Category: Debates

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): I agree entirely with what the Minister and the shadow Minister have said. I particularly agree with the Government’s decision not to intervene in Nigeria directly with military force. Will the Minister explain, though, why the west is right to try to use military force in Syria and Iraq, in rather similar situations, but not in Nigeria?

The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr Hugo Swire): We have deployed assistance to Nigeria and we will continue to do so, particularly on the intelligence side. I repeat that Nigeria is one of the richest countries in Africa and it spends 20% of its own budget on defence expenditure. In the normal course of events, it should be able to handle these things itself, but it cannot, and that is why we are providing assistance to enable it to do so. Drawing any parallel between what is going on in Syria and Iraq is not useful, if I may say so. This is something localised to Nigeria, and we want to prevent it from spreading across other parts of Africa.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): Some of my constituents were badly inconvenienced by these matters, and I would like to hear the Secretary of State’s confirmation that they can claim compensation, which would be some recompense. What else can be done to get over to Network Rail that it needs to raise its standards of customer care, concern and efficiency, because it is still vastly inefficient by global standards?

The Secretary of State for Transport (Mr Patrick McLoughlin): I agree with my right hon. Friend. Compensation is something to which passengers are entitled if the delays were severe and over a certain period. That should happen. On the point about Network Rail overall, as I have said, a number of the projects undertaken have been completed successfully—not least one in Reading that affects my right hon. Friend’s constituency. Anyone using that line can see the huge investment, not just in the station but in the new viaduct, which will have a huge impact on reliability for my right hon. Friend’s constituents and others.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for leading on this issue and for bravely taking the case of many people in the postal sector to the management. From his discussions with the senior management of the Post Office, is there any sign that it now recognises that it made mistakes? Is there any willingness on its part to recognise that at least some of those people are completely innocent and deserve an apology and compensation for the way that their lives and businesses have been wrecked?

Mr James Arbuthnot (North East Hampshire) (Con): That is a very difficult question to answer, because the Post Office pleads secrecy. It will not tell us what is happening in the mediation scheme. We asked in July how the mediation scheme was going, but it refused to tell Members of Parliament because it was all confidential.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): England expects English votes for English issues. We expect simplicity and justice now: no ifs, no buts, no committee limitations, no tricks. Give us what we want. We have waited 15 years for this. Will he now join me in speaking for England?

The First Secretary of State and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr William Hague): Yes, for the whole of the United Kingdom, I hope, including England. My right hon. Friend has made a strong case for a long time that this issue needs to be resolved, in his view through advocating a particular option. But any of the options presented in this command paper would provide a substantial change in our arrangements and an effective veto for English Members over matters that affect only England, which I think is what he means by speaking for England.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): Does the Minister recall that we both fought on a Conservative manifesto that said that we should get rid of quangos and not create new ones, and that Ministers should be responsible and accountable—something that I entirely agree with? Why is he proposing two new quangos on highways instead of the excellent arrangements for accountability through him?

The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Mr John Hayes): My right hon. Friend has made that point to me previously. Let me tell him, with a candour equal to that of my earlier expressions, that I am absolutely determined that the lines of accountability for the strategy we have in place should be clear and that Ministers’ lines of reporting in this House should be palpable and known. Indeed, I have missioned my Department to make sure that that happens.

I will make available in the Library of the House, not only for my right hon. Friend’s benefit but for that of the whole House, a description of precisely what those lines of accountability will look like. When he sees that clear description of how the House and Ministers are going to exercise their proper authority in the name of the people, I think he will be more than impressed and will feel that this Government and this Minister have gone further than even he expected us to.

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Mr Redwood: On the important link to the south-west, did the Government look at the alternative to a tunnel of deviating the road a little further away from Stonehenge —giving generous compensation to landowners—and building a much cheaper road above ground?

Mr Hayes: We considered all the options. My right hon. Friend will know that we undertook considerable research, discussion and consultation on that matter. The scheme we have ended up with has been welcomed by several environmental bodies, such as English Heritage. Of course, each option has pros and cons—I would not be straightforward with the House if I did not acknowledge that—but I think that we have got the right solution.

As with all such schemes, what characterises the Government, above and beyond the desire to think strategically and put funds behind the strategy, is a willingness to look empirically at a range of options. It is very important to be ambitious, but also to be precise, and the way in which we measure the effect of the money we spend has allowed us to allocate funds not only to areas of the road network that have the greatest need, but where we can make the most difference.

The fact that there is £100 million to improve cycling provision at 200 key locations across the network reflects our understanding that it is not just motorists and hauliers who count. There is a £300-million environmental fund to mitigate carbon emissions and reduce the number of people affected by serious noise by up to 250,000. There is £100 million to unlock growth and housing developments.

