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Home Affairs and Communities

Indeed. If a serious discussion took place with the members of the focus groups, and if they were led through the issues as my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis), the shadow Home Secretary led us, and having been asked the pertinent questions, would 80 per cent. of people still support ID cards? However, that is not the point. If ID cards are wrong, we should oppose them. I do not believe—here I pay a tribute to the Liberal party—that the Lib Dems were harmed by their opposition to ID cards. I was vociferous in my opposition to ID cards. I do not remember anyone in my constituency saying, ““I’m not going to vote for you, Mr. Leigh, because you oppose ID cards.”” People want leadership. They want vision. They do not want government by focus groups. They are fed up with that. That is why we have so much apathy. That is why only 35 per cent. of people support the governing party. That is the lowest percentage supporting a Government party of any country in the world, or certainly in Europe. I agree, of course, that the Conservative party did not do much better than that. We should have done much better. Perhaps we had also been listening too much to focus groups. Perhaps we should have had a bit more vision and determination and less of a managerial style. Perhaps we should have worked out what really we believe in—and we believe in the empowerment of ordinary people in choice, freedom, tradition and the nation, in all those finest Conservative values. If we have the determination and the guts to put those values forward, I believe that a much higher proportion of the population will support us. Apart from the fact that there is no theme in the Queen’s Speech, I am worried that the Government seem not to know in which direction they are heading. They realise that the public sector is not performing. For their first eight years, they gave us a blizzard of targets. They seem now to be retreating from that approach, which is that the man in Whitehall knows best. They seem also to be at the stage in which the Conservative Government were between 1992 and 1997. They are starting to talk more about the internal market. They are creating city academies, which seem similar to the proposals that we were advancing in our last term of Government. Do they know to where they are coming? I am worried also that the Government keep on making proposals that we spend hours debating but that have little coherence and there is no determination to implement them. The prime example is control orders. Were we not in the Chamber all night, or was it two nights and two days, discussing them? As my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary said, how many of those orders have been implemented? We shall spend hours discussing religious hatred. I am dubious. I believe passionately that our country has been built on religious disputation on strong arguments. I do not believe that there is any call for such legislation. It is a cynical measure to try to secure votes in one section of a community. I believe that it will be rammed through the House by whipping, with little real support. Furthermore, I believe that, in the end, it will make virtually no difference to the present situation. Indeed, the legislation might cause more harm than good. I would like some coherence in the Queen’s Speech. I would like to see it based on sound principles of local action and local choice. A blizzard of Bills will come from the Home Office. I have a brief from the Law Society and I spent most of the morning trying to plough through it. I tried to understand the Bills that will be coming before us. If we really want to get to grips with law and order, we should do what they are doing in New York. We should elect a police commissioner, a politician, and give him or her real control, free of the dictates of national Government. It is staggering what Mayor Giuliani achieved in the four after his election in 1994. He cut the murder rate by 60 per cent. Robbery and burglary were reduced by 67 per cent. The number of police officers in New York increased from 29,000 to 40,000. That was local action. The mayor did not need Bills going through Parliament. He did not need 45 Bills in one Session. He was just a man who was put in control. That is what we need. That is already happening in this country. There is Ray Mallon, a former police superintendent. He was elected by the good people of Middlesbrough as their mayor. He said that, if he was put in charge of the police and did not cut crime by 20 per cent. in his time, he would resign. In fact, he cut crime by 27 per cent. He is now the elected mayor of Middlesbrough. He is coming forward with good old-fashioned Conservative policies. Once, I stood as the Conservative parliamentary candidate in Middlesbrough. I lost by 13,000 votes. A Conservative has no more chance of being elected in Middlesbrough than does a Trotskyite in the Lincolnshire wolds. In Middlesbrough, however, a good conservative has been elected—that is with a small ““c”” because I do not know what his politics are, and that does not matter—who is coming through with good sound policies that the people want. These policies are based on zero tolerance and more police on the beat. If we could only have the courage in the House not to bring forward year after year more and more criminal justice Bills and more and more interference but to introduce one simple measure to return real power—real empowerment—to local people, that would make the crucial difference. Indeed, that is all that we need to do. The same applies in health and education. We must empower local people and allow them the freedom to send their children to the schools of their choice. We must allow heads to run schools and get back the school discipline and pride that we need. The same applies to the national health service. That is what the Conservative Queen’s Speech would have been. Sadly, we did not have that opportunity, but the time will come. Increasingly, even the Government will realise that targeting has its limits. The man in Whitehall does not always know better. We can aim higher and achieve more, and the next Conservative Government will do precisely that.