Debate on the Address

This is the Gracious Speech that should never have been. The reason I say that is, as we all know, that there was going to be a general election. Frankly, having listened to the Gracious Speech, I wish that that general election had taken place. I would like to make a number of points before going into the detail of the legislation. My right hon. Friend the leader of the Conservative party intervened twice in the Prime Minister's speech. On both occasions, his interventions could not have been more telling. He first asked the Prime Minister to look him straight in the eye and comment on inheritance tax and then again on the general election. The Prime Minister will live to regret his reaction on both those counts. I had been looking forward to the end of the Blair years and to welcoming a new era. In a very short space of time, however, I have been somewhat disappointed. I have no doubt that the Prime Minister had intended to call a general election in 2009. I cannot understand how it was that he listened to the advice of people who may not have been in politics for a great length of time, as that put him in a position that has destroyed any reputation that he might have had. As far as I am concerned, the dithering over the general election is the ERM moment for the Labour party. Labour will not be able to have the election in 2009, as originally intended: it will have to go on to the bitter end. The longer this rotten Labour Government go on, the more Labour Members will be concerned about their seats. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition was absolutely right when he said that the Prime Minister was treating the general public as if it had no intuition whatever as to what the Labour party was about. The Prime Minister has spun this Government as a new Government. For goodness' sake, the Prime Minister was elected in 1983 and he has been running the Government since it was elected in 1997. There is nothing new about the deputy leader of the Labour party either: she was elected in 1982. The idea that this is a new Government is absolute nonsense. There was a wonderful article about the Gracious Speech in one of our national newspapers. It was entitled ““What is the point of all this legislation?”” The hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) made some similar points earlier. The article stated that today marks ““the final curtain”” on ““the Blair years””. It continued:"““In 10 years, there have been 455 Acts of Parliament… and thousands of statutory instruments””." There have been"““reforms of health and education””," but they have been ““piecemeal”” and lacked any real ““vision””. There have been"““two dozen criminal justice Acts, aimed principally at tomorrow's headlines rather than making the streets safe, the legislative effort should have been expended on proper, lasting and effective reforms of public services. Last week's population figures showed how exposed we now are to our hospitals, schools and transport network being overwhelmed by a greater number of people than was ever planned for.””" It continued:"““Over the 10 years of Blairism, Labour has brought in six Acts on immigration, seven on terrorism, a dozen on education, 11 on health and social care, and 25 on criminal justice. It has created new crimes at a rate of nearly one a day and passed more than 32,000 statutory instruments.””" That says everything about this Government. The article went on:"““Cleaning hospitals is a laudable ambition, but…three years ago there was a health and improvement Bill, giving new priority to infection control in hospitals. Why did that not work? What is the point of all this legislation—" including that in the Gracious Speech—"““if it does not actually make any difference?...most of it is useless. There have been measures introduced in the past 10 years that were repealed before they even came into force.””" This is a Government who have absolutely no direction. I want to address eight points in the Gracious Speech in a little detail. First, I shall deal with the proposed constitutional reform Bill. The gap has certainly widened in the balance of power between the Government and Parliament over the past 10 years. Why? It is entirely the result of the former Prime Minister. A balanced working relationship between the two, built on mutual respect and accountability, has increasingly been eroded. Without any doubt, the driving force behind that was Mr. Blair. His presidential style and general disregard for the opinion of both Houses has created the need for a rebalancing of power. My goodness, could not he wait to get out of this place? People are no longer keen to participate in democracy and distrust political decision makers. I blame that entirely on the Labour Government and the former Prime Minister. Their emphasis on soundbites and spin has done much to damage Parliament's standing. Having spoken on the first day of every Gracious Speech since 1983, I can say without hesitation that the attendance today is unfortunately an all-time low. Where are the Government Members to support the Queen's Speech? There are nearly double the number of Opposition Members here. The Whips cannot even organise enough Labour MPs to come in and say good things about the Gracious Speech. The constitutional reform Bill might appear to some to be an attempt to correct the damage sustained by Parliament as a result of the previous 10 years of Labour Government. It is somewhat ironic, however, that the Bill is proposed by the current Prime Minister, as he served throughout the Blair years, and told Mr. Blair what to do half the time. The present Government wish increasingly