Sir Bernard Jenkin
MP for Harwich and North Essex · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Despite long and historic disagreements between successive UK Governments and Israel, it has remained a steadfast ally in counter-terrorist efforts to keep our people safe in this country. We are now embarked, it seems, on a full diplomatic dispute with Israel and tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats.”
“I would very much have liked to have discussed the medical devices questions arising from the Bill. The Minister made an incredibly short speech about that important matter. It is quite clear that these provisions are part of the covert dynamic alignment with the EU and the covert rejoin agenda being pursued by the Government.”
“I am as keen as anybody to get on with discussing the Health Bill, but this topic is too serious an opportunity to miss, given that the hon. Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) has raised such important issues. I really commend his speech and his initiative. Everybody should read it.”
“The Minister shakes her head, but she is yet to give a good reason as to why this measure is in the Bill. When we had an Adjournment debate in July with the then Minister for patient safety, the hon.”
“The chief executive of the CQC is wantonly conflicted in terms of looking after the safe space, so he cannot be the one left in charge of that function. The real point here is that we are missing the opportunity to save so much money. Governments keep having public inquiries.”
“I asked the Minister, in a letter I sent her after the debate in July, to give us the information on how much the transfer of all this would cost. Nothing has arrived. I never had a reply to the letter. Of course, the Government have changed the Minister and the new Minister for patient safety, the right hon.”
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“I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for her intervention because she reinforces my earlier point about the huge economic importance of this route and emphasises its potential. However, the burden of my point today is what needs to be done now. The issue cannot wait for the long term and a strategic decision to be worked out and implemented: it must be addressed now, particularly given that it has been brought to a head by the threat of closing the junctions. Steve Wilcox of Little Bromley parish council agrees that in this case: “The correct, immediate, action is to impose a 40mph speed limit, enforced by speed cameras, and to rectify the dangerously misleading road markings which fail to indicate the correct priorities and the poorly marked traffic islands.”
“Is there any reason why there cannot be a temporary speed camera trial to test that assertion? Closing the gaps without testing that assertion seems extremely irresponsible to me.”
“I am waiting for the Minister to raise the land acquisition issue, which I will want to intervene on him about, but will he explain why he thinks the police might be objecting to average speed cameras? Do they bear any cost for the cameras’ installation and maintenance? I should have thought that the cameras might make quite a bit of money for the speed camera authority. Do they involve any additional labour for the police that would incur cost? Why would the police be objecting to it?”
“I have yet to have a coherent explanation from Essex police as to why it is objecting to the speed cameras. There are other places on the road network where very similar problems occur, such as on the A14 and on an A road in Nottinghamshire, between Nottingham and Ollerton, where speed cameras have recently been installed at similar junctions and have dramatically reduced accident rates. I do not see what the problem is in principle about speed cameras on this stretch of road. The police seem to be objecting to that and have not given an explanation.”
“I can certainly confirm that any likely roundabout would involve the acquisition of private land, but I can also speak with reasonable authority on behalf of the landowners. They would be only too willing to contribute to a safe and practical solution to this junction, because they are local farmers and it affects the movement of their farm vehicles.”
“Why did my right hon. Friend choose to answer this question and not the question about lobbying, which has been in his in-tray for the last three years?”
“Do I need to remind my right hon. Friend that the outgoing Labour Government in 2010 left a note on the desk of the Chief Secretary to the Treasury saying, “There’s no money left”? Is not the challenge the need to make the NHS work on more or less flat funding—though we are doing our best to increase it—while dealing with huge increases in demand? Is not the only answer to do more in the general practice setting, where it can be done more responsibly, more local to patients’ needs and more cheaply, in order to take the pressure off A and E services?”
“The right hon. Gentleman has seen the Prime Minister’s draft Bill. If it became an Act of Parliament requiring a future Government to move an order to set a date for a referendum before 2017, would he do so?”
“Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Government are committed to what one might call a policy of negotiate and decide, although that has a familiar ring to it? Would it not help the clarity of this debate if the Government set out exactly what they intend to negotiate on? That has not been clear from anything they have so far said.”
“The United Kingdom has a trade deficit with the other 26 EU member states of £70 billion. I cannot imagine that the EU would want to cut itself off from the British market by getting into a trade war with the United Kingdom. May I also point out that we export more to the rest of the world than to the EU? The EU is declining in relative terms, whereas markets in the rest of the world are expanding. Surely we are a global trading nation, not just a regional trading nation, and that does not require us to be a member of the single market.”
