Before I call the proposer and seconder of the humble Address, I should announce to the House the proposed subjects for debate on subsequent days, which will be as follows: Wednesday 18 May—foreign affairs and defence; Thursday 19 May—industry and the environment; Monday 23 May—home affairs and communities; Tuesday 24 May—health and education; Wednesday 25 May—the economy and welfare reform.

I call Mr. Kevin Barron to move the humble Address, after which I will call Vera Baird to second it.

I beg to move,

That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty, as follows:

Most Gracious Sovereign,

We, Your Majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament assembled, beg leave to offer our humble thanks to Your Majesty for the Gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament.

Mr. Speaker, I stand up with some trepidation, in view of the words that you have spoken over the last few minutes, in respect of the content of my speech. I hope that it falls within the rules and guidance that you have given us.

I am pleased and privileged to be asked to move the motion today. I believe that I am the first Member representing the Rother Valley constituency to be asked to do so. It is a great honour for me, and for my constituents. I am also pleased to note that the seconder of the motion is my hon. and learned Friend Vera Baird, as I spent my early childhood years in New Marske, a village in her constituency.

My Rother Valley constituency has two great strengths: its natural beauty, which is steeped in history, and its people. Situated in the north of the constituency, where I live, are the ruins of Roche abbey, a 12th century Cistercian abbey dissolved by Henry VIII, which is a great tourist attraction for the area, as is much of the

"pleasant district of Merry England" as described in Sir Walter Scott's classic "Ivanhoe", which mentions

"the beautiful hills and valleys that lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster".

Rother Valley has also played its part in the history of this building, the Palace of Westminster. After the fire of 1834, stone was cut from a quarry in Anston—it is still working today—loaded on to narrow boats and carried down the Chesterfield canal in the south of the constituency to the tidal river Trent, where it was transferred on to Humber sloops for its trip to Westminster.

The people of the Rother valley are open, honest and not afraid to speak their minds—something that I am always happy to be reminded of in election campaigns, unnerving as they can be. The last campaign was the sixth election victory for Labour that I have secured in Rother Valley—[Hon. Members: "Hear, hear."]—and it was the first in which I was able to say to my constituents, "This is what Labour has done for you," as opposed to "what Labour will do for you". As my agent, Alan Goy, always reminds me, we must never take our constituents for granted.

I was, however, slightly concerned to discover during the election campaign this year that the UK Independence party candidate's name was none other than Gordon Brown. Thankfully, my constituents are not easily fooled by someone who was obviously trying to cash in on the name of the most successful Chancellor of the Exchequer that this country has ever had. He lost his deposit.

The Rother Valley constituency is also known, among Conservatives rather than Labour party members, as not a bad training ground for would-be Conservative MPs. For the first time, a Conservative candidate for Rother Valley has succeeded in being elected to the House—although not to represent that area, I hasten to add. I am referring to the newly elected hon. Member for Rochford and Southend, East (James Duddridge). I thought that his seat was a good training ground for Labour candidates, but he told me earlier today that we missed taking it by about 5,500 votes, so perhaps I should not suggest that.

My roots were planted in the Rother valley in the mid-1950s, when my father moved his family to Maltby, where he had work in the local coal mine. It was there that I met my wife Carol. We brought up our family there, and our four grandchildren—Nancy, Ross, Joe and Clark—are thriving there.

The first school that I attended was Maltby Crags junior and infants school, built in 1912 to accommodate the children of the growing mining community. I mention it because it has recently closed and been replaced by a modern, state-of-the-art new building, which opened this Easter. It is the second new school to open in my constituency this year, the other one being a junior school in Dinnington. Alongside those two new buildings, we have had major investment in all other schools, thanks to this Government.

The raising of school standards has been a priority for the past two terms of this Government, and I am pleased to see education playing a prominent part in today's Queen's Speech. That builds on the progress already made, and I believe that we are paving the way for a more just and equal society.

At this point, I remind my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister that he accepted a request to open the new office and classroom block at his old primary school, Brinsworth Manor, which is in my constituency. He visited it during the election campaign—but I hope, John, that it will not be too long before we get a date for the next visit.

Nine months after I became the MP for Rother Valley in 1983, this country was plunged into the year-long miners strike. The constituency had six coal mines and a large workshop, which meant that about 4,400 miners were on strike for those 12 months. No matter what the rights and wrongs of the dispute were, the aftermath of the strike and the pit closure programme had a major psychological and economic effect on the communities of the Rother valley. Taking away major employment and offering little if anything in its place meant a massive increase in unemployment and poverty.

However, I do not want to dwell on those times in my speech today. Instead, I want to celebrate what has been happening in my constituency since 1997, under this Labour Government. The introduction of the new deal has reduced long-term youth unemployment by 88 per cent., and long-term adult unemployment by 90 per cent. Thanks to the positive action taken by the local regional development agency, Yorkshire Forward, and by the Coalfields Regeneration Trust and other Government-funded organisations, unemployment is now below the national average. That is unprecedented in my constituency's history since records began.

In the heart of the constituency, more than £12 million has been spent on the redevelopment and decontamination of the old Dinnington colliery site. The site covers more than 200 acres, half of which is devoted to commercial development. The other half is high-quality public open space, with wildlife habitats. The site has won national awards for environmental best practice. The newspaper publisher Johnson Press has begun work on a state-of-the-art printing centre on the site; at £60 million, the investment is the largest single end-user on a former colliery site. The investment and vision of this Labour Government have transformed sites such as Dinnington and the once infamous Orgreave coke works into focal points of the region's economic infrastructure for the 21st century, just as the collieries themselves were the focal points in the 20th century.

I have been a Member of Parliament for more than 22 years. If I had to select the most exciting and challenging time in that period I would choose 1985, when I was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to the then Leader of the Opposition, Neil Kinnock. The years I spent with him probably gave me the best education a parliamentarian could have had in those days. We had many battles on many fronts, not least with a largely hostile media. During the 1987 general election campaign, a tabloid newspaper ran a full-page article entitled "Why I'm backing Kinnock", by Stalin. The paper had hired a psychic medium to canvass the spirits of major figures from history to establish who they would support in the forthcoming election. Apparently, Stalin was going to vote Labour. Winston Churchill, Henry VIII, Nelson and Boadicea were, unfortunately, backing Margaret Thatcher. And Keir Hardie had switched to the SDP.

Neil Kinnock's role in leading the Labour party back on the road towards government was no mean feat. Harold Wilson once compared leading the Labour party to driving an old stagecoach. If it is rattling along at a rare old speed, he said, while some may feel travel-sick, most of the passengers are so exhilarated that they will not start quarrelling. However, as soon as it stops, they will argue about which way to go. The trick, he pointed out, is to keep going at an exhilarating speed. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has just been re-elected for an historic third term. I believe, as the electorate believes, that we must be travelling at the right speed and in the right direction.

I have been chair of the Yorkshire and Humber group of Labour MPs for a good number of years, although not for as long as was once said by the journalist Brendan Carlin, who wrote in the Yorkshire Post that I had been there since the Romans invaded. As such, I have kept an interest in regional as well as national politics. I do not know the exact number of by-elections that I have been involved in over the past 20 years, but the one that sticks in my mind was in Hemsworth just before the 1997 general election. I was on the street with the candidate outside Hemsworth post office when I was approached by an elderly lady who peered into my face and said, "Excuse me, are you new Labour?" Cautiously, I replied that I was proper Labour. "Thank God, for that," she said, "I can't stand that Arthur Scargill."

The House may know that I have had a long-standing interest in health matters, as a shadow Minister, in chairing all-party groups and in campaigns on public health, particularly against tobacco-related diseases. I applaud the proposed legislation to restrict smoking in enclosed public places and in the workplace. I hope that that will have a comprehensive effect in offering protection to all workers in all workplaces. I also welcome the Government's commitment to introduce more choice and diversity in health care provision and further improvements in the quality of health care services and hospital hygiene.

I note that the Government are committed in the Queen's Speech to continuing the pursuit of economic policies that promote long-term growth and prosperity and to continue reform of the welfare state in order to reduce poverty and offer greater equality. The Government's welfare to work programme is having a positive effect on the lives of many of my constituents.

For many years, I have been the chair of the all-party Bulgaria group, and I have observed with interest the progress that Bulgaria has made to establish itself as a democratic state. In recent years, I am pleased to announce, interest in the group has increased, commensurate, I think, with the probability of Bulgaria's joining the European Union, although that may be in no small measure due to our annual Bulgarian wine-tasting evening, which attracts rather a large turnout of Members. I look forward to supporting the legislation announced in the Queen's Speech to ratify the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the European Union.

It is unusual for a Back-Bench MP to speak to such a well attended Chamber. Rarely do we have such a captive audience. But what makes this occasion unique is that I have been given the honour of proposing this motion at the beginning of an historic third-term Labour Government, and I commend the motion to the House.

I rise to second the motion on the Gracious Speech with a warning from the Chief Whip ringing in my ears that I should speak for only 10 minutes. I love deadlines—it is the whooshing noise that they make as I pass them by. I am very pleased to follow my right hon. Friend Mr. Barron. He mentioned his distinguished role as a Parliamentary Private Secretary, but he also did this party great service in Opposition as a spokesperson on energy, employment and then health. He continues to serve Parliament with distinction, in particular on the Intelligence and Security Committee, and well merits his status as a Privy Councillor.

My right hon. Friend clearly had a great destiny, as he was born in Redcar. I know the school that he used to attend. It is a very good school—now. [Laughter.] It was somewhat ahead of its time, because in his days there, children were searched for guns and knives on the way in. If they did not have any, they were given some. [Laughter.] I would not say that it was a tough school, but it was appointed its own coroner. [Laughter.] I should point out to my constituents from New Marske that those were jokes.

