Mr Paul Flynn (Newport West)

I represent, with great pride, the constituency of Newport, West. Newport, West is a constituency that was formed in 1983 and its first Member was Mr. Mark Robinson. Mr. Robinson was a diligent, hard-working Member whose talents were swiftly recognised by the Conservative party and he won promotion as a junior Minister at the Welsh Office. Mr. Robinson's work within the constituency won him the respect and affection of its people.

The decision of the people of Newport, West to reject Mr. Robinson was in no way a reflection on his gifts, energies or work. The right hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Raison) referred to "a knock-out" on certain issues, but in Newport, West the Conservative party was the victim of a walkover. In local government elections, the people of Newport, West regularly gave the Labour party 60 per cent. of the vote for council members. In the last election, there was a swing of nearly 11 per cent. to Labour. That swing represented a judgment on the work of the local authority.

Today and in the previous debates we have heard an ugly caricature of the work of Labour local authorities — indeed, all local authorities. The right hon. Member for Aylesbury said with some truth that there will be great resentment of the gratuitous insults contained in the Government's intentions. Those intentions will be deeply resented by local authorities of all political colours. I believe that the attempts to suppress and frustrate the work of good, intelligent local authorities will be deeply resented and all parties will revolt against those attempts.

History contains some dire warnings about Governments who have subjected themselves to the delusion that absolute power means they have an absolute monopoly of wisdom, intelligence and judgment. I commend hon. Members to read once again Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". They will discover what happened when Rome decided to draw the power to the centre. The effects of that attempt are found in the volumes devoted to the fall of the Roman empire.

The words "sterile" and "negative" have been used to characterise the work of the Labour local authorities. However, I can talk with great pride of the work of Newport borough council. In the interests of brevity I shall confine myself to one area of its work — housing. Of course, that council cannot compete with the rate freeze suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Dr. Cunningham), but rates have been frozen for three years within the borough. The borough's policy on housing has been one of high achievement, sensitive management, inspired innovation and a genuine non-doctrinaire quest for continued improvement.

It may come as a surprise to hon. Members on both sides of the House to learn that an authority that has been Labour for almost every one of the past 50 years has, for nearly 20 years, been selling council houses. Its reasons for doing so are not the Government's reasons. It is not done as an act of social engineering, a self-motivated act designed to win people to its side. It has always been part of the history of the Socialist movement—going back on the continent to the Swedish Socialists, and in this country to the Rochdale pioneers and the early guild Socialists —that home ownership is the cornerstone of Socialism. We have always considered it right for a person to own his home; what we object to is the belief that it is right to own someone else's home.

The reason that we in Newport have sold council houses for all this time is that we have seen the dilemma of housing in its long-term aspect. Too often, it is forgotten, or seen as a temporary, short-term problem. But when we decide on our answers to housing problems, we are looking for solutions that will not merely last for the life of a Parliament or a council, but will stand firm and good for 60 or even 100 years. The decision to sell council houses in Newport was made, and the sales are being continued, to create stable, mixed communities, and because, in these inflationary times, it is not property but rent that is theft.

We have heard the words "sterile" and "negative". Let us look at the achievements in Newport. Every pre-war dwelling in the town has been modernised; every council house has been equipped with central heating; 20 per cent. of stock has been sold to its sitting tenants, and it is all still occupied by the same tenants. There are highly successful and innovative share ownership schemes to enable the very young to get on to the ladder of home ownership, and stay-put schemes to help the elderly to remain in their communities. All those schemes are up and running. There are more housing action areas in Newport than anywhere else in Wales, and there are brilliantly successful pioneering schemes for the elderly and the disabled. A continuous, successful and unique programme of decentralising power to the estates and the tenants has been introduced.

I could proceed with a long litany of such achievements, but it is a measure of what has happened that those great achievements have been made in the teeth of remorseless antagonism and hostility from the Welsh Office. There has been a 95 per cent. cut in real terms in new money for funding housing since 1979. Apprenticeships have virtually disappeared, and have been replaced by the candy-floss MSC jobs, leading to enormous problems in obtaining skilled building workers. Repeated bureaucratic and frustrating delays by the Welsh Office have left the borough constantly under-funded and under-resourced. To make matters worse, the Government have locked away the money that we legitimately obtained—nearly nearly £28 million — and thrown away the key. We cannot touch it. We cannot use it to create jobs and better housing.

Finally, let me quote the words of a great Member of Parliament for the county of Gwent — Aneurin Bevan—when he was Minister of Housing. He said that his finest ideal—what he hoped above all else to create in the new estates that were being built in the late 1940s—was the reproduction of what he described as the most lovely feature of English and Welsh village life in which the farmworker, the lawyer, the blacksmith and the doctor lived side by side in the same street. He wanted to create the rich tapestry of a mixed community. That is a high ideal that we have rarely achieved.

What do we see in Thatcher's Britain today? Do we see the picture of that tapestry, a balanced picture of harmony and order, or do we see something else? What we see is not a tapestry, but an ugly jigsaw broken by lines of division and injustice. We are seeing the creation of ghettos. On one side are those whose estates are shunned: they are places of fear, crime and neglect. The other, almost equally worrying, piece of the jigsaw shows the privileged estates behind barricades with security fences and guards in front of them.

That is our choice today. Do we take the line—this is what we will vote on tonight—that we will continue to try to create in the long term that happy rich tapestry of a mixed community, or do we carry on as we are and produce again the Thatcherite confusion of our jigsaw estates and our jigsaw society of injustice and unfairness?

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