I have missioned my Department to look closely at the look and feel of what we build. It is absolutely right that the aesthetics are taken into account. If that was good enough for earlier generations, it should be good enough for ours. What we build does not have to be ugly. It can serve a purpose and have an edifying impact on the localities affected.

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Mr Redwood: Now that the shadow Minister has seen the projected overall levels of capital expenditure laid out by the coalition Government in the autumn statement for the period up to 2020, does his party think they are the right levels, or are they too low or too high?

Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab): As I said in answer to the previous question, we are not in the business of saying that we wish to cut back on capital investment. For goodness’ sake, we have been saying for four years that the Government have not been investing enough in infrastructure. It seemed from the Minister’s opening remarks that he was criticising the previous Government for not having spent enough. That is a bit of a change from what we have heard before—usually we are accused of having spent too much. Labour spent a total of £93.7 billion on our road network between 1997 and 2010. That is because we are interested and we are committed to repairing our creaking infrastructure. That will not change.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): One of the most persuasive points that we were able to make to the Chancellor when we lobbied him was that there were bands in the market where there were effectively no transactions at all because people could not get buyers to pay that little bit extra. That was distorting the value of their homes.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): I rise to talk about two large European powers that are both, in their own ways, reluctant Europeans. It is well known that the United Kingdom made an historic and important decision, under the previous Labour Government, not to join the euro. Many of us campaigned actively for that decision. We strongly believed that if the United Kingdom joined the euro it could probably bring the currency down. It would be extremely damaging to our own economy and financial system. How glad I am that we prevailed on that Government. If the United Kingdom had been in the euro at the time of the great banking crash of 2007-08, we would have brought the euro down. The House may remember that it was the United Kingdom that brought down the euro’s progenitor, the exchange rate mechanism, which a previous Government mistakenly went into. Just as the forces of the Great British trading economy—an international economy with a strong dollar base—brought down the ERM, so I think we would have brought down the euro.

Now that we have made that historic decision, I see no intention on the part of any serious force in the United Kingdom to reverse it. I am pleased at that. I confidently predict that no party with any serious chance of winning a single seat in the Westminster Parliament in 2015 will campaign on the UK joining the euro between 2015 and 2020. I confidently predict that the same will be true if we have a general election in 2020. I do not see the mood changing. We have learned our lesson. We have understood that it will not work as an economic project.

We understood also that it does not work from the point of view of our democracy. As soon as a country begins to share a currency with other member states of the EU it must share many other things. Those countries are on a long journey towards a united states of Europe. They are discovering that they will need to share their policy on tax and public spending. It is no longer possible for people in Spain, Italy or Greece to think that they have a democratic right to choose their level of public spending, public borrowing or taxation. They are under increasingly tough controls from the centre. Germany is right about that: strong financial discipline is needed in a currency union if it is to work.

That is exactly the kind of control that the United Kingdom would never accept. I do not see parties of the left accepting that Europe should tell us to spend less; and I do not see parties of the right accepting that Europe should expect us to tax more. Indeed, some of us on the right would not want to be told to spend less in certain areas; and some on the left would not want to be told to tax more, in certain ways. We as a democracy say that the fount of our democracy is the elected Members of this Parliament; and that controlling taxation and our budget are central to our great national story. Our mother of Parliaments emerged to control the finances of the King and to say to the King or Queen, “You shall not tax more—or not without redress of grievance, or without our having a say over how the money is spent.” That is why the United Kingdom will rightly remain a reluctant European. We cannot accept the continuing pressure from the logic of the euro, that we should give away those fundamental birthrights—the democratic right to elect people to tax and spend, and change them if they tax and spend too little or too much, or in the wrong way.

I remember, as part of the anti-euro campaign, hitting on the phrase that joining a single currency would be like sharing a bank account with the neighbours. I used to say that I get on well with my neighbours. We have Christmas drinks and the odd summer party, and enjoy each others’ company. However, I do not know about other hon. Members, but I am not ready to share a bank account with my neighbours. I just have this feeling that if I were the prudent one, when I wanted to draw out some of my money to spend, the neighbours would have spent it. They might have wanted a fancier house, and taken out a big mortgage; then when I wanted a mortgage I would discover that our mortgage capacity had already been used up. That is exactly what being in a single currency is like. My opponents in those debates used to look for what was wrong with my analogy. I thought it was broadly right, but even I thought it might be a little bit of a try-on. Now that we have seen the euro scheme I realise that it was completely apt. That is exactly the position of countries such as Greece, Italy and Spain, in relation to Germany. Germany says “We do not want you using the collective mortgage, because we know you will borrow more, and we have got to do the saving.”