I have paid tribute to my right hon. Friend, but I do not want to leave tributes behind without mentioning the person who made this speech in 2002, the former Member for Bethnal Green and Bow. She is a delightful woman. She was a dedicated constituency Member and a talented parliamentarian. It is tragic that she lost her seat, and it is dreadful that she suffered the treatment that she did in the campaign of her successor.

The election campaign in Redcar was better humoured. On the bank holiday, we walked around at the seaside, carrying tall sticks with posters of me at the top. They reminded me uncomfortably of the way in which, in mediaeval times, people who had been executed had their heads put on poles for display. However, there was no one to behead me in Redcar at the election. The Tory candidate, the London-based chief of staff of a Front Bencher, did not find Redcar until the third Saturday in April, and then he seemed to lose it again until election night, when he came back and lost second place in the poll as well. None the less, we worked very hard and I thank my Labour party and other friends for that—but I note the Tory disregard for the people of a northern electorate. People in constituencies such as mine know which party cares about them, and I thank Redcar people for marking that out with their votes.

Redcar is a sandy seaside town, with New Marske, where my right hon. Friend was born, close by. Then a long road runs inland with the steelworks on one side and the chemical plant on the other, where nobody lives, until it reaches three former steel towns inland, which have—in varying degrees—the problems of inner urban, post-industrial deprivation. I am very fond of my constituency. After only four years, I have a high recognition factor. In fact, I think that I had it on the first day. I am, by a considerable margin, the tallest woman in Redcar, and the local paper further marked me out when I was first elected by headlining, "It's the Redhead for Redcar".

I am equally well known not to be local. I come from Oldham, but people who are converts to a place or faith often become more strongly committed than those born into them. I am of that school.

After I had spent half a lifetime working in a middle-class profession, Redcar—or rather, Redcar people—took me back four years ago to how I lived in my childhood. My father worked in labouring jobs. He was in and out of employment, although he was a hard worker, and indeed a good and Christian man. People were taken on and laid off in those days. There were no contracts of employment or redundancy payments Acts to give working families security.

My father got a job as a maintenance painter in a cotton mill. The mill took one line of spinning machinery out of operation each year and he spray-painted it so that it would not rust. That was his job. His employer did not give him or anyone else a mask, and at 55 he developed pneumonia in his paint-congested lungs and he died. I was 10. He was gone.

My mother went to work in a raincoat factory—no minimum wage then. I passed an exam to go to Manchester high school with a scholarship for the fees and uniform, but we could not pay the bus fares. To be honest, I am not sure that I would have had the confidence to go there. However, I went to the local school and did well. I went to Northumbria university to read law, transferring my roots to the north-east.

When I started to read more widely than my school books, I understood from my experiences in childhood the point of Labour politics. In Eston, Grangetown and South Bank—those three steel towns in my constituency—I can see children from backgrounds such as mine who still do not have the confidence to take up their opportunities. In my view, it was an amazing piece of luck that with under-educated parents in a struggling household I got so far as to be a lawyer and then Redcar's MP.

I do not want Redcar's children to get on only by being lucky. Those children need early years investment, giving them social skills and making them outgoing. That is why I applaud the emphasis in the Queen's Speech on child care, Sure Start, children's centres and the promise of 8 am to 6 pm wrap-around care for three to 14-year-olds. I welcome, too, the commitment that every child will have a tailored education and learning package and a detailed pupil profile.

My lucky rise from 95 Coalshaw Green road, Oldham, Lancashire was partly due to my parents' values. They were Methodists, and although I was not confident in the outside world I felt secure at home, reflecting their values. We all knew where we were. It is hard to feel secure unless we have values, and very hard to feel confident unless we can rely on other people living up to recognisable values, so I applaud the aim in the Queen's Speech of restoring respect to society. That is important not only to give the current victims of disrespect and antisocial behaviour their freedom again, but to give antisocial people the chance to look for satisfaction in their lives, rather than living as nuisances.

Although we need to restore respect, Redcar is nevertheless enjoying an upturn in prosperity after eight years of new Labour economic stability. The steelworks has a 10-year contract to export, through the river, all the slab it can produce. For the first time that anyone can remember, it is recruiting staff. That success has made Teesport, in turn, ambitious to develop a deep-sea container terminal to catch some of the rising container market and save thousands of lorry miles, delivering boxes up north from ports down south. Meanwhile, our petrochemical industry at Wilton flourishes, thanks to a Department of Trade and Industry grant that brought us huge US investment and turned the industry around. How would those companies—steel, chemicals and the port—have such ambition and such success if they were still living with the Government who brought them 15 per cent. interest rates, high inflation and boom and bust?

Some political parties might tell people to get on their bikes. We support viable local industries that can boost regional economic performance. That might mean that public spending in the north is higher for a while, but only as part of the understanding that every region has to be brought on to perform to its optimum to resource the top-class public services that we seek. I applaud the commitment in the Queen's Speech to reform those public services.

Lastly, I want to welcome the equalities Bill, establishing the commission for equalities and human rights. Discrimination too holds people back, whether it is against women, ethnic minorities, disabled, gay and lesbian people, or on the grounds of age or religion. It will not be ended by legal cases, by the accident of someone happening to discriminate against somebody who happens to have the courage or the cash to go to court and get a one-off ruling that no one else then knows about. That requires a change of culture, which will be driven positively by the commission.

I could talk more. I could talk about our ambition, consistent with the charity's motto to "Make poverty history". I could talk about a lot in the 45 Bills and five draft Bills in the Queen's Speech, all of which will bring opportunity for all and fairness much closer. But, despite the fact that I dislike deadlines, it is possible to talk too much. Once a judge commented to a jury:

"In Mrs. Baird's closing address there were no wasted words—she used every one I know at least twice."

He later added:

"Though I" very much

"enjoyed listening to her arguments, I was sorry to miss my children growing up".

[Laughter.] So before I revert to type, I will commend the Gracious Speech to the House, and I will sit down.

I warmly congratulate the proposer and seconder of the Loyal Address. Both spoke with fluency and wit and both are renowned as tireless campaigners for the causes in which they believe.

Mr. Barron entered the House the same year as I did, 1983, although we probably have rather fonder memories of that year than he does. Two years later, he became the Parliamentary Private Secretary to Neil Kinnock, but he has come a long way since then. Earlier this year, he came fifth in the ballot for private Members' Bills and he used it to propose a tax cut—in stamp duty, no less. As he explained,

"hard-pressed first-time buyers will see a significant reduction in their stamp duty bills, with hundreds of thousands . . . paying no stamp duty at all."

He is on the right lines and we look forward to his next proposal for tax cuts.

The right hon. Gentleman is also a keen supporter of Rotherham United. Unfortunately, they have been relegated, so they have changed their manager and are bringing in younger talent to complement the more experienced members of the team. It is a strategy I wholly recommend. I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on his excellent speech today.

Last July, Vera Baird was in The Guardian's list of 101 overlooked women intellectuals, but she has been overlooked no more. First, Spectator Back Bencher of the year, now seconding the Loyal Address, and soon, no doubt, in Government. And she was not the only member of her household to win an award last year. Her Bedlington terrier, Zack, won the Westminster dog of the year prize in October, although I understand that he was run very close in the sit-up-and-beg competition by the new Northern Ireland Minister, Mr. Woodward. As for the title "best-groomed poodle", I believe that Mr. Milburn has ruled himself out this year. In contrast, the hon. and learned Lady, of course, has always been her own woman and she was not described as one of the brightest of the 2001 intake for nothing. Her speech today was a model of its kind.

I congratulate the Prime Minister on his election victory. The people have spoken and of course we respect their verdict. They elected a Labour Government, but they also voted for a stronger Conservative Opposition to hold the Government to account.

I also welcome the new Members on both sides of the House. This is a new intake of high calibre and we look forward to their contributions.

Immediately after the election, the Prime Minister said that he would now deliver on the people's priorities. As I said at the time, whenever he does so, we will support him and these days the Prime Minister needs all the support that he can get. His former Transport Minister says that he should go "sooner rather than later." His former Sports Minister says:

"Every MP that comes back will tell him just how unpopular he was."

And his former Health Secretary, Frank Dobson, described him as "an enormous liability." But perhaps the best advice came from someone who worked with him even more closely than they did: the former Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, who gave us the benefit of his reflections in a recent article in the Evening Standard. He mused:

"We have all been here at some point in our lives. Most of us have known a friend who clings to a relationship long after the other partner has any appetite for it. We have sighed when they plead for one more chance or another full term. Eventually, one of us takes our friend down to the pub for a pint and tells him it is over."

Now perhaps I can offer the Prime Minister some advice of my own. It comes from personal experience. The way to get your colleagues to ask you to stay is to set a timetable for your departure. I hope that the Prime Minister will take that advice in the constructive way in which it is intended.

The Prime Minister said the day after the election that he had listened and learned, and that this time he would "focus relentlessly" on people's priorities. The signs, I fear, are not encouraging. Take the crisis in manufacturing. During the general election campaign, we saw the closure of Rover—a tragedy for thousands of workers and their families and a painful reminder of the problems faced by manufacturing industry. Britain's competitive position is under threat. What was the Prime Minister's response? He looked at this policy on trade and industry, and what did he do? Did he change the policy? Did he change the direction? To give him credit, he did take decisive action: he decided to give the Department of Trade and Industry a new name—a name designed to show that it was a great new organ of government: a Department for Productivity, Energy and Industry, but he had not looked at the acronym. The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry told the Financial Times that the Department had attracted "various descriptions", including "Dippy". When asked whose bright idea that was, he replied:

"I don't know. It certainly wasn't mine."

That is not the only thing on which the Prime Minister did not get his way. It is not just the names of the Departments: he was thwarted in deciding which Minister goes where. He was not able to get the Trade and Industry Secretary he wanted. He was not able to get the Education Secretary he wanted. He was not able to get the Health Secretary he wanted. He has been saddled with second-choice Ministers, but at least one person is delighted with his job: the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. He says:

"It's a fantastic privilege to be Secretary of State for Northern Ireland—having a castle to stay in".

