HC Deb 21 January 1977 vol 924 cc916-22

3.41 p.m.

Mr. Brian Sedgemore (Luton, West)

I beg to move, That this House regrets that under its new leadership, the Conservative Party has become an extremist party; and believes that democracy can only be sustained in Great Britain through the Labour Party and a Labour Government planning for freedom with reason as their inspiration. I am delighted that the House has given me the opportunity to raise this subject, and I hope to share the time with one hon. Member on the Conservative side. I hope that we can have a mature, quiet and philosophical debate, and I, too, join in congratulating both political parties on having appointed a "Minister for Political Philosophy".

There is, however, a serious aspect to this debate. In my view, neither political parties nor nations can survive unless they have perspectives. I believe that our perspective on this side, that is, the perspective of Socialism, is the perspective of freedom and of reason. Because we believe in freedom and reason, we reject the perspectives which flow from capitalism, which, in fundamental and philosophical terms, can be seen as little more than the transference of the theories of Charles Darwin in the animal world to the economic world. Having in mind, in particular, such people as the hon. Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley), who, I believe, is a student of the Nobel Prize winner for economics, Mr. Milton Friedman, we see that the perspectives of capitalism are little more than latter-day versions of Herbert Spencer.

Looking back into Socialist history, we see that the strand of freedom lies deep and intense in the soul of Socialism. I take, first, the statement of Aneurin Bevan in "In Place of Fear": If freedom is to be secured and enlarged, poverty must be ended…There is no other way. One can go back also to Richard Crossman, who wrote in 1951 in "Planning for Freedom": The democratic socialist draws his inspiration from the belief that nothing but human will and social conscience can liberate men from a historical process which, if left to itself, leads to slavery, exploitation and war. One can look back to the poets. Oscar Wilde, for example, said: Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to individualism. The true perfection of man lies not in what man has but what man is. One can look back also to the nineteenth-century idealistic philosophers. I should like to quote Marx, but, because of the pain he gives to many, I shall not do so, and nor shall I quote Hegel since it was once said that he was not worth studying even in error. However, I shall quote a more modest English idealistic philosopher, T. H. Green, who said: We are right in refusing to ascribe the glory of freedom to a state in which the elevation of the few is founded on the degradation of the many. One can turn to a slightly earlier anarchistic strand in the poet Shelley, another Socialist, who declared in 1812: A man not only has the right to express his thoughts. It is his duty to do so. One could go back to the earliest Socialist, Thomas Rainsboro, who said: The poorest that he in England is hath a right to live as the greatest he. I hesitate to add my own quotations to that galaxy of talent, but I believe that a Socialist is, as I said in a recent lecture, he who believes that the best life is that in which the creative impulses play the greatest part and the possessive impulses play the smallest part. I believe that A socialist is one who believes in the positive concept of freedom. He knows that for the generality of man, the release of creative impulses stems neither from the fact nor the challenge of ignorance, poverty and ugliness but from economic security, from craft, from skills, from science, from art, from solitude and thought, from comradeship and joy. The weapons that we must use are the weapons of common ownership, social control of capital and the sharing of power.

I can think of three people who have moulded the philosophy that exists on the Opposition benches today—Burke, Disraeli and Lord Salisbury. Burke was a corrupt Whig hack. Disraeli was the first British politician to put party before country and Lord Salisbury was a man who did not understand, and indeed hated, the whole concept of democracy in all its forms.

It is curious that the Leader of the Liberal Party should have developed Disraeli's theory about party coming before country. He said that the Leader of the Opposition was putting personal ambition before both party and country. He did not give any evidence to back up that theory, and for that he was wrong. But there was some evidence in the Luton Post and Echo in which the hon. Member for Aberdeen, South (Mr. Sproat) quoted the Leader of the Opposition as saying that she was thrilled with his McCarthyism. The hon. Member for Aberdeen, South did not use the word "McCarthyism" but said that the right hon. Lady was thrilled with what he had been doing recently. I cannot believe that that is so. Anyone whose speeches are written by the CIA quisling, Mr. Robert Moss, has something to answer for in the House.

I do not object to her saying that in some countries which purport to have done something about Socialism terrible things have happened. If she wants to declare war on Russia, that is a matter for her, but let her declare war on behalf of the British people and not on behalf of a foreign intelligence agency.

Looking at the scene in Russia and relating it to the Socialist concept, I should quote the Russian Socialist academic dissident, Roy Medvedev, who in a paper presented to the Institue of Worker Control which commented on Russian Society said: However, our country has seen virtually no progress in civil and political rights—freedom of speech and the Press, freedom of assembly and of political association, the right to an opposition etc. A gradual democratisation of our society is perfectly feasible, although its implementation remains a difficult task.… In a country like the USSR bureaucratic infelicities are refracted in national republics through the prism of all manner of national pride and pretensions. It has therefore been necessary already in some republics to make a number of concessions particularly in the field of culture. Whilst one can be critical of the denial of freedom, we should feel deeply for working people in both Socialist and capitalist countries.

The Tory Party is fighting all the battles that we thought we had won for the 20th century. The history is one of the development of public conscience, public concern and even public enterprise. Now we appear to be reverting to those 19th-century Darwinian evolutionary theories, perhaps best summed up on 21st December by the hon. Member for St. Ives (Mr. Nott) when winding up the economic debate. Referring to a speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for Newham, North-East (Mr. Prentice), he gave a pledge on behalf of the Conservative Party. He said that it was a major necessity to cut pensions and public service pensions. He spelled the matter out in some detail, and I have quoted him several times in my local newspapers. How can a political party start talking about disrupting the concept of the Welfare State, cutting pensions, charging for hospital treatment and perhaps even charging for treatment at school?