to devolve power to local bodies; they should get on with it. They have had 10 years to do something about it, but over that time they have done everything possible to destroy local government. Southend, which I share with my hon. Friend the Member for Rochford and Southend, East (James Duddridge), has been undermined by not having enough money to maintain services. If we wanted to put up the council tax, we would be capped. Furthermore, I am surprised that the human fertilisation and embryology Bill has not been mentioned, as I am very concerned about it. I spoke during the passage of the 1990 Bill, and many of us who were concerned about allowing experimentation on human embryos up to 14 days have been proved right. The Minister for Science and Innovation shakes his head in disagreement, but the idea that we would put in place the wherewithal to police laboratories to allow experimentation on an embryo of 13 days old, but not on an embryo that is older, is a nonsense. The authority that came into being in 1990 has turned out to be shambolic. All the promises made of cures found as a result of experimentation on human embryos have been proved wrong. To date, as Ministers have confirmed in reply to numerous questions that I have asked, extensive embryo research has produced no significant breakthroughs whatever, and nor has embryonic stem cell research. Adult stem cell research, however, has been far more successful. Even at this late stage, therefore, the Government should reflect on the Bill. We have a marvellous Freeview television now, on which I saw the Minister with responsibility for public health say to the Science and Technology Committee that there was no scientific evidence to show that Parliament should consider the present law whereby abortion is lawful up to 24 weeks. That was an incredible statement. Before the last general election, when the three then party leaders were asked their view on abortion, they said unanimously that their constituencies had special baby care units that now save babies at 23 and a half weeks, 23 weeks and some even at 22 and a half weeks. We know that those babies have lung development problems and so on, but for the Minister to say to that Select Committee that there were no grounds for reconsidering the matter was extraordinary. I salute my two colleagues who then decided to issue a minority report. I pray in aid the words of the noble Lord Steel, the architect of the Abortion Act 1967, who said recently that abortion is being used as a form of contraception in Britain, and admitted that he never anticipated anything like the current number of terminations when leading the campaign for reform. I am therefore fearful of the Government's proposed Bill being used by some parliamentary colleagues to make having an abortion in this country even easier. I believe that if that does happen, a large number of hon. Members will fight, word by word and line by line, to ensure that the abortion laws in this country are not weakened further. Then there is the criminal justice and immigration Bill, whose proposals read as a long list of Government failures. I believe strongly that over the last 10 years Britain has become a fundamentally unjust country. It is ridiculous: Home Office Ministers wake up in the morning and decide ““We will make another law: we will make something else illegal””, although we all know that it is up to chance whether any of those laws are enforced. The criminal justice system has been very badly damaged. Despite the introduction of more than 30 separate criminal justice Acts and the creation of more than 3,000 new criminal offences since Labour came to power in 1997, crime has continued to rise significantly. The Government are behaving as if they were still in opposition. The truth about the Labour party is that it is no good in government; its expertise is in opposition. Labour Members are very good at moaning about everything, but what happens when they are given power? If anyone were to ask whether the country is any better today than it was in 1997, the answer would be ““Absolutely not””, and history will show that the last Prime Minister failed the country very badly. Let me say a word about the police. We used to have the best police force in the world, and the best judicial system in the world. Now our police are just like those in the rest of the world, and our judicial system is just like that in the rest of the world. I am sick to death of being invited to go on all-night rides around the town watching what goes on among people who are committing crimes. I have done that. I have been there. I invite those police officers to spend a day with me, as a Conservative Member of Parliament. We know what the problems are, but the solutions are another matter, and I think the ““Panorama”” programme that we saw during the summer recess was very telling indeed. Given the recent behaviour of the chief of the Met over the de Menezes case, his position is absolutely untenable. It is outrageous. If the man running the police force is giving this sort of lead, no wonder officers are in open rebellion. If there is one thing the Government have done that has been more damaging than anything else, it is the way in which they have ruined our criminal justice system. Given that we have wasted all this money on the investigation into cash for honours—£1.5 million, we now discover—was it surprising that the Crown Prosecution Service did not proceed? The gentleman who runs the CPS is a staunch Labour supporter, for goodness sake: he was never going to go ahead with the prosecution. I think that when there is a general election, Labour will be judged on that as well.