Alas, his new deputy, the hon. Member for St. Helens, South, thinks differently. He is going to find his room a bit pokey and I am told that it has only got one butler.

Then there is the new Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Defence, Lord Drayson. Parliamentary Under-Secretaries spend lots of time travelling to far-flung places where the British flag still flies: Gibraltar, the Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands—all locations with which he and his tax advisers are very familiar indeed.

What about the Minister the Prime Minister forgot, the Minister for Women whom he appointed as an afterthought? He asks her to do the job in her spare time and tells her that she is not going to be paid. So much for the manifesto promise to narrow the pay gap between men and women.

We welcome many measures in the Government's programme. For example, we support legislation that will genuinely help in the fight against terrorism. We support any legislation that will restore the integrity of the voting system, which was recently described as something that would "disgrace a banana republic". But why are the Government continuing to ignore the advice of the Electoral Commission that voters should register individually? Why are on earth will the Government not agree to that?

In Northern Ireland, we support the Government's efforts to secure a comprehensive agreement, but there should be no place in government for any party that is engaged in crime or maintains its own private army. I hope that the Prime Minister will agree that the onus is now firmly on the republican movement to deliver what it promised in 1998.

I pay tribute once again to the courage and professionalism of British troops serving around the world, and especially in Iraq. The killing of Anthony Wakefield is a tragic reminder of the bravery that they show day by day.

The world faces many other challenges. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in Darfur. I repeat the view already expressed many times from these Benches that urgent action should be taken to bring that killing to an end, starting with a new resolution at the Security Council of the United Nations.

The Gracious Speech also mentioned Britain's presidency this year of both the G8 and the European Union. That gives us a singular opportunity to press for reform on the international stage and, in particular, to lift people out of poverty by fighting for freer and fairer trade. We also, of course, support a referendum on the European constitution. Will the Prime Minister confirm to the House the Government's unequivocal commitment to giving the British people a vote on that constitution even if other countries vote no? If he does so, why will he not name the day for the referendum?

The day after the election, the Prime Minister set out his priorities, the priorities that are meant to be reflected in the programme before us today: controlled immigration, school discipline, cleaner hospitals and police. Come to think of it, they sound rather familiar to me. In fact, it is almost a complete set. We had no idea that he was thinking what we are thinking. The only one of the five that is missing is lower taxes. I wonder why.

In looking at the Government's programme, our position is clear. Where the Government do the right thing, we will support them. We support more choice in schools and hospitals, and greater use of the independent sector where it provides quality and value for money—likewise with genuine reform of incapacity benefit and proper controls on immigration. On these measures, if the Prime Minister means what he says, takes a stand on the things that matter and sends a clear message to his Back Benchers, we will support him.

The Prime Minister's manifesto set out new Labour's commitments for a third term. In his first two terms, he found it impossible to keep just five pledges but, for his third term, there are 274. I suppose that he hopes that people will not notice when he breaks them. He says that there will be a points system for immigration, but what is the point of a points system without a limit? Is it not utterly pointless?

What of health reform? The Prime Minister was absolutely astonished to discover what everyone else knew: that his GP targets stop people getting an appointment when they want one. It is not just GP targets that are a problem. Hospital targets are too. We know that they stop hospitals dealing effectively with the superbug. The chief executive of the NHS himself says so.

I was pleased to hear that the Government are to introduce measures to provide for cleaner hospitals, but I was less encouraged to hear the Secretary of State say that, if hospitals fail, she will prosecute them. A simpler solution would be just to get rid of the targets. If only the Prime Minister would listen to his chief policy adviser, Matthew Taylor, who said:

"The downside of targets are several. One is that you get perverse outcomes . . . A second is that people cheat . . . But perhaps the greatest problem of targets is that they deny autonomy to frontline managers".

The reason why the Prime Minister will not scrap the targets is that he does not trust people. He does not trust professionals, parents or patients to make decisions themselves. In the misguided words of the Chancellor, Ministers do not know any other way than targets to achieve value for money.

The Prime Minister says—the hon. and learned Member for Redcar referred to this—that he wants to restore respect in Britain. I agree, and I have said so many times. Let me suggest one practical way in which we can do that. If children do not learn to respect their teachers at school, they will not respect others when they grow up. The one thing that would most encourage respect in the classroom would be to give head teachers complete control over what happens in their schools. That is the way to teach children respect at an early age, so if the Prime Minister takes action to bring that about, we will support him. The minority should never be allowed to ruin the education of the majority of the children in our schools.

The Prime Minister also promises a regulatory reform Bill—it is certainly needed. Just in the past fortnight, we have had figures showing bankruptcy up, insolvency up and more job losses on the way. Meanwhile, production, retail sales and manufacturing orders are all down. What is the Labour party's response? Last week, the Prime Minister's own Members of the European Parliament voted for more burdens to be placed on British business by abolishing the individual opt-out from the working time directive. His manifesto promised that the Government would work hard with Labour MEPs and would

"ensure that EU regulations are proportionate", yet days after the election, in the first test of the Prime Minister's authority, his MEPs completely ignored him and voted for a measure that he described as "wrong" and "completely misguided". He has not even got the authority to get his Members of the European Parliament to listen to him.

It is not only red tape, but tax, too, so I want to remind the Prime Minister of his election promises on tax. On 15 April, it was put to him that almost every expert thought that he was

"going to have to raise National Insurance after the election".

He said:

"I don't agree with that at all".

On 20 April, he was asked:

"You are going to have to raise taxes after the election, aren't you?"

He said, "No".

On 28 April, he was asked:

"what new stealth taxes do you plan to introduce first?"

He said:

"well, I don't plan any".

There we have it: no increase in national insurance, no new stealth taxes and no raising of taxes at all. We shall not forget those promises. We will hold the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer personally responsible for each and every one of them.

I hope that those pledges prove more durable than those of the Liberal Democrats. Their education spokesman says that they might be offering tax cuts next time round. The decapitated Liberal Democrat ex-Member for Guildford said that the local income tax was unpopular with hard-working couples. What a surprise.

Peter Hain promised that this programme of legislation would be

"a really strong, radical, fizzy first Queen's Speech."

He said:

"it's going to surprise people".

However, he was the one with the surprise coming because he is no longer Leader of the House. For the rest of the country, all we have had so far is more fizzy rhetoric. What matters now is delivery.

It is time to reward people who do the right thing: the people who play by the rules, work hard and take responsibility for themselves and their families. It is also time to restore respect in our society: to tackle the yob culture head on, to restore discipline in schools and to ensure that the punishment fits the crime. The Prime Minister talks about these things, so for the sake of our country, I hope that his actions will finally match his words. If they do, we will support him, but whatever happens, this party will hold him to account for the promises that he has made to the British people.

I congratulate the proposer and seconder of the Loyal Address on their excellent speeches. My right hon. Friend Mr. Barron and I have known and worked with each other for a long time, having both entered Parliament in 1983 on the back of a disastrous election defeat for our party. In those days, of course, winning just 209 seats was regarded as a catastrophic result for an Opposition party. Nowadays, it is apparently a cause for delirious celebrations. Within a few years, he and I were working closely together as shadow Energy Ministers, where his personal expertise as a former miner went some way to compensate for my total ignorance of the subject.

My right hon. Friend came to the House with a rich and interesting history. Just two years before he was elected a Member of Parliament, he had been Arthur Scargill's successful campaign manager for the National Union of Mineworkers presidency elections. Who knows? If he had stuck with those politics, he might have made a new recruit for the Liberal Democrats, but, fortunately, he did not. As an MP for a mining constituency and sponsored by the NUM, it took enormous bravery for him to stand up and criticise the leadership of his union over the handling of the strike. Despite savage personal attacks on him, he never flinched or gave ground. His principled stand won him the respect of Members of Parliament of all parties at the time.

My right hon. Friend's courage was also seen as he began the long and difficult job of modernising the party. As Parliamentary Private Secretary to Neil Kinnock, he did it with great skill and loyalty. He took on the job of heading the new clause 4 campaign with enthusiasm and dedication. I congratulate him on the same determination he has shown in his long campaign to reduce the death toll from smoking. I know that he is proud of this Government's action to curb tobacco advertising, but that he is determined to continue pressing us to do more to tackle that threat to public health. His was a superb speech. It showed not just ability but judgment and character. He deserves our heartiest congratulations.

My hon. and learned Friend Vera Baird is also to be warmly congratulated. Like my right hon. Friend, she has a surprisingly colourful history. There cannot be many barmaids at a Pontin's holiday camp who have gone on to become one of the country's top QCs. When I asked my colleagues last night what I should say about her, one advised me to make a few jokes about women from working-class backgrounds who are staunch feminists and go on to become highly successful QCs. I thought about it and I simply say how deeply I admire such people.

I understand that my hon. and learned Friend was at first going to be a medical student, but decided that she would rather spend her time dissecting arguments than bodies. Medicine's loss has been the law and politics' gain. Her expert and passionate advocacy on behalf of the victims of rape and domestic violence in high-profile court cases has had a profound impact on how the modern law and the criminal justice process have evolved. Her energy, vitality and principle have made her a contributor to this House's debates, and she is respected by Members on both sides. As I represent a seat not far away from her constituency, in the north-east—a region, by the way, where our party held every single seat on 5 May—I know how successfully, through hard work, she has won the trust and respect of our constituents.

My hon. and learned Friend once said:

"The only way a working class girl from Oldham was able to become a QC was because of Labour Governments that saw the point in providing decent dry housing, good healthcare and free education for children like me. I want to repay some of that and make sure that others have the same chance."

There could be no better way of summing up the central purpose of this historic Labour third term.

