John Redwood, speaking on the first day of the Queen’s speech debate, called on the government to grant a referendum on the EU Constitution and to offer justice to England within the Union.

He welcomed the stated government aim, to return power to Parliament and people, but pointed out this Queen’s Speech did the opposite. It will transfer substantial power to the EU and to various new quangoes, denying us the referendum Labour MPs promised electors before the last election.

He summed up his critique of the Queen’s speech by saying:

"I will vote against the Queen’s Speech because I see nothing in it to solve the main problems facing the country. I will vote against it because it does not strengthen our democracy; it undermines it further. I will vote against it because it does not tackle the lack of trust in politics; it accentuates it by not offering us a referendum or sorting out the English problem. I will vote against it because I do not think it contains solutions to the problems in our large public services, and because I do not believe it truly meets the aspirations of the British people"

ENDS

<strong>The full speech, taken from Hansard, is below.</strong>
<strong>
Mr. John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con):</strong> It is a great pity that on today of all days we have lost a sense of occasion. That may be because it is the first time that the Queen’s Speech was delivered by the Prime Minister several weeks before Her Majesty gave the speech. It may be because at 11.19 this morning I? and, I think, all right hon. and hon. Members? received a definitive text of the Queen’s Speech from a news service, some 12 minutes before Her Majesty started to read it to the Members of the Lords and Commons assembled in the other place. It also reflects the fact that over the past two or three days, Ministers of the Crown have entered into an active debate in the media and in the pages of the newspapers on much of the contents of the Queen’s Speech. As a result, right hon. and hon. Members know that to participate today, on the first day of the Queen’s Speech debate, is to participate at the end of a rather long debate in the media, conducted while Parliament was not in Session by Ministers, commentators and others. Other right hon. and hon. Members have found it difficult to get into that debate. I hope that the authorities and the Government will reflect on that for the future.

If the Government are serious? and I hope that they are? about wanting to make Parliament the fulcrum of our national political life and the centrepiece of our debate, surely the Chamber is the place where the first clash of argument should take place over the nature of the Queen’s Speech, and whether it is wide-ranging enough or deep and profound enough. If that were the case, more Labour Back Benchers would wish to stay for the rest of the debate. For the Hansard record, only two Labour Back Benchers spoke in the debate after the speeches by Front-Bench Members, so it can probably be argued that they do not support the speech enough to come here and speak in favour of it, although, doubtless, they will vote for it. It implies, too, that they believe that the debate has already taken place.

<strong>Tony Baldry:</strong> Is it not a rather sad spectacle that Members such as the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Stephen Pound) should be driven in by the Whips and handed a Whips’ brief as they arrive in the Chamber? [I nterruption. ] Indeed, the hon. Gentleman is the Whips’ lackey. Doubtless, we will see Government Members driven in one by one to keep the debate running. It is a very sad situation.

<strong>Mr. Redwood:</strong> It is sad for parliamentary democracy, because one would hope that by and large Government Members support the speech and do so sufficiently to want to speak in favour of it. If the House returned to the notion that the Queen’s Speech should remain confidential until the Queen delivered it, that would be
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a courtesy to Her Majesty, and it might encourage more right hon. and hon. Members to take the debate seriously

Angus Robertson On the issue of the Hansard record, is it not noteworthy that there is not a single Scottish Labour MP in the Chamber? Many measures in the Queen’s Speech pertain only to England. Labour Members are not prepared to listen to the debate, yet they are prepared to vote for measures that will impact on English constituencies, which is a very odd state of affairs, is it not?

<strong>Mr. Redwood: </strong>That is another good point, and it prefigures something that I was going to say. Her Majesty began the Gracious Speech with some extremely good sentences crafted by the Government about the way in which the Government intend to give more power to Parliament and to people. I would find that more credible if the Government had something sensible to say both about engaging people in the question of the European treaty and about Government representation of England. Many Conservative Members believe that the European constitutional treaty is almost identical to the document that was rejected in referendums in countries freer than our own that allowed plebiscites on the issue. I know that the Government disagree? they argue like a rather expensive but not entirely convincing lawyer over a few words at the beginning of the document, although the rest of the words bear a remarkable resemblance to the original document? but it is not just Opposition parties that believe that it is more or less the same document. It is the settled view of most Governments of the European Union, and it is the view of most independent commentators with no party political axe to grind.

