The Prime Minister (Mr. John Major): Would the right hon. Gentleman care to give way on the question of the internal market?

Mr. Blair indicated assent.

The Prime Minister: I quote:

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Mr. Blair: I do not think that I have heard such a ridiculous intervention in all the time that I have been here. [Interruption.] The right hon. Gentleman cannot even make up the intervention: he has to read it out. Lord Winston has vigorously attacked the Tories over the internal market. If the Prime Minister intends to quote figures about the national health service, he should quote the figure of £1.5 billion extra spent on bureaucracy because earlier this week the community health councils said that it was an illusion that that had brought the better services that he wants.

If we are to have the Bills that the country wants, why not one that not merely ends that Tory internal market but deals with some of the crime issues, bans the sales of combat knives, halves the time that persistent young offenders take to come to court and sets up in every community a proper, statutory responsibility for crime prevention to make our streets safe? The Prime Minister could introduce a Bill for a statutory minimum wage to tackle the worst abuses of poverty pay. He could introduce a Bill that allows the capital receipts tied up in council accounts to be used to build homes for homeless people.

There should be a Bill that has at its heart the belief that it is intolerable in any decent society that half a million young people have no job, no training and no prospect of a job or training and that we will levy the excess profits of the privatised utilities and start to put those people back to work. There should be a Bill that allows the people of Scotland and Wales the chance to determine their own governance and one that gives London, our capital city, its own government, so as to allow it to invigorate and innovate itself.

A real Queen's Speech would give us many more measures. It would present measures to replace the boom and bust of Tory years with stable growth during which living standards would rise for all our people and in which Britain was equipped for the challenges of the future.

The last hope of the Tories is a massive, collective attack of national amnesia. [Interruption.] If he is so confident about it, let him call the election and let us have it decided. As I say, their last hope is a massive, collective attack of national amnesia so that we forget the 22 tax rises, the VAT on fuel, black Wednesday, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the doubling of crime and of debt, the poll tax, arms for Iraq, cash for questions, Scott, Nolan, the business failures, the negative equity, the job insecurity, the waste, the inefficiency and the incompetence of the most wasteful, inefficient and incompetent Government in living memory.

But people will not forget, because they know that enough is enough with these Tories. I say this to the Prime Minister: in his party conference speech, he claimed that the Prime Minister's job was taken. It was his, he said, and it could not be taken away from him. That is for the British people to decide. I do not take it for granted and nor should he--[Interruption.] Let the British people decide.

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It is not a battle for a job. It is not about who sits in Downing street or who uses Chequers at the weekend. It should be a battle about a vision of this country's future, and this Queen's Speech shows that the Conservative party has no vision for this country's future. That is why the Queen's Speech to which we look forward, the people willing, is next year's Queen's Speech, under a new Labour Government, to build a new Britain.

3.30 pm

The Prime Minister (Mr. John Major): The right hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair) has already generously paid tribute to the hon. Members who have died during the past year. We shall all miss David Lightbown and Terry Patchett. Perhaps on behalf of everyone in the House, I can not only say that, but thank them for their long service, both for their constituents and for their country, in this place.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler) and my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Field) on their excellent speeches proposing and seconding the Loyal Address. My right hon. Friend was the Secretary of State when I first joined the old Department of Health and Social Security. I learned speedily that he had both a generous disposition and a very precise mind. Over early morning interviews, often at short notice, on obscure but controversial social security matters, he was always especially generous and insisted that I took all of them. He was Secretary of State for six years before the sheer weight of work in that combined Department led to health and social security, rightly, becoming separate Departments.

More recently, my right hon. Friend joined me throughout the last general election campaign. His role was absolutely invaluable, but it did have one drawback: whenever we were together, people threw eggs at him. I had no idea how controversial he was. When he shouted, "Duck," I thought that it was a warning, but it was not--it was the type of egg. As I told the House, he had a very precise mind.

My right hon. Friend reminded us that he pioneered the practice of leaving to spend more time with his family. After the general election, I invited him to become chairman of the Conservative party. To avoid any dispute, I should like to make it clear that that was expressly not at the request of his family. He is a distinguished journalist and we cannot say that of many. These days, he is chairman of a newspaper group and he will know the old saying: "Never argue with a man who buys his ink by the gallon." I do not, and I congratulate him on his speech.

My hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight also spoke extremely well. I was delighted--in some ways relieved--to see him in his place, as he has a poor reputation for time-keeping and tends to arrive for any function at the last moment. On one occasion, I am told, he left to join his wife on the Isle of Wight ferry as it left the dock. Breaking into a sprint, he leapt dramatically over open water and landed on the moving deck. As he did so, he turned around to see his wife on the quay. As he was late, she had got off. Undaunted, he leapt back ashore with the fastest recorded U-turn in political history.

Apart from his political career, my hon. Friend once owned a large share in one of Britain's largest funeral director companies. It is often said of politicians that they will always let you down in the end. In my hon. Friend's

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There were two light-hearted speeches to begin, and rather a brazen speech to follow. The leader of the Labour party sought to draw Britain's ills forward with sweeping generalisations about the state of our society.

Mr. Keith Mans (Wyre): Will my right hon. Friend give way?

The Prime Minister: Of course, but a little later.

Of course I agree with the right hon. Member for Sedgefield that there are many problems to be solved. Some of them, concerned with education and crime, are dealt with specifically in this legislative programme. However, we must examine reality, not what the right hon. Gentleman had to say.

With more people finding work, regional differences in unemployment are declining. Strikes are at their lowest levels since records began. More young people than ever before are gaining qualifications in full-time education and training. More people than ever before own their homes and have a share in a capital-owning democracy. There is new hope and investment in inner cities. Charitable giving is the largest we have seen at any stage in our history. Voluntary work is at record levels, with more than half the population engaged in it. We have created one of the most mobile societies in Europe, giving people the opportunity to better themselves through their own efforts.

There is far more that is good in our society than is bad. We should be glad of that, not take every opportunity to run our society down--as the right hon. Gentleman does. Of course we face challenges, but our job as politicians is to find practical solutions, often to complex problems. To over-simplify matters, as the right hon. Gentleman did, is to deceive and not to engage with the real problems with which politicians have to deal.

Any politician should be cautious about cloaking himself in righteousness. I do not know how the right hon. Gentleman can disclaim, as he has just done, any responsibility by the Labour party for faults in this society when his Labour party has, over the years, consistently championed every fashionable, politically correct cause that has undermined our traditional way of life, and has opposed every measure that we have taken to correct the balance.

It was Labour that banned competitive sport in schools. It was Labour that undermined traditional approaches and sponsored every anti-establishment pressure group that it could possibly find. It was Labour that opposed measures to restore standards in schools through tests and league tables. It was Labour that opposed the freedom of grant-maintained schools and has opposed every measure that we put forward to tackle crime. Labour has also opposed common-sense measures to deal with benefit fraud. I do not think that I am inclined to accept sanctimonious lectures from the Leader of the Opposition.

There was much that the Labour leader did not get around to mentioning. The right hon. Gentleman did not mention the longest run of low inflation for a generation or that unemployment is at a five-and-a-half-year low. He did not mention that mortgages are at their lowest for 30 years. The right hon. Gentleman was not only selective

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When the Leader of the Opposition fleshes out his policies with detail, we might listen with some interest to the right hon. Gentleman's critique of our detailed policies.