Now for Mr. Howard. He made some fun at my expense, but I say good luck to him for the future. Let me gently remind him, however, which party won and which lost the election. He has 197 MPs. We have 356, and I stand here and he sits there. After only three elections since the war has the Conservative party had fewer than 200 seats—this was one, and the others were in 1997 and 2001. The truth is that the people were not thinking what he was thinking. Unfortunately, they were remembering what we were remembering: 15 per cent. interest rates, 3 million unemployed, two recessions and under-investment in our public services.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman can put all of that behind him now, but his speech was rather like the election campaign: there were a few good lines but no real vision for the future of our country. He and the Conservative party did not just lose the election—they lost the argument in the course of the election. On the economy, their mixture of spending increases, tax cuts and borrowing cuts swiftly collapsed. On public services, we had the spectacle of the Conservatives being willing to do doing anything other than engage in debate on their flagship vouchers policies. The oddest thing about the election was that we were more interested in discussing Tory policy than the Tories were.

Where are those policies now? Who will defend cutting £35 billion from Labour's spending programmes now? [Interruption.] I am being told, "Get on." I assume that that policy has gone now. [Interruption.] Oh, so the Tories did not say that they would cut £35 billion from our spending programmes. Oh yes they did. How about national health service vouchers—has that policy gone too? Have school vouchers? As a parting present, can we now be told—I know that they know—where was that fantasy asylum island?

Now, the battle is on for the leadership—the fifth Tory leader I will have faced. The most profound question in that debate appears to be to wear a tie, or not to wear a tie? Aspirant Tory leaders fall over themselves to appear tieless on TV—it is not so much a policy statement as a fashion statement. No wonder I am told that Lord Saatchi has left—to be replaced by Lord Gucci, no doubt. The only candidates—there is quite a field—who seem to stand no chance are those on the right and the left of the Tory party who want to debate policy. The most intelligent analysis of the state of the Tory party—I mean no disrespect to him—came from John Bercow, who was immediately condemned by his leader as disloyal. However, the ultra-moderniser, the new party chairman, came to the rescue in his interview in this morning's Financial Times, which reports:

"Tim Yeo, leadership contender and former shadow cabinet member, has suggested that true modernisers needed to do more than just 'just appear on television without a tie'. But even Mr Yeo would concede that Mr Maude goes the extra modernising mile: he conducted his interview with the FT in his socks."

The mind boggles as to where further acts of modernisation might take us. That is today's Tory party: tieless, shoeless but, above all, clueless. It is not clothing the Tories need to discard, it is policy, and the sooner they realise that, the better. However, the party chairman got one thing right when he concluded his interview by saying:

"We need to look forward not back."

How right he is.

Not that the Liberal Democrats are any better. I understand that they have ditched the policies on which they fought the election, instituted a major policy review and now have a policy blank page. If they take my advice, the page will remain that way—it is more in keeping with their politics. Theirs is the party of Gladstone, Lloyd George, Beveridge, Keynes and, now, Brian Sedgemore—[Laughter.] They run to the right of Labour in Tory constituencies and to the left of Labour in Labour constituencies. In this Parliament, we are going to make them choose.

Only one serious programme for government was put forward in the election—the one that is now in the Queen's Speech. At the heart of the Queen's Speech are policies that prepare our economy for the future, continue the investment in and reform of the national health service and our education system, and protect our citizens from terrorism and crime. They are quintessentially new Labour: economic prosperity combined with social justice, right in 1997, being delivered now in 2005.

Does the Prime Minister still intend to serve out a full term? In any circumstances will he change his mind?

I have already dealt with that, in the course of the election campaign and afterwards. I think that my leadership of my party has been a bit more successful than the hon. Gentleman's leadership of his party. I say frankly, and probably to the delight of my colleagues, that when I do leave the leadership, I will not be coming back again.

The right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe said that it was time that we delivered. Let us consider the state of the NHS today. We have 80,000 more nurses and 27,000 more doctors than in 1997. As for the estate of the NHS, 10 years ago, half of the buildings had been built before the NHS was created, and now such buildings represent only a quarter of the estate. There are more than 100 new hospital projects open or under way. Waiting lists are down to the lowest level for 17 years. I shall take two examples. In cardiac care, in 1997, more than 1,000 patients waited for a year to receive their treatment. Some of them waited two years. Many died waiting. Now it is a maximum of three months. There are 2.5 million patients treated with the right drugs, up from 300,000 in 1997. Heart deaths this year are 27 per cent. down on 1997.

In 1997, people often waited more than 18 months for treatment for cataracts, but now it is three months, with double the number of operations. That has been achieved by investment and by modernisation, and the process will continue. There is payment by results where hospitals are paid for the work that they do and patients have a choice of which hospital they go to. There is practice-based commissioning so that general practitioners can choose the most appropriate care. The "Agenda for Change" in the work force has meant that the number of nurses in training is up by 60 per cent. Medical school places are up by 70 per cent. GPs in Britain are paid roughly twice as much as they are in France, but in exchange for old demarcations and practices going and new ways of working.

Just a few weeks ago the King's Fund audit of the NHS said:

"Overall, in our view, the results of this audit are very positive. The ambition for the NHS has been appropriately high. There has been unprecedented investment. There have been significant improvements in most areas that the Government have focused policies on. Has there been a 'step-change' in NHS performance? If step-change means a significant shift of gear, with more and better services, then yes there has."

We accept, however, that there is much more to do. We shall introduce measures to improve public health with the ban on smoking in public places. There will be further money and modernisation to give NHS patients, by 2008, an 18-week maximum wait—and that is from the door of the GP to the door of the operating theatre. The average wait will be nine weeks. There will be a choice of hospital by 2008 and all breast and bowel cancer referrals will be done within two weeks. Under this Government, however, NHS money will be spent for NHS patients and treatment will remain free at the point of use.

In education, likewise, there has been delivery. By 2008, if we continue investing, investment per pupil will have doubled since 1997. In 1997, there were only 83 secondary schools which were non-selective and achieved the result of more than 70 per cent. of pupils with five good GCSEs. Today, the figure is 400. There are 130,000 more support staff and 30,000 more teachers in our education system. The number of failing schools has halved. There are 300,000 young people with education maintenance allowances. There are more teacher training places available than at any time since the 1980s. Teachers' pay is up by 25 per cent. in real terms. Again, we accept that there is much more to do: extending specialist schools, the new city academies, the ability to gain foundation powers for all schools and guaranteed three-year budgets. There will be no return to selection at age 11 and the money spent will be spent on state pupils in state schools.

I congratulate the Prime Minister on his party's re-election. I want to ask him about another area of public investment. He supports choice and diversity in policy on health and education. Will he apply the same approach to local councils and local council housing so that councils that want to keep council housing can do so and council tenants who want to stay council tenants can choose to do so too?

Surely, the whole point is that we are allowing the tenants themselves to choose. Some of them have chosen to make the changes because they think that they will receive a better service.

As for child care, there will be a duty on local authorities to provide extended child care between 8 am and 6 pm for children aged three to 14. Sure Start will be expanded. Let us remember that, when we came to office, child benefit had been frozen, there was no working families tax credit, maternity pay was £55 a week and paid maternity leave was only 14 weeks. Now, child benefit is up by 25 per cent. in real terms, the child tax credit benefits millions of families in this country and maternity pay is more than double what it was. Maternity leave is 26 weeks, it will be increased to nine months and, in time, to one year. That is a Labour Government delivering for the people of this country.

There is, however, a need to make further reforms to our welfare system. A total of 1.2 million people have been helped through the new deal, including lone parents, young people and disabled people. I believe that the new deal has worked well for the people of this country. I remember that when my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley and I were first campaigning, people used to talk about skivvy schemes. They used to talk about young people being taken off the dole, given a programme for a short period and then being put back on the dole. No one describes the new deal like that, and I urge both Opposition parties to drop their rejection of it. It is a good programme delivering real opportunities to people who need them, and it should have received our wholehearted support in the House.

Reform of the public services and the welfare state is one theme of the Queen's Speech. Another focus is on continuing to cut crime, the fear of crime and, in particular, antisocial behaviour. Antisocial behaviour measures have been built up over several years and, in many cases, work well. I remind the House that there have been over 90,000 fixed penalty notices and 4,000 antisocial behaviour orders. Hundreds of houses used by drug dealers have been shut and millions of pounds of their assets have been seized. There are an extra 13,000 police and 5,000 community support officers. The new legislation will crack down on imitation firearms and target knife crime and binge drinking. It will tighten antisocial behaviour laws and give the police new powers to tackle drug dealing. In addition to the record numbers of police, there will be a further 20,000 community support officers. When we first introduced CSOs, they were a bone of contention in the House and were opposed by many hon. Members. Again, I hope that all parties now accept the contribution that they make and will support them.

Does the Prime Minister believe that he made a mistake by reclassifying cannabis?

We have asked for advice from the misuse of drugs professional panel, and we expect to receive it in the next couple of weeks. If it advises us to change that decision, we will do so. If it does not, we will obviously have to consider that. However, I believe that the most important thing that we can do is to support the measures that we have already introduced on crime and drugs and the measures that we are going to introduce on violent crime. I hope that we will receive the support of people such as the hon. Gentleman and, for once, the Liberal Democrats on tough measures to deal with crime.

In addition, we will continue to invest in our young people, who need places to go and things to do. We will expand the youth service, sport in schools, Sure Start and the inner city new deal. Let us be clear, however—we can, and will, put a visible uniformed presence back on our streets. People want that visible uniformed presence on our streets. We can and will give the police new powers. We can invest more in our young people, but bringing a proper sense of respect and responsibility to others is not the job of Government and Parliament alone. Parents, local communities and local people must join law makers and law enforcers to make a difference. I believe that we all know what we want in the House. It is completely unacceptable that law-abiding people should be in fear of a lawless minority. It is time to reclaim the streets for the decent majority, and all of us in Parliament and in the country should work to that end.