The House was elected in 2005, which is not very long ago. Practically every Member in the Chamber was elected on a party manifesto pledge, often backed by a personal manifesto pledge, to vote for a referendum should something like the constitutional treaty reappear. Why, therefore, are the Government shy about putting the issue to the people? They say that they have a great case, and that this is an entirely harmless set of proposals, which will be good for Britain, so why will they not put that case to the British people to show that they are serious? They know that 80 per cent. of the British people think that they ought to have a vote on the matter.

Stephen Pound (Ealing, North) (Lab): I am reluctant to interrupt the right hon. Gentleman’s mellifluous flow, but may I assure him that what we said in our election statements in 2005 was not that there would be a referendum if there was something like? a constitution but if there was a constitutional treaty? What we face is a reform treaty? it is not a new constitution. I rest my case.

<strong>Mr. Redwood: </strong>I have already dealt with the point. The argument is getting extremely tedious.

<strong>David Maclean (Penrith and The Border) (Con) rose?

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<strong>Mr. Redwood: </strong>May I just finish this point, and then I will be happy to receive my right hon. Friend’s support and encouragement?

The Government do themselves a great disservice. No one outside the House believes them when they claim that it is an entirely different document. That is why there is so little trust in politics and in government.

David Maclean: I am sure that my right hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Stephen Pound) will have heard that great statesman, Val??ry Giscard d’Estaing, when he said that the constitution and the treaty are the same thing. Je repose ma valise.

<strong>Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): </strong>Order. I remind hon. Members that the debate in this Chamber is conducted in English.

<strong>Mr. Redwood:</strong> In view of the falling standards in foreign languages, and the falling interest in them, that is extremely wise guidance, Madam Deputy Speaker, which will allow people outside this House to understand my right hon. Friend, who spoke in elegant French as one would expect? although perhaps not in this House.

<strong>Mr. Evans:</strong> Before my right hon. Friend goes off that point, does he remember the Queen’s Speech on 23 November 2004, when it was stated that

A Bill will be introduced to give effect to the Constitutional Treaty for the European Union, subject to a referendum.??? [ Official Report, House of Lords, 23 November 2004; Vol. 667, c. 3.]

That was just three years ago.

<strong>Mr. Redwood:</strong> I think that that was a much better Queen’s Speech remark than the Government’s position today, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for reminding the House about it.

My first recommendation on the Queen’s Speech is to amend it to include a referendum Bill, because that is the way both to give power to the people on an issue on which they want a voice and to settle the European issue. If the Government are so confident about their position, they should put it to the electoral test, which is the way to start to restore confidence in politics and politicians. Confidence in politics and politicians is damaged by all sorts of things, but it is certainly damaged by the impression formed by many people outside this House that they were offered a referendum that has now been taken from them.

The second big constitutional problem that the Queen’s Speech does not address under the excellent rubric of giving power to Parliament and the people is the lack of proper representation of the people of England. There is now devolved government in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales that is capable of making decisions over a range of issues on which English MPs can pass no comment or have no influence, whereas Welsh, Northern Irish and Scottish MPs can come here to settle our affairs, which form a lot of the substance of this Queen’s Speech. This Queen’s Speech is partly a programme for the Union? it includes areas such as foreign affairs and benefits, which run across the whole Union? and it is
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partly for the people of England, where it deals with issues such as planning, housing and education.

We desperately need a solution to the problem of England. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition has made the perfectly good suggestion of moving towards more decision making in this House by the body of English MPs, so whatever is settled for Scotland in the Scottish Parliament would be settled here in Westminster by the English MPs of the Westminster Parliament exercising their jurisdiction as English MPs.

<strong>Angus Robertson:</strong> Is it not fair to acknowledge that the current situation falls far short of the most elegant solution, which is, of course, independence for Scotland and independence for England? In the short term at least, Scottish MPs should do what Scottish National party MPs do at Westminster, which is to abstain on matters that are solely English. That would not answer all the challenges in the long term, but it would address the core anomaly, which unfortunately arises when Scottish Labour MPs vote through matters in England when those matters have no relevance to Scotland.

<strong>Mr. Redwood:</strong> The hon. Gentleman has made a moderate and sensible point. That is good advice, but I do not think that the Government are about to take it, because the truth is that they often need their Scottish MPs to vote against the interests of England to drive through policies that the body of English MPs on their own would never dream of accepting for our country.

