Mr Alan Simpson (Nottingham South)

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me as the first person to make a maiden speech in this afternoon's debate on the Queen's Speech.

Let me begin by paying several tributes. First, I pay tribute to my immediate predecessor in Nottingham, South. One would be hard pressed to find two people further apart politically, but Members will undoubtedly remember my predecessor as a loyal and faithful servant of the House. What Members may not know is that he was a distinguished rowing referee; often to be seen strutting the banks of the River Trent during competitive events. Those qualities probably made him much better qualified than me to understand a Government who were often perceived by the general public as going backwards, at great speed, and with their eyes closed.

My second tribute is to my city of Nottingham. It has been my home for some 25 years since I first arrived there as a bright-eyed student. It is a great and kind city. It has a long-held reputation, which is well deserved, as the Queen of the Midlands. Last year it was also voted the place in which the most people around Britain would like to live. This year the people of Nottingham confirmed the good judgment of the rest of the country when they voted to give the city a facelift. In a fit of great electoral enthusiasm and sound common sense, Labour swept the board in Nottingham in the general election. We are now in the proud position that at every level of government, be it district council, county council, Parliament or the European Parliament, Nottingham is well and truly a Labour city. We were only somewhat perplexed to know what was happening in the rest of the country on 9 April.

But Nottingham has its own problems, and it is these problems which force me to speak in opposition to the Queen's Speech. When I examine the measures set out in the Government's programme, I find that they are at best irrelevant and at worst cruelly indifferent to the challenges facing my city and this society. I have served as a county councillor in Nottinghamshire since 1985. I know how deeply, long-term and rising unemployment scars the life of entire communities in my city. Yet there was no mention of unemployment in the Government's programme.

This year, the county council has had to revise the graph that it uses to chart the growth of unemployment because the figures have spilled over the top of the original axis. How tragic and ironic it is that that has coincided with the issue appearing to drop off the bottom of the Government's agenda.

Nottingham has also been riven by the Government's policies on homelessness and bankruptcies. We now have record levels of both in our city. I have to tell this House that not a single family in Nottingham has been saved from eviction by the Government's much-vaunted mortgage rescue scheme. Not a single property has the city council been allowed to buy or buy-back to avert a repossession. The city council has been forced by the Government's dogma to sit on capital receipts of more than £50 million, unable to buy properties or buy back properties to avert repossessions, whilst the repossessed and dispossessed have had to sit out on their belongings.

Unfortunately, the Government's package of proposals offers as little to the homeless in Nottingham as it offers to the jobless. The city has also suffered as much as anywhere from the Government's gimmicks and games-show approach to education funding and reform.

I am a governor of an inner city comprehensive school —a school which I am proud that my children attend—but I have had to watch in sadness as the Government have lavished about £10 million on the white elephant of a city technology college that it will not even allow Her Majesty's inspectorate to issue reports on. Consider what that money could have been used for. Had we been able to share out the money, we would have been able to put it towards huge increases in the quality of education for more than 16,000 secondary pupils in the city of Nottingham rather than the 250 pupils at the city technology college. Had we used the money in a different way, we could have provided a nursery place for every child of three or four years of age in Nottinghamshire. That is the opportunity lost through the games-show approach that the Government have adopted towards education—one special school gets £10 million to spend, and the other 543 schools in the county are allocated £5 million between them.

The question is whether the Government's policies offer a future for all the children in Nottinghamshire or whether they are simply about privileges for a select few.

Although it may be a strange thing to say at this time in the life of a Parliament, I must tell the Government that time is not on their side. Another agenda is being shaped outside this House. It is an agenda that, sooner rather than later, the Government will have to face. Young people I know and with whom I spoke on the streets of Nottingham in the lead-up to the election have a different set of priorities which they wish us to face. They want answers from the House about tackling the worst famine in the history of Africa. They want to know our response to the huge increase in civil and regional conflicts, which are spreading around the globe, where the dictionary definition of a ceasefire has already been rewritten merely as the time it takes to reload or the time it takes to sell replacement arms.

I have to tell those young people, and young people in the Chamber today, that they will find no answers to those questions in the bunker mentality of the Government's approach to aid or arms control, or in the pernicious return of the Asylum Bill. There will be no future for my children or for anyone else's in a society riven by the extremes of wealth and poverty. In the Government's programme they will find only the policies of an Administration that closes its doors and turns its back on those increasingly trapped in fear, famine and civil war.

Those young people also ask how we may halt the destruction of the planet—so that they may inherit a future rather than a funeral. They will find no reference whatsoever to this in the Government's programme. That enormous challenge is being ducked.

People of all ages are asking what plans we have to reclaim the links with that generation of Thatcher's children who have become lost—those who were told to fend for themselves and that they were not worth decent training. As in the past, the Government's response is one of lamentable silence.

If there are lessons to be learnt from the tragic events of the Los Angeles riots, surely one lesson must be this: that the self-indulgence and complacency of the rich in Beverly Hills was as much a part of the riots as the looting and shooting amongst the poor. I see no future for this country if we ignore the lessons of those riots. I see no future for our children if we consign them to a society riven by the shabby prejudices of race, gender, age or religion.

When I rise in the House to tackle such questions, I shall seek to continue to press the Government on the issues that are already being shaped by a generation outside who will lose patience with the House if we do not address their priorities. I shall seek to do so with a degree of humour, and with courtesy, but reinforced by the words of advice from the late President Truman, who said: Never give them hell—just tell them the truth and they think it's hell. The lives and livelihoods of my constituents in Nottingham, South are of such importance that anything less than that commitment would be quite remiss of me. I pledge that commitment to the House now and to my constituents throughout my period in this House.

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