Today's asylum figures show how much progress has been made in sorting out the system. The number of monthly applications is now at its lowest level since March 1997, but there is much more to do. New immigration laws will strengthen our protection against abuse while protecting our country's deserved reputation as a place of tolerance and help for those in need. Measures taken already—for example, in respect of bogus marriages and non-existent student colleges—are yielding results. The points system for working and tougher penalties for illegal trafficking in people will also help. However, I reject quotas for asylum or immigration. In the case of asylum, they are unfair. In the case of immigration, they are unworkable. Not once during the election campaign could the Conservatives properly explain how they would work.

Long term, the solution is identity cards. By 2008, we will need to have biometric passports because of the United States and the European Union moving towards biometric visa requirements. In addition, we need ID cards as soon as possible for foreign nationals entering Britain on more than a short-term visa. Any ID card scheme will take time to set up. It is essential that we begin now. It is a manifesto commitment and we will honour it. I urge other parties to think carefully before opposing what is necessary for our security, to combat fraud and to tackle illegal immigration, and a measure that the new technology makes the obvious policy for security in the times in which we live.

This is a busy legislative programme focused absolutely on the priorities set by the British people. Other issues include reform of the fraud laws, measures to combat the compensation culture, a Bill outlawing incitement to religious hatred in the same way as racial hatred is dealt with, regulatory reform, the new EU accession Bill and the new equality commission. Of course, if we are successful in our bid to host the 2012 Olympics, a Bill to ensure that that happens will be brought before the House, and I am sure that it will have the support of the whole House.

The Queen's Speech protects traditional universal public services free at the point of use, but insists that with the extra investment must come the modernisation that today's patients, parents and pupils demand. It provides for a welfare state that helps those in need, but insists that those who can work do so. It takes forward the agenda on law and order that has seen antisocial behaviour legislation introduced and more police and community support officers and it sends a clear signal that we want a modern society in Britain free from the old prejudices, but with the rules, order and proper respect due to each other as equal citizens. It enables us to have the immigration that our economy needs, but properly controlled with a system that is fair and compassionate.

Compare Britain in 1997 and Britain in 2005—our economy stronger and 2 million more jobs, our public services improving, crime falling, poverty cut and opportunity increased. If we use our presidency of the G8 in the right way, we can help to make poverty history in Africa. I agree with the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe that we should always pay tribute to and support our armed forces wherever they are in the world and most particularly now in Iraq. There is a lot to do, but much progress has been made in the past eight years. The Queen's Speech shows the Government's renewed energy, purpose and ambition to build on the achievements so far and to move faster and further in the direction that the country wants, in our public services, in reform of our welfare state and in tackling crime and antisocial behaviour. That is what the country voted for, and I commend it to the House.

rose—[Interruption.]

Order. Will hon. Members please leave the Chamber quietly?

It is my pleasure to join in the congratulations to Mr. Barron. Together with the leader of the Conservative party and the Prime Minister, we both joined in the class of '83, and a very good intake it was that year, when we all look back. Through both personal and parliamentary acquaintance over the past 22 years, I know the integrity that the right hon. Gentleman has brought to politics. From the evidence that I submitted during the previous Parliament, I also know of his studious, sustained and important work as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. I pay warm tribute to him.

In the course of his remarks, the right hon. Gentleman mentioned a new Conservative Member who had been a former opponent of his. It turns out that Vera Baird, who also spoke, was a former Labour opponent of my right hon. Friend Mr. Beith. Indeed, my right hon. Friend has pointed out to me that there are now four Members of the House who were former opponents of his—two Labour and two Conservative. We congratulate them. At this general election my right hon. Friend had the unique experience of one of his former Labour opponents from days gone by becoming his defeated Conservative opponent. If we are looking for a barometer of who may or may not move on, or who may move elsewhere completely and still not move on in British politics, Berwick-upon-Tweed is clearly that barometer.

As the Prime Minister made a humorous personal reference to his domestic circumstances, perhaps I might just be allowed one personal word of my own. I say thank you to the Prime Minister, to the Conservative party leader and to the many personal friends from all parties on both sides of the House who, during the course of the campaign, have been so kind and generous privately to my wife and myself with the arrival of our first born.

That was one arrival, but today marks another. This is the biggest intake at a general election in the Liberal tradition in British politics for over 80 years—and what a welcome arrival it is. It will add to the health and quality of debate in the House in the Parliament ahead. When we look at the plethora of proposed legislation before us and remind ourselves that it was only a few short months ago that the previous comprehensive Queen's speech was introduced, with 37 possible items of legislation—many of which had to be cut short because of the likely date of the election that we had all anticipated, and which most of us knew would never reach the statute book—and also remember that the Government had a three-figure majority before this election, the experience of the past few months makes the case strongly for fixed-term Parliaments to ensure that so much legislative time is not squandered on legislation that then has to be reintroduced, which is exactly what is happening now.

There is another wider reflection that is not just for Liberal Democrats. It has already been a matter of some discussion within both the Labour party and the Conservative party, and quite rightly in the latter case as the party that out-polled the Government in England at this general election. The Government secured only 36 per cent. of the votes cast and a little over a quarter of those able to vote. Surely there is a lesson for us all here, because each and every party now must reflect on the fact that to greater or lesser extents we are competing minorities across the country.

That has one important implication. Since 1947, the House of Lords has operated the Salisbury convention, which recognises that back then, nearly 60 years ago, there was a majority Labour Government but an overwhelmingly Conservative hereditary-dominated House of Lords. Hence that convention to respect a mandate from a Government elected in this House, even though they could not command a majority in the other House. It is worth reminding ourselves that compared with this election, in those days the Labour majority in this House was 146, supported by 48 per cent. of the popular vote cast at that election. What a far cry from where we find ourselves today in this House—but also what a far cry from the position that the Prime Minister has set up in the other House, because now, for the first time in history, Labour is the largest single party in the House of Lords and the hereditary element has rightly been largely eroded and may yet be completely withdrawn.

The Government should not, particularly on bitterly contentious items such as Lords reform and identity cards, fall back on such an inadequate basis of election here to force through that legislation and expect the House of Lords to be acquiescent. It is absolutely ridiculous that this Government should now fall back on a 60-year-old convention relating to absolutely different political circumstances in order to justify the contents of today's Queen's Speech.

The second and related issue is, of course, the voting system itself. I mentioned the experience in England of the Conservatives, but despite out-polling Labour in England they have no representation in any of the major English cities outside London. Is that healthy for the geographical representation of the body politic? The result of this election yet again underlines that first-past-the-post voting in this day and age is a redundant system that belongs to a redundant age of British politics. British society is more fluid and party allegiances are much less fixed, and our society as a whole is more aspirational as a result. Therefore, the time has surely come to revisit—as the Prime Minister promised but reneged on when first elected Prime Minister—the whole issue of voting reform in this country. It is no longer a question, as in days gone by, of just those in the Liberal tradition feeling particularly hard done by; there are now losers in every party and in every part of the country. That is why the duty is surely on us all to look at this issue afresh.

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for raising the issue of proportional representation. It is clear from the election result that many Labour voters actually voted Liberal. How can it be fair, honest or right that there be proportional representation, when such a switch of votes would lead back to a Labour Government with a Liberal element?

In the closing stages of the campaign—to be fair to the Prime Minister, during last week's press conference at No. 10 he was unusually candid on this matter—the Prime Minister was urging people not to be tempted into voting Liberal Democrat because they might end up with a Conservative Government. If I had been in his shoes—at the end of eight years in office that were buttressed by three-figure majorities, and in the closing stages of a campaign in which he was seeking this historic Labour third term—I would have had something a bit more positive and persuasive to put to the public than the argument, "Don't vote for that lot, even though you don't like me and us, because you might end up with somebody even more to your disliking." What kind of contortion and absolute distortion of people's votes is that?

I come now to some of the headline legislation before us today. We will certainly maintain our consistent and principled opposition to a system of compulsory national identity cards. We have been through many of these arguments before and we look forward very happily—particularly in the light of a reduced Labour majority—to replaying those arguments and to seeing how attention to them may have shifted with opinion in the parliamentary Labour party and, indeed, in the wider country.

Our views on health, education and benefit reform were set out at the general election. We need to look closely at the legislation before us, but it is clear that there are differences between the parties over the shape of the required reform. We oppose the imposition of top-up fees and tuition fees on our students. I heard the hon. and learned Member for Redcar speak movingly and sincerely about her ability to get up the ladder of social opportunity. I simply ask her and her colleagues this question: to what extent has that ladder been pulled up behind us, away from the current generation whom we are trying to help?

We also oppose the centralisation of targets in the health service, which, as we argued during the election, is distorting clinical priorities; indeed, there is agreement on this issue in many respects. We also continue to favour reducing class sizes in our schools and the accompanying boost to the teaching profession. We are all for diversity in the provision of quality public services. However, what most of us realised during the campaign is that real choice means people knowing that they can receive for themselves and their families at the point of need—and based on need, not ability to pay—quality local provision, whether it be at the school, the hospital or whatever. That is preferable to the false idea of having massive choice, which really involves travel, complexity and all the rest of it, and it is certainly the approach that we shall continue to advocate.

What advice would the right hon. Gentleman consider appropriate for reforming the health service in England on the basis of the Scottish example, where the Liberal Democrats are in government but waiting times are up?

My advice to the hon. Gentleman, given that we have all been through the democratic experience, is that the Liberal Democrats, who are in the coalition Executive in Scotland, must be doing something right because they are now, for the first time ever in a general election, second in Scotland. I am also delighted to say that the Scottish National party, like Plaid Cymru in Wales, is emphatically down—[Interruption.] I am going to move on, Mr. Speaker.

The issue of terrorism was highly contentious both here and in the other place in the run-up to the election, but I know that this Parliament is going to return to anti-terror legislation. We all understand why there was a partisan atmosphere in the run-up to the election, but I nevertheless hope that, when we revisit the legislation, it may yet prove possible to establish an all-party consensus on the matter. Such a consensus must surely remain true to the principles that several of us argued for in the last Parliament—not least the principle that key decisions about individual liberty should never be in the hands of an over-mighty Executive, but should remain under long-established judicial control. At the same time, we have to balance that alongside the continuing need to be vigilant about combating terrorism.

