Orders of the Day — Labour Party (Election Pledges)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 29 July 1965.

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Photo of Mr Patrick McNair-Wilson Mr Patrick McNair-Wilson , Lewisham West 12:00, 29 July 1965

The hon. Member will perhaps rue making that remark.

I say that the leader of the Government is a bad politician. He must know that in a small island with a population of 56 million, half of whom would starve to death if goods were not brought in from outside, the financial balance in the economy is bound to be extremely delicate. He must realise that the confidence of the people abroad is absolutely essential if one is to make the economy of this country operate at all, let alone be prepared to stand the strain of enormous social programmes, such as were outlined in the election campaign.

The Prime Minister must know of this, or else be a had politician. Why, if this is so, does he, having been elected to office, start upon a deliberate campaign to denigrate the position of Britain in the world? We saw, soon after the Government was elected, a document issued by them, on the economic situation as they found it. This document is available to Members in the Vote Office. It certainly points to problems which an economy such as ours is always likely to be faced with—the difficult problems of import-export balance of payments. It is because we live on an island that such problems exist.

In this document, summing up the economic situation as the Labour Government found it, there is the sentence: We reject the stop-go policy. Yet since the Government has been in power we have had nothing except stop.