“Friend the Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway) that I utterly respect the sincerity of his views, and I was expressing no more than frustration that he would not allow me a spare minute of his time to explain the statistics on which I think this fundamental debate should be based. I agree with the terms of the amendment and will support it, although I might not have tabled it myself. I doubt that some of the noise and discord around this issue has impressed those who failed to support us in the elections two weeks ago, reflecting a certain and widespread despair about the ability of all three main parties to keep their promises on referendums, which has become an emblem of the distrust in which so many of our voters hold the British political establishment.”
“When I received, somewhat to my surprise, a telephone call from my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron), inviting me to add my name to an amendment that regretted the absence of an item in the Queen’s Speech, I confess I was somewhat astonished. I think it a mark of the enormous shift in opinion that is taking place on what has for decades been a matter of fundamental consensus in British politics that we find ourselves straining the conventions and normal behaviour, and even the Standing Orders of the House, to accommodate this debate. I say to my hon.”
“One hundred per cent. of our economic activity is burdened with those regulatory costs for the sake of less than 10% of our overall GDP.”
“The rest of the world is the growing proportion; the EU is the declining proportion. Manufacturing is the only part that would be excluded, by virtue of the tariffs that were mentioned earlier by my hon. Friend, and manufacturing exports to the EU comprise 10% of GDP, and 10% to the rest of the world—a substantial and important part of our economic activity. The point is that there is no evidence that we would not continue to trade that proportion of our manufactures with the European Union—incidentally, the figures are inflated by what we know as the Rotterdam-Antwerp effect because a lot of what we export to the EU is instantly exported to the rest of the world. We are regulating our entire economy and burdening our taxpayers with the costs of the contribution—rising to £19 billion gross—with our membership of the European Union.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. I will not debate at length the quality or timing of an EU referendum, although I think that those who voted for UKIP and are likely to do so in next year’s European elections will not be impressed unless we make every effort to hold a referendum as soon as possible, rather than when it suits the three main political parties for whatever reasons we have to continue putting it off. I wanted to say to my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South that I have the figures from the House of Commons Library, and our total earnings from abroad constitute 44% of our GDP. We are a global trading nation and trade a higher proportion of our GDP than any other major European state. Trade with the EU comprises 19% of GDP, and 25% with the rest of the world.”
“The single market does not reduce the costs of doing business in the EU; it is a regulatory burden on trading in the EU.”
“The idea that 3 million jobs are dependent on exports to the EU and that we would lose them if we left is a myth. There is no substantial evidence that we would lose any jobs. On the contrary, if we had a freer and less regulated economy, we would probably create more jobs by trading more easily with the rest of the world. The EU is in long-term structural decline and our non-EU markets are expanding. The UK enjoys a trading surplus with the rest of the world—with which we trade much more effectively—and we have a £70 billion trade deficit with the EU. The rest of the EU would therefore not want a trade war with the UK; it would not be in its interest. The idea that Ireland, or even Germany, would enter a trade war with the UK is absolutely ridiculous. By the Commission’s own admission, EU red tape costs 4% of the EU’s GDP.”
“I totally agree. The irony of this debate is that a lot of people in UKIP are saying things that are similar to what is felt by a lot of people who would like to vote Conservative at the next election. There is a majority in this country, and I think the Prime Minister was right to say that he wants a different relationship—a new relationship with our European partners. This entire debate is conducted on the premise that membership of the single market is indispensable to our national interest, is it not? Those who say we must remain in the EU come what may believe that the single market is indispensable to our national interest, but here are the facts. I have already mentioned how little of our GDP that we export in goods would be subject to tariffs were we not to have a free trade arrangement with the EU—probably around 8.7% of GDP.”
“I am not going to give way. The EU internal market has become an end in itself—it is a means of promoting political integration. We must accept that, in the minds of our European partners, the single market is indivisible from the treaties. Even if the UK were to leave the EU altogether and apply for article 50, the EU would be legally required to negotiate free and fair trade with non-EU countries, so we would continue to have access to EU markets. That different perspective, which voters and large parts of business are beginning to appreciate, is shifting the burden of the debate. Are we doing the right thing in creating such long uncertainty by putting off a referendum until 2017? Should we not have the referendum much sooner to bring the debate to a head? Are we too scared of our own voters to face the truth?”
“In his travels around Europe, has my hon. Friend gained the impression that there is any appetite in the Commission or among our European partners for substantial treaty change that would allow the United Kingdom to have a different relationship with the EU while remaining signed up to the existing treaties?”