It seems to me that the two political parties are coming to a great political divide, and perhaps this gives cause for hope. The last quarter of the 20th centry may well see ideology as an important issue. Ideology is about no more and no less than morality. We shall win in the last quarter of the 20th century because morality is on our side.

3.52 p.m.

Mr. Nicholas Ridley (Cirencester and Tewkesbury)

I am delighted to congratulate the hon. Member for Luton, West (Mr. Sedgemore) on having time to move his motion—and on being made a Parliamentary Private Secretary for the second time. The hon. Gentleman suggested that I had been promoted to Shadow Minister of philosophy. I am afraid that I must tell him that I am acting for the day as Shadow Minister for Sedgemore. The hon. Gentleman is the one to whom our thoughts go out today. He will have to be careful, because he is not allowed to vote against the Government or even to speak against them now. We have seen the awful example of the hon. Members for Leeds, West (Mr. Dean) and Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr. Rooker), who, it seems, were sacked for doing just that. I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on having kept so much to history in his speech, not straying for a second into the present day.

In his motion the hon. Gentleman talks about moral philosophy and reason as his inspiration. The moral philosophy of the Labour Party does not commend itself to me and my hon. Friends. Let me speak of the hon. Gentleman's friends from Russia. He has entertained Mr. Ponomarev and Mr. Shelepin, but there was no reception committee for Mr. Solzhenitsyn and Mr. Bukovsky, who seek only to defend human rights and prevent their being trampled upon by a dictatorial régime. Such is the prejudice, the moral philosophy, of the Labour Party that it eschews the reformers and entertains those who would continue a régime under which people are put in prison for their beliefs and under which people do not have human rights.

The hon. Gentleman talks about deprivations of freedom. Has he thought about the deprivations of freedom in Cambodia, Vietnam, Tibet and most of the Black African countries? I am not in favour of what happens in South Africa, but I ask of the Labour Party, with its moral philosophy, "Why is it that the excesses of South Africa are constantly condemned but there is never a word about the excesses of Communist countries, where freedoms far more important and far wider than those extinguished in South Africa have been removed?" The double standards of the Labour Party are nauseous.

The motion talks about democracy. The hon. Gentleman says that it can be sustained only by the Labour Party. Let me remind him of the history of the present Prime Minister, who succeeded in upsetting the recommendations of the Boundaries Commission to make fair constituencies with fair electorates. The right hon. Gentleman then tried to fix the Committee of Selection so that the Government had a majority in Committee when they did not deserve one, and later interfered in the affair of the tied vote on a procedural motion on the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Bill. These are not good auguries for Labour Party democracy.

The House faces the Bill to give devolution status to Scotland and Wales, but it hardly becomes one who advocates democracy that that Bill should be going through without a common move to equalise the representation of those countries at the Parliament of Westminster. As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Scots have 71 seats. If they were to accept the same average electorate as the English, they would have 55 seats. If they were to accept devolved status appropriate, perhaps, to Ulster, they would have 43 seats.

Why has the Prime Minister not proposed a reduction in the number of seats held by the two countries that he wishes to devolve? The answer is that that would threaten the Labour Party's majority in this place. That is the moral philosophy of the Labour Party. Its philosophy is to win by any dirty means at its disposal, to fix our democratic rules, to rig them, to do anything that it can to try to secure power by cheap and unfortunate methods.

The hon. Gentleman knocked the National Association for Freedom. What is wrong with freedom? What is wrong with a national association to achieve it? The tactics of the Left appear again, namely, the smear, the misinformation.

The suggestion has been made that CIA money is given to the National Association for Freedom. My God, I wish it were. If that were the case, it might be possible for us to take more of the victims of the closed shop to the courts to fight their cases, to take up the unfortunate legal position of many of the victims of trade union bullying and domination, and to fight the cases of those who have been refused tax certificates to work in the building industry as a means of extinguishing self-employment and those who want to follow their living but who have had their freedom to do so removed by the Government.

Those are some of the matters that are important to ordinary people. It is the freedom to work, the freedom of speech and many other basic freedoms that the Conservative Party seeks to promote. We seek to stop the Labour Party extinguishing those freedoms.

It was only the other day that the Prime Minister said that he believed in the freedom of the Press with the qualification—"provided it was accurate". Who is to be judge whether the Press is accurate?

Mr. Peter Bottomley (Woolwich, West)

The Prime Minister.

Mr. Ridley

My hon. Friend is right.

The matters to which I have referred represent the moral philosophy of the Labour Party—"My party right or wrong. To hell with the freedoms of individuals and the people who form the British electorate." Make no mistake about it; once the democratic rights that the hon. Gentleman seeks to protect in his motion have been extinguished there will be no more elections. It is a surprising thought that none of the countries in the world run by Communist Governments, Marxist Governments, Trotskyite Governments or Maoist Governments has free elections.

If the hon. Gentleman wishes to promote the freedom of the people, let him use his undoubted energies and talents to ensure that there are free elections throughout the Communist world. The free election is the ultimate safeguard of freedom. The hon. Gentleman is in no position to talk about moral philosophy or democracy as long as his voice is not raised with those in the National Association for Freedom in favour of free elections throughout the world.

3.59 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for Employment (Mr. John Golding)

Certain misconceptions contained in the speech of the hon. Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley) should be cleared. The Labour Party, which I represent, is a democratic party. It believes strongly in the election of all representatives, and we take exception to remarks about the visit of Mr. Bukovsky. I understand from the categoric statement made by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister that Mr. Bukovsky was invited to meet Ministers in the Foreign Office and failed—

It being Four o'clock, the debate stood adjourned.