Orders of the Day — Rolls-Royce

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 15 May 1973.

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Photo of Mrs Judith Hart Mrs Judith Hart , Lanark 12:00, 15 May 1973

Perhaps I could put it in much more simple terms. Where someone has acquired shares in a denationalised company—denationalised because it was held by the Tory Government to be a profitable part of the public sector— we do not regard it as right that a profit should be made out of that acquisition. Circumstances will vary and I do not pretend that I can spell out the precise formula for each different circumstance, whether for Thomas Cook or whatever else it might be. I say only that our intention is clear. We do not regard it as right that profit should be made out of a Tory policy of hiving off, and we shall make sure that a profit is not made out of it.

We are advancing an argument which goes back to pre-war days. It certainly goes back to the days when the first postwar Labour Government was bringing the basic industries of the country into public ownership—bringing them into public ownership because, unless they were publicly-owned and unless public investment went into them, the whole of the national economy would not survive. The mines had been neglected, as had the railways, and only with the injection of public money would it have been possible for the nation to survive that post-war period.

Time and the argument have moved on. If the Conservatives believe that they can conduct any longer in any meaningful way an argument about private versus public ownership without reference to national objectives, they are wildly out of touch with the way the nation is thinking. People are much more concerned today about how to get done the things they want to see Governments doing. If Governments show by the results of their policies that they are failing to get done what the nation wants to see done, the nation will be ready— and I believe it is ready—to look at the alternative ways of approaching the task, giving the Government a direct instrument of planning, something that will not be circumvented all the time by City boardrooms, giving the Government, on behalf of the people, a way to direct and control the economy in the national interest that will not be frustrated all the time by the inevitability of the private company, perfectly correctly from its own point of view, regarding the interest of its own shareholders as more important than the interests of the nation.

It is in this area that we shall now be debating this issue. I think that the country is ready to look with a clear mind at this idea. I have no doubt that, as it does so, it will recognise that what we are saying is the relevant thing to be said in terms of national needs. What the Conservative Party says in terms of Selsdon Park or the somersaults it has done afterwards are becoming increasingly irrelevant by comparison with the antics that my right hon. Friend referred to. These antics are becoming more exciting than the murders and sex stories in the papers. We have the latest antics in the courts, over Lonrho, and the latest antics in the boardrooms, like Slater-Walker. They are becoming fascinating to the public, who are beginning to have a much clearer insight into what matters in the City boardroom and what does not matter. They are beginning to see that the interests of the nation are not the interests that matter in City boardrooms.

The public must therefore be ready for the debate to enter a new phase, part of which is precisely the area raised by my right hon. Friend in the motion—the need to be sure that we do not consider the question of which parts of industry become publicly-owned and which parts remain privately-owned in terms of the interests of shareholders but that we determine these matters in the interests of the nation.