“Is not the corollary of what my hon. Friend is saying that if we follow the programme of the Labour party and continue to pursue a policy of closer integration and more burdens on our economy, it will mean more cuts, more borrowing, slower growth and more unemployment than if we sort out this relationship?”
“What evidence is there that the United Kingdom would be unable to negotiate a free trade agreement of its own with the United States if we were not part of the European Union and that we would not be able to negotiate a free trade agreement with the European Union if we were outside it? The treaties say that the EU would have to do that.”
“Will my right hon. Friend cast his mind back to the first G8 summit that he attended as Foreign Secretary? Was anybody forecasting that we would be facing a horrendous conflagration in Syria and the threat of thermonuclear war in North Korea? Does not that underline how unpredictable our current international security situation is and the fact that it is impossible for us to predict that we will not require nuclear weapons for our protection within the next 50 or 60 years?”
“Income taxes paid by the richest 1% of the population increased from 11% to 15% of the total tax take. As she grew older, we regarded Lady T less and less as a former Prime Minister, more and more as a favourite aunt or grandmother. Sometimes it was hard to believe that this small, frail lady had once held the world in the palm of her hand. The whole nation will be for ever in her debt.”
“We should regard some of the more unseemly reactions to her death as a backhanded tribute to her, a reminder of the attitudes she had to overcome in order to achieve what she did, but let the argument about her legacy be based on the facts and not the myths which her opponents would prefer to believe. Spending on health, education, pensions and welfare continually increased under her premiership. The number of people in work increased by 1.8 million. Manufacturing output was significantly higher when she left office than when she was first elected. Wider home ownership and share ownership spread wealth more widely than ever before; social mobility was greatly increased. The incomes of every section of society, including the poorest, increased in real terms.”
“Her premiership was about restoring national self-belief, something few can deny she achieved, and that is what we must now do for ourselves. It has become an axiom in the coverage of reaction to Margaret Thatcher’s death that she was divisive, which ignores the fact that the UK was already bitterly divided. We need to hear about the scars that industrial decline has left in many constituencies represented on the Opposition Benches, but that should not detract from her achievements; nor should she be blamed personally for what was, in many respects, an inevitable transition of economics.”
“I would caution those who try to use her name in support of the EU, as it has become, as though she would ever have put her name to the Lisbon treaty or anything like it. Another myth that this debate helpfully dispels is that she had no sense of humour. When she arrived in Essex in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) for the 1992 election campaign, a junior reporter from the Essex County Standard breathlessly caught up with her hectic pace and asked, in front of 200 other journalists, “Do you agree that the Conservative campaign is lacking in oomph?” Mrs T retorted, with heavy irony, “That’s what I’m here for, dear.” She will always be revered as a woman of principle with iron determination, even by those who disagree with her.”
“What is loss of face compared to the loss of 350,000 jobs? If you think that, you’re a fool. There’s the door!” Not an easy introduction for an aspiring candidate. What we miss from politics today is her certainty, her seriousness, her clarity of principle, her fusion of the practical with her sense of moral purpose. Those who disagreed with her undoubtedly felt that to be arrogance on her part, but she felt she was a guardian of greater truths and principles, which were far more important than her mere self. This, with her formidable intellect, gave her an extraordinary prescience about the world. How right she was about the exchange rate mechanism, and about the Maastricht treaty and monetary union.”
“This was genuine humility, not arrogance. And we have read and heard so much about her acts of personal kindness. It was her passion for the truth that made her such a dangerous adversary in argument—a danger which she harboured long into old age—and she loved a good spat. She met some bright young candidates before the 1992 election—me included— [Interruption.] I beg your pardon. Two now serve as senior Ministers of state. As they tried to justify UK membership of the exchange rate mechanism, she scorned the one who had worked closely in her Government with heavy inflection. “Oh,” she said, “I am so disappointed with you.” She listened to the other, who argued that the exit from the exchange rate mechanism would involve too much loss of face for the Government. She retorted: “Loss of face?”
“The House has already heard much about Margaret Thatcher as a huge political figure—the iron lady who dominated British politics and world politics—but my wife and I grew to know her after she retired from the House of Commons. We came to know someone who was far from the arrogant or heartless figure portrayed by her adversaries. She was someone who must have forced herself to be strong, to hide any self-doubt, to deny herself any weakness, in order to live up to an ideal of herself. She was anything but arrogant. I do not know how many times we saw her reject the adulation that was so often heaped upon her. She felt undeserving of such praise and standing ovations. She would say how she could never have achieved anything on her own, that her Governments were a team effort in which many played their part.”
