Welsh Affairs

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 9:44 pm on 27 February 1992.

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Photo of Mr Wyn Roberts Mr Wyn Roberts , Conwy 9:44, 27 February 1992

I must tell the House of the sort of letter that I think that the hon. Gentleman might write. It would say: Dear Auntie Clare,We've got this awful election coming up and if we win, which I very much doubt, I could become Secretary of State for Wales. I don't really want the beastly job and all the hard work that goes with it, so I am planning to palm off as much as I can to an Assembly in Cardiff so that they can take the blame for anything that goes wrong. What do you think? The reply would say: Don't worry, it will never happen. During the debate we have heard remarkably little about Labour party policies, even the finger-in-the-wind policies referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd, North-West (Sir A. Meyer). We heard nothing of its education policies in our debate in the Welsh Grand Committee. It was left to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I to refer to the policy document. Is the Labour party ashamed of its policies? Other people are ashamed of them, as I mentioned in the Welsh Grand Committee. The two American experts commissioned by The Sunday Times to investigate our education system said of the Labour party's policies: The Labour Party is a lost cause when it comes to education reform … The Labour Party is trapped by its past, a defender of the status quo, and a purveyor of old, hopelessly out-moded ideas. Of the Labour party's proposal for an educational standards commission the experts said: this hardly deserves to be called a reform. It is more of the same from a party that appears incapable, politically and ideologically, of offering anything different. We have heard nothing of the Labour party's destructive, bureaucratic NHS reforms. It plans to sweep away the NHS trusts and general practitioner fund holders. Is it ashamed of those reforms? Others are, including The Times, which wrote: The last thing the NHS wants is another upheaval to take it back to the old days. The news that the Labour party means to abandon the recent reform of the NHS should it ever come to power is immensely depressing. Reform was needed. The Tory reforms are in the right direction and are gaining ever wider acceptance within the NHS.

We have heard nothing of the Labour party's alternative policies for dealing with the recession. Labour has failed miserably to pin the blame for the recession on the Government. The recession is worldwide and everybody knows it. People know that the companies for which they work, such as Hotpoint and Hoover, are facing a lack of customer demand that extends far beyond our shores, to our export markets in Europe and the United States.

Labour has failed to grasp that taking money out of people's pockets through increased taxation and national insurance is a sure-fire way of worsening and prolonging the recession. Every worker in manufacturing industry knows that we need to increase demand for products.

The Labour party has failed to grasp that the key to recovery is competitiveness. Its political somersaults on major issues will go down in history as the biggest volte face of all time. Labour Members will be known as the most desperate political trimmers of this century and the most dangerous since Sweeney Todd. All the chopping and changing of views, policies and principles and all their inconsistency have come about because they have seen their political credo discredited. Socialism has failed worldwide.

Undaunted by that reversal, Labour Members have changed their political colours like the chameleons that they are. They claim to be able to run a capitalist system better than those who believe in it. But even in opposition Labour Members are beginning to find out that their conversion is incomplete. They keep reverting to socialist ideas and their rose is returning to the briar that it was. The suckers of socialism are sprouting everywhere, hence their £37 billion of spending commitments, which make them so antagonistic to the idea of tax cuts to restore consumer demand and lead us out of the recession.

The electorate will not be deceived. They will not be made into socialist suckers. The Labour party will be rejected as having no real remedies to deal with the recession or, indeed, any of our problems.