Welsh Affairs

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 7:51 pm on 22 January 1981.

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Photo of Mr Tristan Garel-Jones Mr Tristan Garel-Jones , Watford 7:51, 22 January 1981

I shall not withdraw them. My right hon. Friend nods to confirm that my statistics are correct. I was merely wishing to emphasise the Opposition's partisan approach. I hope that the Conservative Opposition showed some understanding of the difficult decisions that the Labour Government had to take to close down pits in Wales.

In a speech to the Welsh CBI in Cardiff just before Christmas the Prime Minister said: our third rule, Mr. Chairman, is what I call constructive intervention. I say constructive because I mean stimulating industries which do have a future, rather than shoring up lost causes—helping to create tomorrow's world, rather than to preserve yesterday's.One example is the National Enterprise Board's stake in the new biotechnology company in Cambridge. This will develop products and know-how based on the excellent research in biotechnology which is being carried out there.Another example is the Government's backing for the Inmos microchip project. I wish to concentrate my remarks on an important subject, namely, constructive intervention. I agree with the Prime Minister that that is a good description. Intervention must be not only constructive, but well thought out. We must know why we are intervening, where we are intervening, and how we intend to intervene. I draw the attention of the House to some studies by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on what it calls the long wave theory. The business cycle is thought to move up and down in a relatively regular pattern. The economists at the institute say that overlying that pattern is a long wave which is dragged along by one central technology. The clearest example of that during the last century was the railway system, which was the central thrusting technology that dragged everything else behind it. The development of the steel and coal industries was brought about by the railways.

That group of economists is saying that the most difficult and tense time for any free economy is when it reaches the end of a long wave, enters a deeper recession, and has to transfer almost into a new world. That is a difficult and painful process. It is my contention that Britain—indeed the Western world—is reaching the end of a long wave. There is a duty on the Government to make imaginative and constructive interventions in the economy to help Britain into the new wave of technology.

One example of the non-dogmatic approach of the Conservative Party was the grant of £40,000 to the Wales TUC. It was later given an additional £5,000. the purpose of the grant was for the TUC to study co-operativism and its potential in the Principality. That illustrates that there is virtually nothing to which the Conservative Party is opposed on dogmatic grounds. If it concludes that co-operativism has a future in South Wales. I have no doubt that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and the Government will give it every support.

When the TUC goes to Spain and visits Mondragon, I hope that it will take careful note of the hours of work in that co-operative, the lack of restrictive practices, and the strictness with which time-keeping is adhered to. All those factors are part of the reason for the success of the Mondragon co-operative.

Britain is possibly the only Western industrialised nation that has not built up an adequate and sensible set of mechanisms for that sort of intervention in the market. We have not done so because the party political controversy in the House—the sort of hyperbole that we have heard frm the hon. Member for Newport—is not conducive to a climate in which it is possible for two parties to talk sensibly and arrive at a certain amount of common ground. The Opposition seem to believe that the only way to return to office is by riding on the back of their opponents' failure. They overlook the fact that the ultimate success of this nation, and certainly of the Principality, depends on this Government succeeding. The Labour Party has a stake in ensuring that the Government succeed. I am confident that if the Labour Party were to choose areas of common ground and work with the Government and were to attack them in other areas a great deal of the credit for that success would redound to the Labour Party.

I shall mention only two of our competitors in the Western world. It is naive to think that when great British industries compete abroad for contracts they are competing in a free market. There is no such thing as a free market when GEC bids to build an electrical plant. The United States has a defence budget and a space budget. Their object is to put a man on the moon and to defend the territorial integrity of the United States. But there is a secondary object—to ensure that great American corporations such as IBM and GEC are kept in business. The American Government place orders with those companies which demand that research should be carried out. They fund that research. In West Germany one Ministry is entirely devoted to research and technology and to seeking out those areas in which the private sector, for one reason or another, has either not spied the opportunities or is not able to take them up. It supports and nurtures the private sector while encouraging it to enter those areas.

For a number of social and historic reasons, I regret to say that Britain has not devised the sort of mechanism and common ground that exist in the United States, Germany and France.