“May I commend my right hon. Friend’s emphasis on leadership? In Colchester, we have seen periods of good and bad leadership, and good leadership is self-evidently the right answer to hospital management. Can I therefore ask him to lay more emphasis on what constitutes good leadership and trust between good leaders and their employees in the health service right through the system, including from Sir David Nicholson downwards, and not to rely overmuch on regulation, which is no substitute for good leadership?”
“Does my hon. Friend agree that the sheer cost inflicted on smaller businesses trying to bid for public contracts is prohibitive? What are the Government doing to reduce the cost of bidding for public contracts? Unless we reduce the cost, they simply will not bid.”
“My right hon. Friend is saying something that should be blindingly obvious. When a Government borrow some money and spend it, once it is spent it is gone. It does not create economic growth. Once they have spent that money, it might have a little bit of effect in the economy, but then it is over. What we need to generate is what the right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls) used to call endogenous growth, because that is what comes from within the economy itself instead of being stimulated by Government spending.”
“What does my hon. Friend make of the fact that Ireland has a 12% corporation tax rate, although it has had to inflict on itself far more austere economic policies than we have had to inflict on ourselves because it is in the euro? Should we not be emulating Ireland?”
“I commend chart 1.8 on page 21 of the Red Book. At the peak of the economic cycle in 2007, the structural deficit was more than 5%. As soon as the economy went into reverse after the crash, it quickly became apparent that the previous Government had vastly overextended themselves and had vastly increased public expenditure beyond what we could afford, so that public expenditure peaked at over 50% of GDP, the previous Government having inherited public spending at below 40% of GDP. It was that expenditure that was unfunded, even at the peak of the economic cycle, which is why we now face such a dire economic situation. I commend the Chancellor of the Exchequer for taking this as seriously as he has and setting it out to the House so truthfully. I hope that his forecasts will be delivered.”
“It may yet prove beneficial and necessary to accelerate the spending reductions, the reductions in taxation and the supply side measures, and accelerate even further the infrastructure investment that is so necessary to get the economy to grow. If we find ourselves once again set back by economic forecasts that have not been delivered, we will have to begin to ask ourselves not how we just let ourselves off the lead and start spending money that we have not got and borrowing even more money that we cannot afford to borrow, placing the burden on future generations, but how we start taking additional pain now to avoid greater agony in the future and greater agony for our children and our children’s children. I remind the House that it is not just that the Government inherited a very difficult situation.”
“Hitherto, we have been disappointed, and that is because energy costs are so high; it is because of excessive banking regulation pouring out of the EU on to the City of London, which happens to be our biggest export earner and our biggest generator of tax revenue; it is because the banks are not lending because the Government have increased the capital ratios for banks when they should perhaps have been reducing them; it is because quantitative easing might make bank lending cheap for the Government, but it does not necessarily make it easier for the banks to rebuild their balances; and it is because of the burden of high taxation. I commend the Budget for its consistency and determination, but the question is whether the pace of economic reform that my right hon. Friend is introducing is fast enough.”
“The real question at the heart of the Budget was raised not by the Leader of the Opposition but by a number of right hon. and hon. Members, including one or two Members of Her Majesty’s official Opposition, but not from the Front Bench, and that is growth. The real question that hangs over the Budget is whether we believe the growth forecast.”
“I commend the review, and I hope yet that the Government will speed up the decision about airport capacity, which is so vital for the health of London as a global city. My right hon. Friend’s statement also reflected an extraordinary determination to follow through and to continue what he started, and not to be diverted by those who somehow think it would be easier and more effective for the Government to start borrowing more money and spending more money, as though that was a painless way of reviving the economy. It is extraordinary that we have to go back to the lessons that we thought the Labour party had learnt in the 1980s—that we cannot spend our way out of trouble. It has forgotten all the lessons that made it electable under Tony Blair, and I suspect that that makes it unelectable now.”
“The reduction in corporation tax is another step in the right direction; the abolition of employers’ national insurance for small employers is a huge step in the right direction; and the limitation on capital gains tax for business is a very good step in the right direction. I also very much welcome the substantial implementation of the Heseltine review. The Select Committee on Public Administration, which I chair, took evidence from Lord Heseltine, who gave a very good account of many of the things that could and should be done to make the use of public money much more effective away from London, as well as championing things like swifter decisions on infrastructure, such as airport capacity.”
“I rarely remember, if at all, a Chancellor rising to deliver his Budget statement against a background of such dire and low expectations about what he could achieve. I am pleased to reassure my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry), who has just left the Chamber, that I am happy to commend the Chancellor’s Budget statement. He had incredibly little flexibility at his disposal, but the Budget contains a number of really imaginative measures, particularly the supply side reforms that always help to stimulate economic growth. In whatever economy they are tried, such measures prove to be effective.”