There is therefore an unhealthy tension, which is why I must talk about two reluctant Europeans. The other big power in Europe that is proving to be reluctant about the scheme of full European integration, providing the political backing to the single currency, is none other than Germany itself. At the very time when some Germans presume to lecture the United Kingdom on being a reluctant European—a very counterproductive thing to do, because it encourages Euroscepticism no end when Germans lecture us in that way—we find that Germany is busily trying to restrain the others from the impelling political logic of the euro, which must be to complete the political union to provide the backing to the currency.

If we exchange banknotes in the United Kingdom, we see on the banknote a symbol of our country. We see the monarch’s portrait. It is there partly because we like our monarch, but also as a symbol that the whole taxable capacity, the whole parliamentary and political weight, and the whole authority of the United Kingdom Parliament stands behind that banknote. People trust it, trade it and use it because they know that that is true. In time of crisis Parliament stands behind the Bank of England; the Bank of England stands behind the banknote; and the taxable capacity of the country is there for whatever crisis might arise. The problem with the euro is that there is as yet no symbol or political union to stand behind the banknote. That is why it has been subject to crisis after crisis. Pictures of bridges had to be used on the notes, and they could not be like any actual bridge to be found anywhere in Europe, because that might offend people. An Italian bridge might mean the Spaniards would be jealous; or perhaps they would be grateful that their bridge was not being pledged on the banknote—I do not know. There would have been tension or difficulties even over choosing the symbols for the banknote, so they had to choose something more anodyne.

There is a much bigger and more important political reality behind that; we are discovering that the full taxable capacity of the German state does not yet stand fully behind the euro, and that the rich and successful countries do not want to pool their riches and success with the poorer countries in the Union. Until they do, the currency will be crisis-stricken. The development of a second euro has already happened. The second euro was the Cypriot euro. Unbelievably in a first-world currency, people who had been foolish enough to deposit euros in a Cyprus bank could not take them out. When it was allowed, they were not worth €1; they were devalued before people could have their money back. That had to happen because the German taxable capacity would not stand behind the Cypriot bank. There is no way that, if a city or part of the United Kingdom—it would be invidious to give names—got into balance of payments or financial difficulties, people’s pounds, deposited in a bank in a part of the United Kingdom, would be first frozen and then devalued before they could be taken out. Everyone would rightly be scandalised and think it absurd. Yet that happened in the eurozone, because our reluctant European, Germany, would not stand behind the euro.

My prediction is that Germany is on a slow but inevitable march to standing behind the euro. In a way, I hope it is, because I wish the euro well and it needs to be a grown-up currency with proper transfers behind it; but the more Germany is on that movement towards being the paymaster, founder and discipline-provider of the euro area, the less possible it is for Britain to belong to that system. That is why I welcome the magnificent contribution that my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), has once again made to our national debate, and why I hope people are listening outside the Chamber, in addition to those who have kindly come to listen. Today’s debate is about the mighty subject of our generation. We wish our continent and the euro area well, but the United Kingdom must now find a new relationship. Just as surely as Germany needs to become the centrepiece of the political union to make a proper reality of the euro, so the United Kingdom, unwilling and unable to join it, will need a new, looser and different relationship with that emerging superpower—which will be not an armed superpower but an economic one, with, at last, the taxable capacity of Germany standing behind the rest.

It is important for that to happen quickly. I do not want to live in a Europe where there is practically no growth year after year and where there are sometimes rather bad crashes. I do not want to live in a Europe where the banking system is still riven by difficulty and disaster because there is not full support from the euro-area in the way we would expect from an integrated economic zone. I want to live in a Europe that is more vibrant, more exciting and more interesting.

I am very pleased that my country has stayed out of the euro; I am very pleased that, with our own financial and monetary policies, we now have a growth rate of which we can be proud and that gives our people hope; and I am very pleased that unemployment is coming down. It would make things so much easier for us if Europe had a growth rate of which we could be proud, if its unemployment rate was coming down and if it could offer hope to its young people. Europe cannot do that unless it either completes its currency union properly or breaks it up as soon as possible. We cannot join Europe in the former, and we do not wish to lecture it on the latter, so can we please get on with negotiating a relationship that works for Britain? Can we privately, not publicly, remind Germany that if she wishes this mighty project to work, she has to commit herself to it as fully as we have to disengaging?

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): Given that the United States has been the fastest-growing advanced economy since 2009, based on the exploitation of cheap energy, was there any discussion about what we and others need to do to compete with America industrially? We will need to invest in a lot of cheap energy to keep up.

