---

Queen’s Speech

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow that marvellous speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Bellingham. I am not a scoffer and support her 100 per cent. The first sentence of the gracious Speech states that the overriding priority of the Government is to ensure sustained growth. Let us take time to look at that. Since the Government came into office, resources have been remorselessly and systematically siphoned off from the private to the public sector. My noble friend Lord Forsyth mentioned this earlier and got a rather evasive answer. There has been virtually no growth in the private sector for the past 12 years. What has been the object of this exercise? Presumably, it has been to see the public sector grow. However, measured by outputs rather than input employee costs, economic growth in the public sector has been modest. What has not been modest in the public sector is the mushrooming of jobs, and the mushrooming continues relentlessly. In the past 12 months, while 900,000 jobs have been lost in the private sector, 289,000 jobs have been created in the public sector. Do the words "sustained growth" mean sustained at the level we have had over the past 12 years? That would be nothing to be proud of, nor would it go anywhere towards reversing what has become an inexorable decline in our competitiveness compared with the big five Asian economies and the economies of some Latin American countries. My noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford gave a masterly exposition of the transfer of economic might to these countries in the debate on the Queen’s Speech on 19 November, at col. 36 of Hansard. I commend it to Members of this House who might have been lulled into a sense of comfort by the endless repetition of claims that the Government have managed the economy quite brilliantly for the past 12 years. The Government have not been asleep on the job all the time but when not asleep they have been dozing and dreaming—yes, daydreaming. In the first paragraph of the gracious Speech, the Government say that their aim is, ""to deliver a fair and prosperous economy for families and businesses"." Can we have details please? What are they going to do? What new strategy will they employ which will deliver something that they have spectacularly failed to deliver in the past 12 years? By the way, have the Government, elected by 20 per cent of the voters, the right to determine that it is only families and businesses who should benefit? What about the pensioners and the hard-working single people who live alone and who are always left out and constantly discriminated against by many sectors of this economy, including supermarkets, shops, hotels and the travel industry? They are not even on the Government’s radar screen. No, they do not count. They are not expected to benefit from a fair and prosperous economy; they are just part of silent groups that have to grin and bear it.