<strong>Sammy Wilson: </strong>As a staunch Unionist, I find that argument rather disturbing. Although devolution did not apply to Northern Ireland for many years, part of the contract of the Union was that decisions about Northern Ireland were made in this House by people who often represented parties that did not even organise in Northern Ireland. In the absence of devolution in England, does that contract not also apply to people in England in the sense that all hon. Members should make decisions about what happens in this part of the United Kingdom?

<strong>Mr. Redwood: </strong>The point is that the constitutional argument is moving on. The idea driving Scottish nationalism is to radicalise English voters so that they, too, become Scottish nationalists? by proxy. That is what the Scottish nationalist strategy is all about.

As an English MP who has always in the past defended the Union, I am conscious that the political mood in my country of England is moving rapidly in exactly the direction that the Scottish nationalist party wishes for, as it tries to turn England into a battering ram against the Union. As a result, my right hon. and hon. Friends have reached the point of thinking that unless the problem of Englishness receives some recognition that goes some way towards matching the devolution offered to Scotland and other parts of the Union, that problem will get far worse, and the Scottish nationalists are more likely to get their way. The people of England will, effectively, become advocates of Scottish independence because they will want English independence. That is the process on which we are now embarked.

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My advice to the Government, who still claim that they want to save the Union, is that they must do a much better job of that now that Scottish nationalists are radicalising English voters. At the very least, the Government should understand that splitting England up, balkanising it into a set of artificial euro-regions, is the very opposite of what is required to deal with the problem of Englishness. Far from making English people happy, some kind of second-best devolved Government in bogus regions? such as, in my case, the south-east, which we cannot define and do not wish to? will make them far angrier. They will say that such changes are a deliberate ploy to stop them being English, and they will be made more English and more anti-Union than if the Government had not gone down the route of trying to split the country up and pretending that creating artificial regions with unsatisfactory degrees of devolved power was some substitute for tackling the problem of England.

So I welcome the proposal of my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) of English votes for English issues, although I would go a little further, because the movement is rapid and Englishness is on the rise. I certainly like the idea of creating an English structure within the Westminster Parliament; I feel that, because of history, it is the English Parliament as well as the Union Parliament.

My colleagues and I are happy to do both jobs for the same money. I do not want the development of an English movement that wants a large and expensive English Parliament, which would be in other buildings, with other politicians and bureaucrats, producing nothing of value at enormous cost to taxpayers. We can happily do both jobs; we have the plant, the building and the staff. A lot of the business now being conducted by the Union Parliament relates to England; we are saying that there needs to be a different way of handling that business to deal with the problem of England. Otherwise, the Scottish nationalists will win and the Government will look silly. They will discover that in creating a Parliament in Scotland to provide a platform for the Scottish nationalists, they have radicalised not only some Scottish voters, but an awful lot of English voters, and that that will start to pull the Union apart in exactly the way that they said would not happen.

As someone who was sceptical about the devolution proposals when the Government first put them forward, I find that completely unsurprising. I wrote a book entitled The Death of Britain??, which put forward my view that the Government’s constitutional approaches of more powers for Europe, trying to balkanise England into artificial regions and giving lopsided devolution to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales combined to make up the best possible way to start pulling the Union apart. It was almost as if the Government were on the payroll of the Scottish nationalist party, because they were doing its work.

<strong>Angus Robertson: </strong>It is the Scottish National party.

<strong>Mr. Redwood:</strong> I stand corrected by the hon. Gentleman, who names his party correctly.

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I hope that the Government listen carefully to Members from England, who love the Union and our own country as well. I hope that the Government understand that we now need something better to prevent the split of the Union.

<strong>Mr. Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab): </strong>I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker, for coming in late. [Interruption.] I was at two meetings, one with a Foreign Office Minister.

I hear what the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) is saying. I should say? it may already have been said? that all but three of the Bills in today’s Queen’s Speech will have an impact north of the border, in Scotland. What kind of commitment do the right hon. Gentleman and his party colleagues have to retaining the Union? If he goes down the road that he has discussed, he will play into the nationalists’ hands. In his party’s view, political expediency may be the best thing and that might be in favour of an independent Scotland. Is that the case?