“The speech by the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) reminded me of the cartoon in Private Eye called “Great Bores of Today”. He recited a litany of all the clichés that we expect from the Labour party. I would simply say that the Labour party’s determination to oppose the abolition of the extra room subsidy paid by the housing benefit system shows that it is determined to make sure that there should be no reform of the welfare budget whatsoever. It opposes every single measure to try to restrain expenditure on welfare, which takes up over a third of Government spending. [ Interruption. ] I notice, Mr Deputy Speaker, that it is getting rather noisy on the Opposition Benches; I shall try not to provoke them any further.”
“Will my right hon. Friend commend the Prime Minister for setting out the need for a new relationship with our European partners? Is not that need underlined by the fact that, despite vetoing the fiscal union treaty last year, the presidency conclusions contain four new pieces of legislation on economic consolidation that apply to the UK? They include a national fiscal policy making framework, strengthening the surveillance of national fiscal and structural economic policies, an accelerated procedure for dealing with member states with an excessive deficit and a new procedure for monitoring the build-up and correction of macro-economic balances. Why does that apply to us at all, given that we are not going to join the euro?”
“I accept my right hon. Friend’s challenge about openness and transparency in the way the health service reacts outwardly, but that is a means to an end. There is also a lack of honesty and openness between people working in the health service, and the mistrust between levels of management and institutions inhibits the proper flow of information and the ability of people to trust each other in the context of saying what is wrong and putting it right. People in the health service dare not tell their senior management what is wrong.”
“Can the system change dramatically enough unless people are seen to take responsibility for the culture? It is difficult to argue that he has not been individually responsible for the broad culture in the national health service that has led to this pass.”
“It immediately started a storm around our local hospital, the Colchester General, by latching on to one statistic and naming it as one of the hospitals being investigated, even though—I have written to Andrew Dilnot at the UK Statistics Authority and got a reply from him—a single statistic should never be used in such a fashion. In fact, the Colchester General is in the top quartile of its class of hospital, so that was entirely unnecessary. My wife has just had a knee replacement in that hospital. I was completely confident that she would get good nursing care and she indeed got very good nursing care. There is now an uncomfortable atmosphere surrounding this issue. There is an atmosphere of denial, and this relates to Sir David Nicholson. Is he still in denial? Is the system still in denial?”
“There is absolutely no escaping that. I remember the Paddington rail crash. One’s instant reaction was, “Well, the driver went through a red light; it must have been his fault,” but everybody knew that there must have been something much more fundamentally wrong. Something was wrong with rail safety. In aviation, when there is a plane crash, it is very rarely the pilot’s fault. Even if it is down to pilot error, that will be down to pilot training and that will be a system failure. We need to look at this issue in an holistic and sensible way. The reaction of the NHS to the Francis report was immediately to reach for statistics and to start doing things.”
“In the evidence we are receiving about the civil service, we have had powerful testimony from an adviser to our Committee, Professor Andrew Kakabadse of Cranfield university, who rather chillingly points out an obvious truth. Very few people who work in a failing organisation do not know that it is failing. Most people in a failing organisation know that it is failing. What is wrong? The answer is that they do not know how to talk about it. They do not know what to say, who to tell—or, if they try to tell people, it will be bad for them—or what to do. So people often just leave failing organisations, saying, “I can’t do anything about it.” I bet most of those on the board of the hospital trust knew it was going wrong and did not know what to do. There is this idea that this was just an isolated case, but it represents a systemic failure.”
“We want accountability to be about nursing staff on the ward feeling accountable to each other for sharing information, accountable to the patients and welcoming the information they receive from them, and accountable to their managers and holding them accountable for what they do not feel is being done, in an atmosphere of trust and co-operation. What is chilling about the Mid Staffordshire story is the question of what accountability felt like in that hospital at that time? To whom did people feel they were accountable. What did they feel they were accountable for? There must have been almost an atmosphere of “Apocalypse Now” in the hospital, in which nobody knew where to turn.”
“We need to ask ourselves, “What does accountability feel like?” We think we know what accountability feels like, but my goodness, it goes up and down a bit. During the previous Parliament we felt very accountable in some periods, every single one of us. What do we want accountability to feel like in the health service? With the greatest respect to my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Steve Baker), the lawyers must be the last resort. We do not want accountability to be about finger-pointing, blame and holding people to account. Indeed, that is part of the disease that afflicts the health service.”