are kept here in the UK. If we get this right, Port Talbot could become a green energy and manufacturing hub, with our steelworks making the steel for the floating turbine substructures in a new plate mill, and those very turbines then providing the energy to run the Port Talbot steelworks as well as powering tens of millions of homes across the UK. This bold, ambitious, pioneering plan can become a model for a new economy. South Wales was the cradle of the first industrial revolution, and a Labour Government in Westminster, working in close partnership with the Welsh Labour Government in Cardiff Bay, will put our proud country at the heart of the green industrial revolution.

Whichever way we look at it, we need to make, buy and sell more in Britain. Labour knows that this begins with the steel industry, with our £3 billion clean steel renewal commitment dwarfing the Government’s dangerously unambitious and short-sighted approach. The Conservatives are failing to understand the growing commercial opportunities that a strong British steel industry would be well positioned to seize, and they are failing to recognise the risks of over-reliance on other countries. Decarbonisation is, of course, important, not least because consumers are increasingly demanding greener products, but decarbonisation must not become a byword for deindustrialisation. It would be utterly unforgiveable if the deal that the Government have done with Tata Steel leads to the offshoring of production, good jobs and carbon emissions to other countries that use dirtier steelmaking processes and that do not always have Britain’s best interests at heart.

This King’s Speech is noteworthy more for what it does not contain than for what it does. There is nothing on the cost of living crisis, nothing on the crisis in our public services, nothing to address our protracted productivity crisis, and nothing to tackle the epidemic of 6,000 business bankruptcies that we saw this summer. That is because this is a Government who have given up on governing. They just sit there desperately clinging on to power for power’s sake and arguing with one another.

The British people want a Government who see a problem as something to be solved, not something to be exploited. The choice is clear: five more years of the same Tory chaos or a Labour Government who will give Britain its future back.