<strong>Mr. Redwood:</strong> I have already set out my case. I have always been a Unionist? I still think that the Union has a lot to offer the peoples of the United Kingdom? but I am warning the Government that they are losing control of the debate because they have set up a lopsided system of devolution which does not suit the people of England. As an English MP, I will have to give voice to the very reasonable concerns of my constituents. I can still do so within the framework of a rebalanced Union, but if the Government ignore all those pleas, that will get more difficult. If they go in exactly the wrong direction and try to force bogus European regions on England, they will accelerate the process of splitting up the Union and make the problem that much worse. I hope that they are listening and understand the force of the argument. After all, they have some English MPs themselves. They do not get quite as many English votes as the Conservative party does, but they get quite a lot, and they will need a lot if they are to have any chance of staying as a large party in the House of Commons. I therefore trust that they will consider it very carefully.

The Government have tried to use this Queen’s Speech in the usual crude way that we have come to expect of this new Administration? not so new when one looks at their members, but perhaps new in style. They see their list of proposed legislative measures as a cross between a press release whereby they legislate merely to get an effect or create a story? which means that sometimes they do not bother to put all the legislation through or repeal it before it has even come into effect? and a means of trying to expose differences between themselves and the Opposition which they think will place them in a favourable light. I have a piece of advice for the Prime Minister. He has spent all his life trying to get this job, and I would quite like him to do it well, because it is my country too, and he is my Prime Minister as well as the Labour party’s Prime Minister. However, a good Prime Minister does not spend all their time in office thinking about how they can trip up or expose their opponents? they should spend most of it thinking about how they can solve the nation’s problems, identifying them correctly and taking the action that only they and their
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Government colleagues can take. Obviously, Opposition Members can speak but cannot act; we share the frustrations that Labour Members will remember from their time in opposition. We can have good ideas, but unless the Government adopt them, they do not happen.

Of course, the Government live in a political world, and from time to time they have to give the Opposition a kicking, or try to? that is part of the life of this place, and I am not saying that we should be immune from criticism. However, they would be a better Government, and thought to be so, if they spent a bit more of their time worrying about the problems of the country and how their policies might work in effect and rather less time worrying about what the Opposition’s position is on things. The Prime Minister spent quite a lot of his speech trying to find out what my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition thought or said about a number of interesting issues instead of spending time developing the detail behind the Queen’s Speech, which he and his colleagues had written, in order to satisfy the House that it would be different from the 10 Queen’s Speeches written by his predecessor and would really make a difference to the problems of the country.

Let us look at some of those problems. The Prime Minister says that affordable housing is a very big problem. It is obviously true that a lot of people would like to buy a property but are fairly young or do not have the incomes or savings that enable them to do so as easily as they would like. We notice that under this Government more and more young people live with their parents for rather longer. While I am sure that family life is a wonderful thing, I suspect that it is mainly because of economics? they cannot afford to get a property of their own at the stage in life when their parents or grandparents took it for granted that they would leave the family home and find their own property.

The Government refuse to answer one very simple question. They say that they want more affordable housing, but when I ask Ministers by how much they want house prices to fall for them to then regard housing as being affordable, they will not answer, because they realise that telling all the existing home owners that they are trying to engineer a house price fall would not be very popular. However, if they are not trying to engineer a house price fall, it is difficult to see what they mean when they say that they want housing to be more affordable. It just does not make any sense. We know that there are lots of properties for sale, and it is possible to buy a property if, of course, one has the money.

The difficulty is that the Government’s analysis is economically illiterate. They believe that the determinant of house prices is how many new houses are built. Unlike the market for most goods and services, the housing market is mainly driven by second-hand homes. Most of the homes that are bought and sold each year are houses that were built quite a long time ago, and only a marginal amount is made up of new homes that are constructed. It has been a very marginal amount under this Government because not that many homes have been constructed. The Government say that if only they could make a quantum increase in the number of new homes built,
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they could create a hugely disproportionate effect on the market, leading house prices to fall enough to be affordable. I just do not think they have done the maths. They do not understand the balance between second-hand homes and new ones.

More important, the Government clearly have not understood the first fundamental of how a housing market works in a free enterprise society with a big banking sector, such as the United Kingdom. Thanks to the work of the Prime Minister when he was Chancellor, we have lived through a credit boom and bust. We had several years of massive boom because interest rates were kept extremely low, inviting banks to lend huge sums of money against property, bidding the prices up. In the last three months, we have had a credit bust, which was very visible with a run on a leading mortgage bank, and people now have great difficulty in getting access to the mortgages they might need.