Will the right hon. Gentleman tell us how negative and partisan it was to spend the entire election complaining that Labour and the Conservatives were fighting negative campaigns?

I was simply responding to consumer questioning on that matter. To be fair to the right hon. Gentleman, although I am about a million miles removed from most of his opinions, I pay tribute to him as a parliamentarian who is often a generator of fresh thinking and ideas, which he puts forward for public debate. I would encourage him to continue to do so, as I believe that it also helps the Liberal Democrats on many occasions.

There is another area in which it is vital to re-establish what was a long-standing all-party consensus until the Conservatives arbitrarily broke it when they were in government. I refer to long-term pensions policy. By definition, such policy should be something on which the individual citizen can rely with a degree of certainty, irrespective of the vagaries of elections and which parties find themselves in office. When we see the further report of Adair Turner later this year, I hope that it will be possible to return to a sane debate in which Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats work together, as happened in the early 1970s after years of dispute. It should be possible for us to revisit that and have a more co-ordinated and less disjointed approach.

Penultimately, there is local taxation reform, on which we advanced positive views during the election. They proved controversial—much criticised by some, warmly applauded by others, which is what elections should be about.

rose—

I shall carry on, if the right hon. Gentleman will forgive me.

It is clear that the Government will return later this year to the funding of local government and I hope to see a more informed debate based on sensible proposals rather than a rejection of each and every idea that comes from every other quarter than the Government's. The Conservative party introduced the council tax and the Labour Government will have to reform it. They know as well as anyone else how deeply unpopular and regressive that tax is, and it is clearly not sustainable. The Conservatives introduced it only in response to the complete and hideous shambles that was the poll tax, which led to the demise of their leader at the time.

The poll tax and the council tax followed on from the old rating system. That, too, was completely unsustainable, but had been supported by both Labour and Conservative Governments. Therefore, I shall take no lectures from people who presided over such a mess in respect of local taxation. That is why I shall continue to make the case for a local income tax.

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

I am sorry, no.

My final point has to do with Britain's role in the world. There was, rightly, much discussion of the Iraq issue during the election campaign. We remain of the view that we should be planning a responsible and phased withdrawal of our troops from Iraq, not just in this Parliament but in this calendar year.

There were obvious controversies and leaks during the campaign, but I regret that we did not have a broader discussion of Britain's role in the world. Whatever happens in the French referendum to be held in a week or two, this Parliament is bound to be dominated by the European debate, and correctly so. It is time for us to make a positive case for Europe—one that engages and persuades the public. Those. Members of all parties who had informal contact in the previous Parliament must work as never before. Moreover, the Government must be seen to be heavily engaged in the argument. We must go out and make the positive case for Europe and ensure a yes vote in whatever referendum comes down the track. The pro-European parties secured 58 per cent. of all the votes cast in the election. That is very encouraging, but we must be prepared to build on it.

The outcome of the election confirmed one of the developments of recent years in politics. There is a need for the Liberal voice to be heard in party politics, in Parliament and in public on many of the issues that face us today. The Labour Government won only a marginal mandate, but they want to introduce illiberal measures. They can be assured that they will receive a Liberal response from those on these Benches—and that that will be good for the quality of our politics as a whole.

It is a pleasure, Mr. Speaker, to be called so early in the debate, and to follow Mr. Kennedy. He spoke about proportional representation, which was not mentioned in the Labour manifesto. The Government have made no commitment in that regard, and the subject did not appear in the Queen's Speech. The right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber said that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister had reneged on his commitment to proportional representation, but he will remember that my right hon. Friend set up a commission under the late Lord Jenkins to look into the matter. That commission produced a very good report, but it did not lead anywhere.

I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber for finishing his speech on the high note of Europe. I want to make that the most important element of my contribution, given the commitment in the Queen's Speech to a debate on the referendum in the first instance, which will be followed by the appropriate legislation and then the referendum itself. The Leader of the Opposition called for a date for that referendum. We do not yet have that date, but I have no doubt that the referendum will be held, regardless of the outcome of similar procedures in any other European country.

I turn now to the royal prerogative, which used to mean that no treaty was required to be approved by Parliament or the people of this country. However, the Government passed the royal prerogative to this House when we agreed to go to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. We are now to go still further, by passing the royal prerogative to the people of our country, who will decide in a referendum whether to ratify the European constitution treaty. The right hon. Anthony Benn—or Wedgwood Benn, or Tony Benn, however he wishes to be called—will be very pleased about that. He has argued for many years against the use of the royal prerogative in respect of wars or treaties. This Government have passed the royal prerogative to the people themselves, and that is a very interesting development.

Does the hon. Gentleman support the view of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, given during the election, that the royal prerogative should be given up completely in relation to decisions about war, and a decision always made by Parliament? Does he support our view that the use of the royal prerogative should cease completely and that treaties and decisions about war and peace should be made by Parliament, not the Executive?

Yes. I agree with the Chancellor and with the proposition that the hon. Gentleman has put forward. Clearly, if the royal prerogative were passed to Parliament on the question of war and if we pass the royal prerogative to the people on the question of the treaty, it could never go back again. That is a development in our constitution that we should all welcome. The right hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn—Tony Benn—would, as I said, welcome that more than anyone.

The destiny of the treaty establishing a constitution for Europe is in the hands of United Kingdom citizens. When the referendum comes, they will have an important decision to make. That decision will affect not only this generation, but generations yet unborn. Mr. Speaker earlier urged us to have a careful debate and to be polite among ourselves as we discuss points with care and interest. When it comes to the European debate, we ought to be careful with the facts and to ensure that we have a proper debate that can go out to the country so that the country can make its decision. As the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber said, some 58 per cent. of those who voted in the general election voted for parties in favour of a yes vote.

There have been references to the 1983 election from my right hon. Friend Mr. Barron, from the Leader of the Opposition and from my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister. We fought that election on a manifesto that called for peace, jobs and freedom. As The Guardian succinctly, if drily, said, that was better than fighting for war, the dole and slavery. If we think about the history of our continent over the past 60 years, however, we can see that we have lived in peace from one end of it to the other, apart from the difficulties in Northern Ireland—I am glad to see Rev. Ian Paisley in his place—and on the eastern front in Kosovo and such places. We have had peace in Europe, and that is due in no small measure to the fact that the European nation states wished to come together, did come together and have stayed together ever since. We tend to overlook the fact that the continent was riven by war for 1,000 years, and I ask any Member who cannot sleep at night to dip into Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", where he or she will find that for many generations before nation states existed, tribes in Europe were also involved in warfare.

My hon. Friend is a passionate European who has fought the European cause for as long as he has been in Parliament. Does he take the point made by the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Mr. Kennedy, that we should gear up for the referendum campaign? It is not just a question of having debates in the House. The Government have to lead a proactive campaign in the country if we are to win the referendum, if it comes next year.

I may, I think, commit the Government to there being a referendum next year, regardless of the outcome of the French referendum. The 25 nation states in Europe must make up their minds, and it is not a question of one saying no and the rest of us turning tail on the European treaty. A decision will have to come to the British people, but my hon. Friend Keith Vaz makes a valid point. In France, the treaty has been sent to every French household. It is a very lengthy treaty, but that was an important thing to do. For a while, it became a bestseller in stores. When that happened, the no vote became a yes vote in the opinion polls. My contribution today, following as it does the contribution of the leader of the Liberal Democrats, is the beginning of a campaign, in so far as we can engineer a campaign. Clearly, though, the campaign must be Government led, and it is a matter of some regret that the Conservative Opposition maintain their opposition to the European Union, even though it was a Conservative Prime Minister in 1972 who took us in. It was Baroness Thatcher who, in 1986, signed up to the Single European Act, and it must astonish the people of our country that a party that used to be so pro-Europe has become less European now.

I often like to quote a line of poetry to the House, and today it is:

"And see how dark the backward stream

A little moment passed so smiling."

We spend much of our time on events that happened a long time ago. It is proper and right that we should celebrate the 60th anniversary of the ending of the war in Europe and, in July, the ending of the war in Japan. I often wonder whether it is proper and right that we should celebrate Trafalgar day 200 years after that battle. [Hon. Members: "Absolutely."] Well, Opposition Members will be heartened to learn that the people of Orleans in France have just celebrated the 576th anniversary of the liberation of the city by Joan of Arc and her defeat of the English, with no less a personage than the president of the National Assembly in attendance. We are not alone in looking back to a long-gone but not forgotten past. The point about such commemorations and celebrations is that they remind us how Europe was riven by wars for century after century. That is no longer the case, and the peoples of Europe can come together to live in peace and harmony, and to reach their own personal destinies.

Our 1983 manifesto concentrated on peace, jobs and freedom, as I have said, and great play is made today of the unemployment rates in France, Germany and Italy. In fact, we have 72.9 per cent. of our citizens in work. In Germany, it is 64.6 per cent, in France 61.9 per cent. and in Italy 56.2 per cent. We trade among ourselves and we take in each other's washing, and the consequences for our prosperity can be seen from Ireland to Portugal and Spain, and as far as Greece. It is no wonder that 10 more nation states have now joined the European Union. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley referred to Bulgaria and Romania, and three other nation states also wish to join the European Union, in the interests of their people and to give them the prosperity that we have enjoyed.

I am reminded of the point made by John Fitzgerald Kennedy when he said that all boats lift on a rising tide. The prosperity from trade and job creation brings prosperity to all our people and we should welcome the chance to share it. We live in a global economy. We cannot get away from China, India or the US. We have to be able to work together to improve our markets and to participate in the world market. That is why the European Union is so significant.

