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8.42 pm
Mr. David Amess (Southend, West): I rise to address the House for the first time as the newly elected Member of Parliament for Southend, West. I congratulate you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, on your election--
Mr. Home Robertson: What about Basildon?
Mr. Amess: I will come to that in a moment, but before so doing I wish to pay tribute to the two maiden speeches that I have heard this evening.
Mr. Deputy Speaker, you and I plus one other colleague were elected to this House some 14 years ago. There was a large Conservative majority at the time. I remember only too well the occasion of my maiden speech. There was a packed House. The debate was on the rate capping Bill. I followed my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Sir E. Heath). I was given advice on how to make my maiden speech by the former Prime Minister.
Whoever gave the hon. Members for Milton Keynes, North-East (Mr. White) and for Corby (Mr. Hope) advice on how to make their maiden speeches, they were both splendid. We welcome the tribute paid by the hon. Member for Milton Keynes, North-East to our former colleague Peter Butler. Throughout the campaign, the hon. Gentleman certainly had a good grasp of local issues. I congratulate him on his speech.
The hon. Member for Corby made a fluent and forthright speech. I will observe the conventions on this occasion, but I am afraid to say that I did not exactly agree with his analysis of the political situation. It is clear that the hon. Gentleman will bring great fluency to future debates in the House. He feels things passionately, and I am very much in favour of conviction politicians. He certainly made an excellent maiden speech and I wish him well in the future. He also praised our former hon. Friend, whom he defeated.
The hon. Member for East Lothian (Mr. Home Robertson) mentioned Basildon. Let me put it on record that I am the first and last Member of Parliament for Basildon. On three occasions I was proud to be returned to serve my constituency of Basildon, and I did so for 14 years. On each occasion, my vote increased and the percentage of my vote increased. My former constituency is now represented by two Members of Parliament--one Conservative and one Labour. I wish those two Members of Parliament well in serving their constituents.
We still have many friends in Basildon, and I intend to keep my links with it--it is where our five children were born. I shall watch carefully future comments in the House about my former constituents.
It was with great humility that, some two years ago, I was chosen as the candidate for Southend, West. The constituency had been represented for four decades by Lord Channon. For more than 100 years, the constituency was represented by the Guinness family and the Iveagh family. It was well served by a number of Members of Parliament. My wife was born in the area and comes from the area. Without wishing to copy anything that the Labour party has to say, for my wife it is very much an occasion for her coming home.
The constituency is made up of seven wards--Bellfairs, Blenheim, Chalkwell, Eastwood, Lea, Prittlewell and Westborough. The issues in Southend, West are somewhat different from those that I came across in my former constituency, which was a new town. Southend, West has a coast. There are fishing issues. I pledged on election night to campaign immediately on four issues. On Friday, I shall detain the House on the first: my pledge to save Leigh fire station and ensure that Essex fire protection service is properly funded--something that the Labour and Liberal coalition on Essex county council has never done.
Secondly, houses in multiple occupation have made an unfortunate impact in Southend, West. I intend to challenge the local authority to ensure that the excellent legislation of the former Government is followed and that the increasing proliferation of HMOs stops in Southend, West. The third of my four pledges is to do everything I possibly can to attract investment into the town. It is through new investment and increasing job opportunities that we can offer real hope, especially to young people, in Southend, West.
My fourth pledge is to work with sensible women and men to establish Southend as the premier seaside resort in the country. One or two other hon. Members may challenge that, but that is my pledge.
Before I get on to the Queen's Speech, I wish to share with the House one or two thoughts about the general election campaign nationally and locally. Nationally, it was a rotten general election campaign. It was not a campaign with which any Member returned to this House could be pleased. The issues were not debated, they were fudged. We wasted the first two weeks arguing about particular matters. In the rest of the campaign, we did not get down to the nitty-gritty of what the general election campaign should be about. Never mind what the Government may say about the Conservative party; that general election campaign did the House no credit whatever.
There is a huge Government majority, and if we want this place to be serious again, the attendance tonight is somewhat disappointing. Although we have only 164 seats, there are Conservatives here, and also an Ulster Unionist colleague, the hon. Member for Belfast, South (Rev. Martin Smyth). I had hoped to see more Labour Members in the Chamber on day one. [Interruption.] I am sorry if hon. Members shake their heads at that. This is the place where we were elected to serve, and I think that the debate should be taken back into the Chamber.
The general election campaign was rotten. Now I shall say something about the campaign locally. Personally, I have been to hell and back. I did not much like hell, and I am glad to be back here. In Basildon, it was the Labour party that I fought, and I have no time for the Labour party; but in Southend, West I fought mainly the Liberal party.