If the Government are serious about wanting people to be able to buy homes, they must first of all look at their lurch from boom to bust in the credit market, and they have to get the credit and mortgage markets going again. Through the Chancellor, they need to have conversations with the Bank of England about why there was such a catastrophe in Britain? worse than anywhere else in the world? over the summer, and about how they can secure sufficient liquidity for the banking system again, with an interest rate structure that makes sense.

During that period, the famous, so-called independent Bank of England has turned out not to be independent at all, as some of us always suspected. It turns out to be part of a tripartite arrangement with the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority. We now know that most of the crucial decisions taken during the summer were either actively taken by the Chancellor and the Treasury, or were heavily influenced or cleared through the Chancellor and the Treasury, illustrating that the Bank was not truly independent.

What do the Government need to do from here? There should be a Bill in the Queen’s Speech to introduce proper independence for the Bank of England so that we can pursue a more sensible monetary policy. I am not sure that the Chancellor’s interventions during the past few weeks have been at all helpful. It would be good if the Bank of England were to re-establish control over interest rates in the money markets.

All the attention is focused on the monthly deliberations of the Monetary Policy Committee. During the past couple of months, its deliberations have been academic seminars. It has fixed a rate, but it is not the rate at which transactions are taking place. The rate at which transactions are taking place has shot up considerably above the rate recommended by the committee because the Bank has not been doing the other part of its job. It has not been using open market operations, supplying liquidity or getting the banknote issue and the supply and trading of bills right in order to ensure that market rates are in line with Monetary Policy Committee rates. If the Government want to continue to believe in the Monetary Policy Committee, they must learn how monetary policy works so that the committee can once again be the main driving force for
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interest rates in the economy, not an academic spectator making interesting observations about it.

The Government have to learn that if they want to price people back into the property market, they have to do something about money supply, credit and their mismanagement of the banking system. Promising, or threatening, some increase in the rate of new house building in 2, 3, 5 or 10 years’ time will not have an impact on the current situation. The numbers are too small in relation to the total number of homes in the economy, and the delay will be such that it will have no immediate impact on the state of the property market today.

I welcome the Government’s belief in aspiration. I have always believed that home ownership is the best form of tenure. It is the preferred form? around half the people who do not own their home would like to do so. It is not the other way round: half the people who own their home would not rather rent. People who were in that position could, of course, easily sell their home and rent instead; that would not be a difficulty. I wish the Government well, but I hope they will study carefully what I and others are saying because they are not embarking on a policy in the Queen’s Speech that will remedy the lack of affordable housing and the current crisis in the mortgage and housing market.

<strong>Mr. Hands:</strong> Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Government may inadvertently be exacerbating the problem by setting the artificial 50 per cent. limit for subsidised housing that we have in London under Mayor Livingstone, and that de facto it will reduce the amount of market housing in the supply, which will surely only drive up prices still further?

<strong>Mr. Redwood: </strong>I agree. Such an artificial target or limit is foolish. I remind the Government that the true aspiration is to own. If one way to promote ownership is encouraging part ownership as a bridging point, so be it; but let us remember that that is not the preferred outcome for people. The preferred outcome is to own the whole thing.

When I was a Minister and trying to switch some homes from rentals in the social sector to shared ownership in docklands, the housing professionals advised me that there was no demand for such things and that people wanted the rented accommodation. However, I insisted and some such properties were constructed. I went to see them when they had been sold; I knocked on the first door, completely at random. A charming lady answered and I asked, Did you have any problems? Was buying a shared ownership home something you wanted to do?? She replied, Yes, it’s really what I wanted to do. I’m very grateful, but I had a problem? they didn’t let me buy a big enough share.? That was a wonderful response from my point of view because all the housing experts were with me and, if looks could kill, that poor lady would have been dead. She was a star because she spoke for the community in docklands, which had exactly the same aspirations as my community in Wokingham, and it was good to play a small part in trying to make those dreams come true.

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I am sure that the Government want more such dreams to come true, but they must examine housing finance and stop playing silly politics with planning, in the hope of tripping up the Conservatives. They should sort out the existing housing market in a way that satisfies more dreams and ambitions.

<strong>Stephen Pound: </strong>I appreciate that the right hon. Gentleman is not speaking ex cathedra, but, in his response to the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) on social housing as a proportion of new build in London, thanks to our enlightened Mayor, was he dissociating himself, if not his party, from the policy of including a social housing element in planning, which is the best way? and in many cases the only option that my constituents have? of getting on the housing ladder? Is the right hon. Gentleman for or against that social housing element?