My hon. and learned Friend Vera Baird referred to Teesport and a new deep-sea container port is proposed for Teesside, which will bring enormous benefits to the Tees valley and the north-east. It would provide some 500 jobs and could create 6,000 to 7,000 new jobs indirectly over the next few years. That development is on the back of the European Union and the trade it brings.

I mentioned the backward stream, and we are proud of the Bill of Rights of 1688. However, the treaty that we are to debate in the House and in the country will establish a constitution for Europe and a charter of fundamental rights. That will cover many of the points that have been made today.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Redcar referred to the right to dignity for the elderly and to respect, as did the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister. That is in the declaration of human rights, which is part of the treaty.

The treaty also refers to the right of persons with disability to enjoy the right to social and occupational integration; to the rights of the child; to the right to choose an occupation, engage in work, conduct a business and conclude a contract and to the right to move freely within the territory. The treaty provides for a post of Minister for Foreign Affairs, merging the roles of the high representative for foreign affairs and the external relations commissioner. All that will maintain and build on the peace in Europe that we have enjoyed for 60 years and will provide a framework for dialogue with other states in the world.

An important and significant part of the work of the Chamber over the next year will be to hold a proper debate on Europe. It must be a debate, not a battle. It should be based on the facts, which will be put to the British public in the referendum, when it comes. The debate must take into account the interests of present and future generations. It is in the interests of our country that there be a yes vote in the referendum. We should carry it through the House of Commons and hold the debate, and for years and years to come the British people will be better for it.

The Prime Minister revelled in his third victory. My colleagues congratulate him on his victory, but the language he must use and the tone he must strike should be different from triumphalist language.

When we consider the results of the general election, each of the three parties with more than 10 Members of Parliament can say that it did well. Labour can say it did well because it won the election even though it lost many seats. The Lib Dems can say they did well because they have learned how to move left of the Labour party and have started to take seats from Labour in urban areas. The Conservatives can say that we did well because we won more seats than any other party. We showed that we were effective challengers for power. We took more of the popular vote in England than the Labour Government.

We all know, however, that each party also did badly by comparison with its ambitions. I am sure that the Labour party would far rather have a strong mandate throughout England as well as in Scotland and Wales. It would like to feel that it had the endorsement of many more people. Perhaps the most shocking statistic from the election, which provides the backdrop to the Gracious Speech, is that four in 10 voters thought it better to vote for nobody at all, because we, collectively, had not interested them, and that only just over one in five thought it worth while voting for either the Labour party or the principal alternative, the Conservative party.

Labour must feel worried that it is only by a quirk of the distribution of constituency boundaries in the electoral system that it is in such a strong position in the House of Commons, with an overall majority and possible support from some of the leftward-inclined parties on a number of crucial issues. We know that Labour owes a lot to the fact that several Labour constituencies have few constituents, so it was much easier for a Labour candidate to be elected than it was for a Conservative or a Liberal Democrat. Labour knows, too, that the forthcoming boundary review will go some way to righting the gross injustice in the current electoral system whereby the average Labour Member of Parliament represents several thousand fewer voters than the average Conservative Member.

For the next four or five years, the Labour Government will have to govern not just against the welcome pressure of questioning and scepticism from their own Back Benches—at last Government Back Benchers are beginning to take the role that has been traditional on both sides of the House, whoever was in power—but against the background of knowing that it will be easy for them to lose their overall majority at the next general election and that the Boundary Commission is already making important decisions. Even if Labour took the same percentage of the vote, such decisions mean that it could come close to losing the election, if those conditions were recreated.

It is extraordinary that a Government with a good majority could have achieved that on only 36 per cent. of the vote, and that that in turn was based on a low turnout of around only 60 per cent. So when I was listening to the Prime Minister I was looking for a little more understanding. He told us that he had learned lessons from the election, but when I went through what he was saying and the contents of the Gracious Speech, I wondered whether that was true.

What were the electors trying to tell us all? Well, first they were trying to tell us that they do not like the political show very much any more, conducted by any of us. The audience are leaving the theatre. We can see that today, when we have a small, very welcome and, I am sure, very distinguished audience in the Public Gallery, but it has not been full even for the first day of the Queen's Speech debate. We see the same thing when talking to journalists; the attention span of the media for what politicians have to say is getting narrower and narrower, their interest in controversy and extreme language greater and greater. They do not seem, as they interpret their audiences, to be willing to engage in a more rounded debate that some of us would like to conduct inside the House and out, so that people could understand politics better.

Does my right hon. Friend give any credence to what a small business man said to me at the weekend, when talking about the election? He regretted that there had not been a Conservative victory, but he said, "There really was not much difference between you all, was there?" Does my right hon. Friend agree that one difficulty for voters, which may have contributed to their reluctance to participate, as he has highlighted, is that they simply did not see sufficient substantial or convincing differences, at least between the two major parties, to be bothered to make a choice?

There is some truth in that. The way I would put it is that as Conservatives identified important issues that did matter a lot to the public, such as choice in public services, or the problems of immigration control, or the problems of how to police and whether we needed more police, we saw the Labour party counter, because it used similar polling and similar research and decided that that research was good, so it crafted soundbites and possible policies for the Labour Government during the pre-election and election period, and that seemed to be going on to our territory. One of the reasons why the public feel so let down by the last eight years, or perhaps a little longer than that in truth, and why they are becoming extremely sceptical about politicians' claims, is that they see clever people at the top of the Labour party crafting language that has some Conservative elements in it, but then they discover that the Government do not deliver on it, because that language does not agree with the instincts and genuine worries and concerns of many Labour Members of Parliament.

I have followed many of the right hon. Gentleman's arguments and have been impressed by his intellectual approach, while never necessarily supporting his conclusions. Is not the problem that in this analysis, as in many other analyses, he is revealing that he is part of a very small political class? When pundits become the people who are questioned, and pop stars make the front pages—when, for example, this morning, Kylie Minogue's illness was the first item on the BBC news, although I hear that she is a very good singer and has many fans—it may be that what we are about in this place has little relevance for many young people and others. We should think about how to reach those people by other means.

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. The media may well be very faithful to the interests of the people that they are serving. I would not want to criticise that news judgment. It shows that we all have a very big task: to make the political theatre more interesting again, and to do so in a way that can inform the public better.

I found in Wokingham that an intelligent audience for the election were actually engaged and interested in the issues, and they were extremely frustrated by what was coming across on the national news media. They felt that a tabloid election was being served up in rather unpleasant tones, and conducted in that way as a result of all the parties combined with the media, in the way that that mêlée sometimes works. I made very slow progress around the streets talking to people, because they wanted so much information. They wanted to make an informed choice about the policies and ideas on offer, and that information simply was not available through the debate that we had been able to conduct and the way that it had been presented through the media.

I am listening to the right hon. Gentleman with great interest, as ever, and I am enjoying his analysis. Is not an alternative interpretation of what is going on that the people are disillusioned not with British politics, but with two-party politics? Given that, as he says, there is an evident convergence between the Conservatives and the Labour party, what would spice up politics in the way that he describes is a serious recognition of the fact that we now live in a three-party environment, where two parties got a third of the vote each and the Liberal Democrats got a quarter. Is he therefore willing to entertain the prospect that the answer to his own conundrum is the fact that we should now recognise that we are living in a three-party society?

The Liberal Democrat party is ill-advised to draw me on that subject. In every race that I have seen around the country, they always try to make out that it is a two-horse race, however incredible that may be given their position, and some of the most mendacious leaflets that I have seen come from those who want to make it a two-horse race, when only one of them is a serious runner. If the Liberal Democrats really want to be part of this analysis, it would help a great deal if they would stand by the policies and ideas that they put on to the public record through their Liberal Democrat policy documents and their comments in Hansard.

One of the extraordinary features of the general election was that, when some of us decided that we would like to talk about Liberal Democrat policy to inform our electors of what they were up to, it was the Liberal Democrats who immediately wanted to close down any debate about that and came up with a strange doctrine that anything that a Liberal Democrat spokesman had said or written throughout the four years of the last Parliament did not count—the magic words—unless it was part of their very slim manifesto document. They would never let us get away with that. Everything that we or the Labour party say and do is regarded as relevant, yet the Liberal Democrats think that they have special dispensation to be out of the normal debate. If that is the Liberal Democrats' approach, it will make debate in the House very easy because we can ignore anything that they say for four years and tell them that we are waiting for their manifesto, as that will tell us what they intend to defend.

On that very theme, the right hon. Gentleman may be interested to know that the Liberal Democrat group on Ceredigion district council recently voted against local income tax.

How wise they were, and I am sure that the leader of the Liberal Democrat party wished that he had voted against local income tax, too—or perhaps he did when the policy came up for discussion and he lost.

rose—

I give way again; I cannot resist it.

I thank the right hon. Gentleman. I appeal to the House for some understanding in response to the Plaid Cymru spokesperson's incorrect attack, given the fact that Plaid Cymru has sunk to being the third party of Wales, and the hon. Gentleman knows as well as I do that the Liberal Democrats are now the official Opposition in Wales.

Yes, but the hon. Gentleman does not deny what I have said.

Order. We will now get back to the debate on the Queen's Speech.

You are very wise, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I willingly accept your ruling.

The Gracious Speech adopts certain Conservative language on some crucial policies. Naturally, I welcome the Prime Minister's conversion to the idea that choice, quality, differentiation and diversity are important matters for educational improvement. I look forward to seeing how many of his right hon. and hon. Friends he can carry with him in the Lobby if he decides to put those issues to the test. However, one of the big let-downs in British politics in the past few years is Labour's mantra that cash will be allied to reform, but we have not seen proper reform.

We have seen a massive over-centralisation and a huge increase in targets and bureaucracy. We have seen teachers, nurses and doctors driven mad to distraction by having to fill in forms instead of looking after their charges and by having to deviate from doing what they would like to do—teaching well, or looking after their patients in the best manner—to deal with the priorities imposed by a centralised bureaucracy, sometimes driven by Ministers and sometimes seemingly acting without a great deal of ministerial direction of any kind. Sometimes, if we challenge Ministers, we are told that they will look into things, as though they had absolutely nothing to do with them. Sometimes we think that they may not have anything to do with Ministers: they look very surprised by what the bureaucracy had been doing in their names. On other occasions, they are more honourable and say, "Yes, of course, we as Ministers are responsible", and suggest that they will make some changes.

