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Government and the Legislature

As you will know, Mr Speaker, it is the custom when we come to this place for a new Member to make a maiden speech. With your indulgence, I wonder if I might initiate a new genre tonight: the valedictory speech. I have been in this place 23 years. I hope that, during that time, I have left the occasional footprint in the sand, but I am under no illusion. Only a handful of those of us who currently strut these corridors will still be remembered in 10 or 20 years' time and I do not expect to be among them. Before the waters close over my head, however, I would like to take this opportunity to place on record a few random thoughts that might be of interest to those who come afterwards. To those who ask where I am coming from, I reply that I am a socialist with a small s, a liberal with a small l, a green with a small g and a Democrat with a capital D. Although most of us are more prosperous than we have ever been, we live in an age of disillusion and corrosive cynicism. It is fashionable to believe that all politicians are useless, that nothing works, that everything is bad and getting worse and that all political activity is pointless. I do not accept this. Despite the catastrophe of Iraq, I sincerely believe that the achievements of the last three Labour Governments have been considerable. I have only to look at my own constituency to see the truth of that proposition. With hand on heart I can say with confidence that during these last 13 years the lives and life chances of many of my least prosperous constituents have been immeasurably improved. The Government have, for reasons I can only guess at, been rather shy about it, but we have redistributed some wealth. The minimum wage, working tax credits, pension credits and the huge investment in health, education and public transport have made a considerable impact and I defy anyone to argue otherwise. In my constituency in 1997, and one has to pinch oneself to recall this, a significant number of people—security guards, mail-order workers and care workers—were earning as little as £1 an hour. The waiting time for a hip operation at Sunderland Royal hospital was up to two years and it is now 18 weeks and falling. There is a secondary school in my constituency, Sandhill View, at which 15 years ago less than 10 per cent.—I repeat, less than 10 per cent.—of GCSE pupils were achieving five A to C grades. Today, Sandhill View is under dynamic new management. It has been entirely rebuilt, sharing a library, sports and other facilities with the surrounding community. It covers exactly the same catchment area as the old school, and around 60 per cent. of pupils obtain five A to C grades. To be sure, there is still room for progress, but I think that the House will agree that there has been a dramatic improvement on what went before. Nor do I believe that such changes are confined only to Sunderland. City centres such as those in Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, once in near terminal decline, have been reborn. No doubt there are many reasons why this has happened, but I do believe that it has something to do with the fact that we have enjoyed more than a decade of Labour Government. There has been progress, too, in other important areas, such as the environment, criminal justice, and international development, and above all in Ireland, where peace has been achieved after many years of apparently intractable conflict. And who would have thought that we would live to see the day when a new Labour Government took a controlling interest in three major banks with—eventually—Conservative support? There are social and constitutional reforms that were controversial in their day but which, having been enacted, will endure for ever. They include the bans on smoking in public places and on cigarette advertising, the requirement that political parties disclose their source of funding, and the Freedom of Information Act—painful though that has proved for us humble servants of the people. Whatever the outcome of the election, no one can take those achievements away from the Governments of the last 13 years, and I note that no Opposition party is intending to do so. I would like now to address the future. Whatever the achievements of the past, we are all well aware that we are as far away as ever from achieving nirvana. Although in some respects my political views have modified over the years, I continue to doubt that there is a long-term future for an economy based on shopping. The frenetic consumerism of recent decades surely contains the seeds of its own destruction, and even more so now that China and India are falling over themselves to make, with knobs on, the same mistakes as we have made. I truly believe that this age of consumerism is only a very temporary period in the history of the human race and that, if we carry on as we are, it will end badly—perhaps within the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. As things stand, we are using up the resources of the planet as though there is no tomorrow and, if we are not careful, there will be no tomorrow. One way or another, we have to devise lifestyles that are sustainable, and that may well require changes to our way of life that most people have only dimly begun to contemplate. This I regard as the greatest single challenge facing the new generation of political leaders, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they come from. I think that we can all agree too that the neo-liberal experiment of the last two decades, which has bewitched politicians on all sides of the House and both sides of the Atlantic, is well and truly over. The near meltdown of the global banking system was a wake-up call, if ever there was one. Not everyone has got the message, however. Three months ago, at the annual dinner of the Institute of Directors—I get some invited to some very odd places these days—I was interested to hear the man in charge still chanting the mantra of light-touch regulation and demanding less Government intervention in the workings of the market. I thought to myself, "Lucky there was some big Government around when the banks went belly up." Nor should we imagine, as we sit tight in fortress Europe watching other people's catastrophes on our television screens—and perhaps averting our eyes by switching channels—that we will remain indefinitely immune. The world is increasingly a village. What happens in one part has consequences in another. The danger for western Europe is that, if the world beyond our frontiers is allowed to disintegrate—as the oceans rise, the rivers evaporate, the deserts expand and populations multiply—the flow of economic refugees from Africa and Asia will gradually become a tide that will gradually overwhelm our fragile social, economic and political systems. I do not say that that will happen, but it must be a possibility that can no longer be overlooked. We are deluding ourselves if we imagine that this process can be halted by increased repression. In the end, it can be reversed only by addressing the root causes, and that requires political leaders of courage and vision, willing to face their electorates with home truths and not merely pandering to the basest prejudices. Here in the United Kingdom, our problems are exacerbated by the fact that for a generation or more, our citizens have been encouraged to believe that they can enjoy European standards of public services and American levels of taxation. Sooner or later, choices must be made. Perhaps the moment has come. If we want higher standards in our schools, better hospitals, better pension provision, and long-term care for the elderly, they will have to be paid for out of taxation. Let us not pretend, as some do, that such benefits can be paid for merely by taxing the rich; they cannot. We, the pampered inhabitants of middle England, will have to make a larger contribution. By all means crack down on waste and demand value for money, but do not pretend that that alone will solve the problem. At the end of the day, there are choices to be made, and each choice has consequences that we must face maturely. I keep reading how heavily taxed we are, but I note that the basic rate of income tax today is well below what it was in Mrs. Thatcher's day. Government needs to become a little less frenetic. The practice of annual reshuffles is massively destabilising and confers enormous power on the civil service. There have been eight Secretaries of State for Work and Pensions in the 10 years since that Department was invented. Of late, we have been getting through Home Secretaries at the rate of one a year. Goodness knows how many Health and Education Ministers we have got through. We are on our 10th Europe Minister.