<strong>Mr. Redwood:</strong> Like my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands), I do not welcome a blanket overall percentage that has to apply to all developments over a certain size. That is neither appropriate nor helpful for getting more housing built and more people into the sort of housing that they want. Within the social component, we need to strengthen the element that gives people a ladder of opportunity to ownership. Part ownership is always better than renting, given people’s preferences.

The Gracious Speech tells us that the Government wish to raise the school leaving age to 18. Indeed, the Prime Minister started to say that but corrected himself and said the education leaving age? because he realised that school leaving age? would put off an awful lot of 16 to 18-year-olds. Many 16 to 18-year-olds would dread having to spend another two years at school. It is difficult to persuade many 14 to 16-year-olds that school is the right place for them. They do not find it relevant, interesting, exciting or worth while. If young people do not believe that something is interesting, relevant, exciting or worth while, they will not do it well and perhaps they will not do it at all. That is the reason for quite high truancy rates and poor performance in some schools in several places in the country. School is not firing young peoples’ imagination and it is not what they want. I believe that the Government will rue the day that they took the line of compulsion? telling 16 to 18-year-olds what to do.

I do not normally praise the BBC because I do not often have reason to do that. However, there was a cracking good programme before the Queen’s Speech, which gave us the debate that it would have been nice to have here first. A 22-year-old man who left school at 16 had been invited into the studio. From memory, I think that the programme said he had already sold his first business for a large sum of money. He was invited to comment on whether it would have helped him to be told at 16 that instead of leaving school and setting up a business he had to stay on at school, or that he could set up a business but that he would need to go on a training scheme at the same time which would take him away from his business at a critical point in its fortunes. He was wonderful and said, No, of course it would have been absolutely disastrous.?

That young man said that between 14 and 16 he chose to take business studies at school because he
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always knew that he wanted to be entrepreneurial. He said that those two years of business studies were off-putting, because all he was taught was how to fill in a VAT form and how to comply with all the regulations that the Government have imposed. He wanted to know about buying and selling, serving customers, providing new products and offering new services, because he was genuinely entrepreneurial. It was all right for that young man, because he was talented and energetic and he broke free. It would be more difficult for people like him if they had to comply with regulations that said they could not concentrate on their businesses entirely but had to do other things in those two formative years between 16 and 18.

That young man’s testimony should also lead the Government to ask themselves whether they could improve what is currently on offer in the schools. He is but one, but I have met many young people who do not find the diet served up from 14 to 18 in schools interesting, challenging, exciting or relevant in a way that it needs to be if we are to motivate them and offer them a good future and a good career. Compulsion is not the way. The problem is that the courses do not suit, the style of teaching does not suit and the formal education does not suit.

As someone who did perfectly well out of exams in my youth, I think that there are too many exams. Every summer term is written off by the need to revise, to do the exams and to relax afterwards. There are too many teachers who teach for a test, because they are under the cosh of centralised targets. They know that they have to ensure that the children and the students pass, so they teach only for the test. They no longer educate the children because there is no time for that, because they have to teach exam technique and the minimum number of things that the student needs to get through the test. Because teaching is done in that spirit, the students get wise at loading up the information before the test, downloading it in the test and, when they leave the test room, saying, That’s done; we don’t need to know that anymore. Now we go on to the next year’s test.?

That is not education as it should be understood; it is a testing system based on targets and centralisation, the very thing that dogs the Government in everything that they try to do. They have to let go a bit, trust the teaching profession and the schools more, let people have more choice of school and let 16 to 18-year-olds have more choice. The Government should of course promote apprenticeships and promote the idea that going to university can make sense, but they should not force people to go and they should not set artificial targets.

The Labour party will obviously want to tease out the Conservative position on whether 50 per cent. of all students should go to university. I have a simple answer to that. I would welcome it if 50 per cent. of all school students reached university level. Then I would of course want them to have a university place; but it would be stupid just to say that the top 50 per cent. are going to university anyway, whether they are prepared for it or not. There used to be a rough tariff, whereby if a student could not get two A-levels, they did not go to university. It was not that demanding a tariff? in some cases two grade Es would do it. If there is no longer any general tariff, people can turn up at a university
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not having mastered level 3 and so not having the intellectual equipment or knowledge that one would expect an undergraduate to have to make a success of university.