The Liberals are not here this evening, in spite of having doubled their numbers. Never have I had such a wicked and poisonous personal campaign directed at me. The Liberal candidate was a woman, and she and her henchmen were obsessed with me as an individual. Every day, the Liberals printed rubbish about me, including photographs. They did not discuss the issues at all; all their material was about me as the candidate for Southend, West. It was a poisonous, wicked campaign, frightening people with the suggestion that we wanted to stop their pensions. There were lies morning, noon and night.
Then came the count. In my former constituency we used to declare in just over an hour, but in Southend, West we declared at about 6am, having had a bloody campaign. The returning officer said, "Look, you have won, but there is a discrepancy of 120 between the number of counterfoils and the number of ballot papers. Are you prepared to see your vote reduced by 120?"
My wife was almost at boiling point by then, so I said, "You are asking me to behave like a gentleman, mister returning officer, aren't you? You want all the staff to go home?" I then shook the returning officer's hand and reluctantly agreed to his suggestion, but within a few moments the Liberals were pawing all over our votes and saying that they wanted to go through them.
The Liberal campaign was a disgrace--and what angered me was the hypocrisy of the leader of the Liberal party. Nationally, he talked about Punch and Judy shows and said, "Oh, we don't want this battle between the Labour and Conservative parties; we're above all that," but locally the Liberal campaign was absolute dirt.
There was no integrity in the local campaign, and I hope that we in this House will not let the Liberal party get away with that sanctimonious platform any more. It is no good their saying on the national platform that they are above party politics if at local level they are the experts in dirt.
I did not especially enjoy the Gracious Speech. I could not find anything in it that I could support. I became a Member of Parliament for the first time on the same day as the Prime Minister and the leader of the Liberal party, and although there are many people who do not agree with anything that I say, at least I still hold the same views and values as I did 14 years ago.
When we listen to the leaders of the other two parties, we realise that they have changed their views on everything--not out of conviction, but because they used to lose elections. When we listen to the Gracious Speech, we realise what a disgrace that is, and I have underlined several quotations from it.
The first is:
The next sentence is:
I was attacked by the Labour and Liberal parties for sending my eldest child to the nearest non- grant-maintained non-selective school--but apparently it is all right for the Prime Minister to have his own private agenda. Conservatives have no intention of letting the Government get away with the humbug that we have heard today about education.
The next part of the Gracious Speech reads:
The next line is:
Then there is the disgraceful matter of the Bank of England. I do not believe that the people who drafted the Labour manifesto had not already worked out that they intended immediately to give power to the Governor of the Bank of England. Why was that not in the manifesto? We heard weasel words from the Prime Minister about that today. Labour jolly well did not tell people because that would have been a tangible issue, which Conservatives would certainly have attacked.
Next we are told:
Labour has always regarded profit as a dirty word. The right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) made light of the word socialism, but I assume that everything has been thrown out now.
Another paragraph tells us:
The Queen's Speech continues:
"My Government intend to govern for the benefit of the whole nation."
Conservatives will call the Government to account, and I hope that they will be true to that statement. In what I have heard today, there is little evidence that they will govern for the benefit of the whole nation.
"The education of young people will be my Government's first priority."
I applaud that, but where are the rotten educators? They are all in Labour-run councils. Until the local elections, we ran only Buckinghamshire; it was our only county council. We are talking about Labour councils. If the Prime Minister now intends to criticise his Labour councils, that is wonderful.
"The central economic objectives of my Government are high and stable levels of economic growth and employment, to be achieved by ensuring opportunity for all."
I am aghast. There is Labour, or new Labour, talking about opportunity for all. I must ask my hon. Friends: was that not the theme of the Conservative party manifesto and of our party conference? Yet now it is included in the Gracious Speech. I am flabbergasted.
"The essential platform for achieving these objectives is economic stability."
When we obtained power in 1979, this country was a disaster. The economy was on the floor. Now, Labour is coming in with a healthy economy. The Labour Government have been given every opportunity; even unemployment is falling.
"A new partnership with business will be at the heart of my Government's plans to build a modern and dynamic economy to improve the competitiveness of British industry."
That is new language for the Labour party. It has always hated competition, and has had more to do with socialism and manipulating things. It is extraordinary for Labour suddenly to start talking about competitiveness.
"A Bill will be introduced to ensure that as many people as possible have access to the benefits of the National Lottery including for health and education projects."
It was the Conservative party that introduced the national lottery, and a hard core of Labour Members with interests in Liverpool and connections with the pools promoters
were against it. The national lottery has been a huge success. However, unless everything in the Treasury has changed, its rules will have to be altered before the Government can introduce specific funding for education and the health service. I hope that those details will appear in the Red Book when the Budget is delivered next month.
"Measures will be introduced to enable capital receipts from the sale of council houses to be invested in housebuilding and renovation as part of my Government's determination to deal with homelessness and unemployment."
If the Conservative party had not sold council and corporation houses, there would have been no capital receipts in the first place. It was always our premise that capital receipts could be sold if local authorities did not have any debts. Are the new Labour Government saying that they will ignore all local authority debt?
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