The Prime Minister (Mr David Cameron): There was a discussion about energy, and it is notable now that America starts these interventions by explaining that it is the world’s largest producer of oil and gas. My right hon. Friend makes an important point though: we should not be left out in the shale gas revolution. It has helped American competitiveness and energy prices, and I want to ensure that we do everything in the UK to take advantage of it too.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): Many of us thought that we would have an opportunity today to debate the very weighty question of whether this country should opt back into 35 important measures relating to criminal justice, and put it under European Court of Justice and European Union control. We looked forward to a debate and a vote on that high principle, which includes the important and contentious European arrest warrant, but also a number of other measures that constitute the building blocks for a system in which our criminal justice would be conducted primarily under the central control of the European Union rather than that of the United Kingdom.

We welcome the Government’s wish to engage and to allow us a reasonable length of time in which to debate those matters, followed by a concluding vote at 10 pm, but you, Mr Speaker, have told us, very wisely and helpfully, that that is not what the business motion says, and, through you, I urge Ministers to consider amending it. As I understand the position, you would probably be sympathetic if they wished to do so. We could debate their regulations for 90 minutes, and during the remaining time, until 10 pm, we could debate the much wider issues of substance. We could discuss whether we wish to opt into all those measures and what we think of the European arrest warrant. Some believe it to be the biggest of all the measures, which is in itself debatable. I think that justice would then be seen to be done by the wider public.

I hope, Mr Speaker, that I am not taking liberties by suggesting to Ministers, through you, that a simple amendment to the business motion might provide a way out of this dilemma, and enable the House properly to consider the wider constitutional issues.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): The three leaders of the main parties made generous offers to Scotland. I am sure that they wish to honour those offers, and I urge them to do so as quickly as possible. It would be easier if they could try to find some agreement among themselves, because, unfortunately, their offers were a bit different. I also urge them to be generous. I think we want to have the right spirit for this negotiation, and I disagree with the former Prime Minister: I think that Scotland should have full powers over income tax, and I think that the more fiscal devolution there is, the better. I think it makes a lot of sense for whoever is responsible for spending the money to be responsible for raising it as well.

However, I have also raised the question of England. I have spoken for England, and since I launched my “Speak for England” campaign, I have been overwhelmed with support from around the country. More than 70% of the English people believe that we need English votes on English issues, and they believe that we need them now. That would be a first important step on the road to justice for England.

Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP): The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: he has been totally consistent. I actually used him as an example as I went around the meeting places of Scotland saying, “This is the real mood of the Tory Back Benches.” I was told that he was a siren voice—that he was in the wilderness—but he is actually the voice of the Tory Back Benches.

Mr Redwood: My voice is central to this debate because that is what the English people wish. I am merely trying to interpret their wishes, and I am proud to be able to do so.

We are told by some that this is too difficult to do. It is not too difficult to do. It is very easy to define an English issue: it is an issue that has been devolved elsewhere. What it makes sense for Scotland to decide in Scotland, England should decide in England. We are told that there are complications involving different types of MP, but we have different types of MP today. We all have different rights, duties and responsibilities, depending on how much has been devolved. Some of us can deal with all the issues in our constituencies, but we have the advice and the votes of others from other parts of the country who cannot deal with all the issues in their constituencies because those issues have been devolved.

What I am concerned about is equality for the voters. We are now talking about offering income tax powers to Scotland, which I think will happen, because all the parties agree with a version of it. It would be grossly unfair if the voters of Scotland, by their majority, could instruct their Scottish Parliament on what income tax rate they wanted, while the voters of England, instructing their MPs, might not get their wishes by a majority, because Members from other parts of the country might come and vote for a higher rate in England than English MPs or their constituencies wanted. It would be unfair votes, and that is what we need to address.

Sir Robert Smith (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (LD): rose—

Mr Redwood: Does the hon. Gentleman wish to intervene?

Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle): Order. The hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Sir Robert Smith) has only just walked into the Chamber, and I do not want to embarrass him.

Mr Redwood: I say that we need justice for England, and that we need to embark on this course now. We could begin today if Scottish Members of Parliament such as those in the SNP would simply say that they would no longer vote on English-only matters. We could do it quite simply by amending the Standing Orders of the House, which I strongly recommend.

I hope that other parties will come with us. I am offering something that is extraordinarily popular in England. All the parties are struggling a bit to be popular enough to win the general election, and one would have thought that they would want to associate themselves with something as popular as this. I cannot remember when I last supported something this popular, and I do not go out of my way to support unpopular causes. Yet I find MPs from other parties queuing up to disagree with the English people, to deny the English people justice, to say that an English person’s vote should not count as much as a Scottish person’s vote, and to say that, yes, they want to see an income tax rate set for England by people who will not be paying the tax, and who do not represent those who do pay it.

I say, “Justice for England! Justice now! English votes for English issues!”