I am not speaking as someone being academically picky, but as someone who cares very much about those young people, because the way to make young people unhappy is to put them into something that they are not equipped to do well at. That is why, even with well below 50 per cent. going to university, we already have such a high drop-out rate in some of our universities.
<strong>
David Maclean:</strong> On that point, is it not the case that, when some of our young people are going to university ill equipped for courses that are of no interest to them or that they are not suitable for, we have drop-out rates of 30 to 40 per cent. and that they are dropping out with a ??6,000 debt millstone round their necks?

<strong>Mr. Redwood:</strong> My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is the tragedy: these proposals are not good for young people and not good for the system. They have been put forward just to satisfy some stupid ministerial target. People will say, Haven’t we done well, getting this extra number of people to go to university?? The Government will not have done well unless all those people really get something out of going to university and end up with a qualification that they are proud of and, more important, a qualification that will enable them to command a better salary in the market.

Of course, at the top and middle levels of the university system, that still happens. A degree can give people cachet, knowledge and habits of mind that employers find worth while. However, the more that young people are invited into universities without having met that minimum level 3 requirement, the more difficult it will be for the universities to teach them to the required degree standard, and the less value those degrees will have. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (David Maclean) said, more people will then drop out with a debt round their neck and absolutely nothing to show for it.

I hope that the Government will understand that they cannot simply legislate to make everyone a graduate. They have to work away at it, and that will require reform in our schools and in our education system generally. I hope that they will be successful in that, because I would like to live in a world in which many more people have the opportunity to gain a high level of education as well as to buy a home and to get a decent job. Those things are, of course, all related in this expensive, complex and technical world.

The problems for health are exactly the same as those for education, including top-down targets and Ministers desperately wanting to do the right thing but ending up doing the wrong thing. The central irony in the Queen’s Speech is that the Queen, on advice from the Government, has told us that we are going to have cleaner hospitals. How many times have we heard Ministers promise cleaner hospitals? The Gracious Speech tells us that we shall achieve that by having a new, tougher and more impressive regulator to regulate the hospitals to make sure that they are clean. If the problem at the moment is that standards are not high
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enough and not being policed enough, why do we need to wait a year for another piece of legislation, a new quango, a new chief executive, a new logo and a new set of management consultancy papers? Why can these steps not be taken now? Nobody in the House would mind if the Government just got on with introducing the required standards through the existing mechanisms and making sure that they were met.

The Government have desperately been trying to do that in a top-down way for many months now, and it simply is not working. Perhaps they should ask themselves whether that is the way to run a large national health service, or whether what my right hon. and hon. Friends have been saying about devolving more power, responsibility and authority to hospitals and to clinical and other staff at local level might not make more sense.

I cannot believe that the Government wish to preside over a national health service in which 6,000 people a year die and have a hospital-acquired infection on their death certificate. I have to keep pinching myself to remind myself that that has actually happened. I cannot believe that Ministers find it satisfactory to have to make statements to the House about a hospital group in which 90 people died as a result of hospital-acquired infections. Somehow, because nobody could believe that 90 people could die in the same place in a relatively short space of time, that case has been treated more seriously than the hundreds and thousands of people who are dying month by month and year by year and who are being ignored.

I am sure no one in the House wants such things to happen. We do not want this to be a party political football; we want the problem to be solved. All our constituents need it to be solved. They are now getting worried about even being admitted to an NHS hospital when they are in need or in danger. They are worried that getting something quite moderate sorted out will result in their getting something far worse. There must be a solution, and it does not involve legislation or a new quango. Among the most worrying aspects of the Queen’s Speech are the chilling phrases that imply that the problem can wait 15 or 18 months? or however long it takes to get the new legislation through and to set up the new quango? and the Government’s naive belief that the new quango will have the magic solution that has so far escaped all the quangos and all the Ministers who have looked at the problem. This is extremely worrying and it sums up exactly what is wrong with the state of the Government today.

I will vote against the Queen’s Speech because I see nothing in it to solve the main problems facing the country. I will vote against it because it does not strengthen our democracy; it undermines it further. I will vote against it because it does not tackle the lack of trust in politics; it accentuates it by not offering us a referendum or sorting out the English problem. I will vote against it because I do not think that it contains solutions to the problems in our large public services, and because I do not believe that it truly meets the aspirations of the British people. If the Government believe that they can play silly party political games with those aspirations, they will fail.

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