Orders of the Day — North-West Region

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 6:33 pm on 15 June 1981.

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Photo of Mr Barry Porter Mr Barry Porter , Bebington and Ellesmere Port 6:33, 15 June 1981

If that were likely to continue in the long term, the hon. Gentleman would be correct. It would be much better then to pay people to do something rather than nothing. But if it means, in the short term, that some people will be unemployed and the result of that is to defeat inflation, or assist in its defeat, his argument falls.

Over the years we have also been indulging in the cruel pretence that jobs exist in various industries when clearly they have not existed. The result of that cruel pretence has been to make those uncompetitive industries even more uncompetitive, and to make even greater unemployment in those industries inevitable in the long run. We have done it with steel. We did it with shipbuilding, and to some extent with ship repairing. We did it with the docks in Liverpool, as the hon. Member for Liverpool, Kirkdale (Mr. Dunn) knows only too well.

By trying to be pleasant and humane and by using lots of other people's money, we have made the problem infinitely worse in financial and human terms. If we cared to address our minds to it, we all knew that this nonsense had to come to an end, but not many of us—I include myself—were prepared to face the unpalatable truth, which is that genuine prosperity would involve a period when a rise in living standards had to halt and marginally to decline while we sorted ourselves out.

That is what the past two years have been all about. That is why Opposition Members have been reeling off their statistics today. It is politically wonderful for them. It gives them something with which to attack the Government. But things need not have happened as they have if we had had some realism from the previous Administration. If that Administration had dealt with the steel industry and with the docks in Liverpool as they should have been dealt with, all this need not have happened in the way that it has. The task is harder now than it has ever been.

The alternative strategy of deficit financing, which is what is being offered, by borrowing and printing, is a further cruel deception. The bill for the borrowing must be paid in the end. It can be paid for only by increased production and productivity. From that alone comes greater national wealth. That does not and cannot come basically from Government expenditure. There is no such thing as a free meal. I think that the people of the North-West understand that only too well.

I offer this thought to the electors of Warrington, if they care to heed it. So far as I understand his party's economic policy—although I gather that we are not supposed to understand what it is—the elegant gentleman from Brussels is offering them a rehash of those economic policies that have brought us to the edge of disaster. Yet that policy is presented to those hard-headed, commonsense people in Warrington as though it were something new.