I will believe that the Prime Minister is a true convert to the cause of proper reform when I see the moves that I think he needs to make. He needs to strip out many of those central targets and bureaucracy, and he needs to say that popular schools will be able to expand and that parents will have a genuine choice of school and that the resources and the wherewithal will be made available so that that choice is realistic and their children have a good chance of getting into the school that has been chosen. He also needs to stop his party threatening or menacing the grammar schools.

One of the most disappointing features of the Labour Government over the past eight years has been the decline of social mobility. One would think that Labour—which, like the Conservatives, wants opportunity for people from poor backgrounds—would be a champion of ways in which people could exercise their rights and could achieve greater social mobility. We heard poignant stories at the start of this debate about people who had managed to move upwards from humble beginnings. Many of us on the Opposition Benches did not start with anything, and the way in which we were able to move upwards was often through educational opportunity at a grammar school or, in my case, a direct grant school where I was able to win a free place. That system was abolished by a previous Labour Government and that school is now independent, so people from the background that I came from are no longer able to go to that school and to enjoy the greater opportunity to go on to a good university and make progress. I do not know whether we all regard getting to the House of Commons as making progress, but there are many who still do. I regard it as a great privilege to be in this place, and I am very conscious of the role that education played in enabling me and many others to get here.

The Prime Minister must be serious about allowing different types of schools and about backing and supporting the schools of excellence that are often the subject of jealous attack from some members of his party. He needs to be serious about stripping away the centralisation and urge to control and intervene that have done so much damage to our schooling and part of our health care under this Government so far.

I also look forward to seeing how the Prime Minister intends to buttress his policy of harnessing the private sector's role in the provision of better health care. I think that the important thing about the national health service, which brings together many people and has traditionally united the main parties since the post-war settlement, is the principle that all those who need treatment can get it free at the point of use. It is quite wrong to say that they are getting it free, because all of us are paying very dearly for health care. Very often those who receive it have, over the years, paid many times more than the cost of the health care that they finally need.

I have described the important principle and we have no ideological hang-up about how the pledge is met. Any sensible person would want it to be met in the most efficient way so that people can access care quickly and in the best way so that the outcome of the treatment or care is the best possible. If the Prime Minister is serious about that interpretation—a more Conservative interpretation than his party has traditionally gone in for—I will very willingly support him. I am sure that all my right hon. and hon. Friends feel the same. I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that he is not going to carry that reform forward in the way that he claims he will because there will be political difficulties in his party and because I do not think that he can draw himself away from all the targets, bureaucracy and regulation that are the hallmarks of this Government and in which he is so deeply immersed.

The Government have also, rather late in the day, become a convert to the idea of less regulation. It was some months ago that the Prime Minister boldly announced that for every new regulation that the Government introduced, one would be removed. It was a very crude approach to deregulation, because regulations are not units of account. It would be possible for the Prime Minister to meet his target by introducing a very expensive regulation such as the recent one on the limitation of overtime and by taking out an old-fashioned and cheap one. He could then say that he had met his target and he would at least have stuck to what he said he was going to do. However, in the past few months since he made his statement, I do not find that he has struck off many regulations but that many regulations are still being introduced.

In the Gracious Speech, we are promised legislation to make it easier to remove unnecessary and undesirable regulations, but in the words that the Government crafted for Her Majesty we are not actually promised real deregulation. It is well beyond the time when we should just be discussing that process or the idea. If the Government are serious about wishing to undo some of the many mistakes that they have made by over-regulating and interfering too much, they need legislation this Session that will remove a sizeable amount of regulation from the statute book.

There are many examples of regulations that achieve the opposite of what they set out to do, or fail to do anything along the lines of what was intended. The Government must know about that because they have introduced and supervised many such regulations, so I urge them to beef up the Bill and make it a more serious contribution, if they really think that they have learned the lesson from the electorate.

My view of the electoral mood in the many places that I visited before the general election and during the campaign itself was that people were conscious, as consumers, that when they bought something, they usually got good product information and some sort of after-sales services, and that if things went wrong, they got redress. When it comes to government, however, which is the biggest thing that they buy—they have no choice about that because they must buy it—they find that there is not a proper after-sales services. Measures often do not do what the product information purports to say. There is often little product information of any kind and people find it difficult to get redress.

That is why many people are heartily sick of all of us and the political theatre. They begin to think that all there is is political theatre and that Parliament does not engage with the lack of value, responsiveness and accountability that they find day by day when they discover that they cannot get appointments with their doctors on time, that they cannot get their operations on time, that their children do not get the teaching in schools that they think they deserve, that there is not the discipline in schools that they think is needed, that police do not respond as quickly as they would like to serious crimes in the neighbourhood, or that policemen are not seen on the beat when casual violence or yobbish behaviour is under way. All our constituents witness those failings from time to time, but that does not seem to produce a response here in the elected Parliament that drags the Government to account and gets them to make things work better for the enormous amount spent.

The constituents of all hon. Members pay on average £4 out of every £10 that they earn in taxation, although they often do not see that happening. For example, if they are lucky enough still to be able to buy petrol for 80p a litre—it is now usually a bit more than that at the pump—60p of that 80p is tax that goes straight to the Government. When people buy a product or service that has VAT on it, 17.5 per cent. goes straight to the Government. People can see obvious deductions from their income due to income tax and large deductions due to council tax because that annual bill makes them aware of how much the Government can take.

If the Queen's Speech is seriously to help Parliament and the Government to re-engage with the electorate, we must start from the proposition that the public are not getting value, do not think that they are getting value and feel that the Government are not responding to their worries about the way in which services are delivered and money is spent. All of us need to lift our game and show that Parliament can be incisive and cause the Government to provide better and more responsive services because people will otherwise continue to leave the political theatre.

I am grateful for the opportunity to make my maiden speech. To be able to do so on the day after being presented to the House, and on the day of the Queen's Speech, is indeed an honour. I promised the people of Hove and Portslade that I would waste no time in taking their concerns and aspirations to the House and the heart of government, so that is what I intend to do. Having said that, I am still unsure of the exact route from my office to the Whips Office, but perhaps that, too, could be seen as further service to my constituency.

Hove has been blessed by nature. In addition to being among the sunniest cities on mainland Britain, it enjoys the uninterrupted beauty of the south downs to the north and a wonderful coastal promenade to the south. Ramblers and kitesurfers alike have thus discovered Hove's desirability as a modern city with easy access to outdoor life. I want the best for that way of life as well, which means taking steps to protect our environment. I support measures to create a national park on the south downs, ensuring that future generations may enjoy them as much as we have done. On a local level, I offer my support to council planners and campaigners to encourage new developments that are beacons of environmental sensitivity. The House will also find in me a key proponent of the wider, more global, challenges that need facing up to if we are to stave off the invidious effects of climate change which will blight the lives of many unless we act soon.

It is a particular privilege to make my maiden speech on the day of the Queen's Speech. As the Government begin their third term in office by laying before the people an ambitious legislative agenda, I begin my own, more humble, parliamentary duties. In so doing, I want not to forget just how significant the last two terms have been, and to reflect on exactly how much has been achieved in my constituency since Labour took office.

The 2005 general election was a tough fight, but as far as we were concerned, a principled one. The Opposition, who placed immigration posters in ethnically sensitive areas, cynically used the diversity of our local population for political gain. We, on the other hand, focused our attention on speaking and listening to people on the doorsteps. People shared their concerns about, for example, the insensitive siting of mobile phone masts in residential communities, inappropriate development in suburban areas and the rising cost of housing. I have listened to their concerns, and hope to become the advocate that they deserve.

I was struck by how seldom issues of employment and child care were raised. As a veteran of many previous campaigns, I know how past elections were dominated by the social and economic consequences of joblessness. Hove and Portslade suffered greatly from this disease, but since 1997 they have witnessed an incredible 56 per cent. fall in the rate of unemployment. Had we promised that to the people of Hove and Portslade in 1997, no one would have believed us.

My predecessor, Ivor Caplin, stated in his maiden speech in 1997 that the Chancellor's decision to grant independence to the Bank of England would be shown by history to be the right one. How right he was. The people of my constituency are better educated, better cared for when they are sick, and have more personal freedom than at any previous time. It is on this platform of achievement that we stand proud today, and I look forward to playing my part in this next Session of Parliament, when yet more of Britain's potential will be unlocked for my constituents.

I should also like to take this opportunity to express my deepest gratitude to my predecessor, Ivor Caplin. Much symbolism has been assigned to Labour's victory in Hove in 1997, but it would be a mistake to assume that that was merely the result of a national trend. Ivor had been a tireless advocate for the people of Hove for a great number of years and had already set in motion an ambitious programme of rejuvenation for the town. As leader of Hove council before coming to the House, he achieved the rebuilding of the Portland Gate estate, for example. It was his hard work and considerable leadership skills that mobilised the constituency Labour party, and together they communicated the new Labour vision and earned the respect and trust of constituents.

Such focused campaigning achieved many victories for the people of Hove and Portslade, such as the regeneration of the old market into an active community facility and centre for the arts. As many hon. Members here today will know, it is a work ethic that Ivor carried into his parliamentary career, earning him the respect of hon. Members on both sides of the House.

During the recent election campaign, I had the privilege of visiting a mosque in Hove with Ivor, and was deeply moved by the expressions of warmth and gratitude made towards him by people there, as they bid him farewell as their Member of Parliament. That he could sustain a productive and personal relationship with the Muslim community while carrying out his challenging ministerial duties of the time speaks greatly of his abilities as an advocate. Those who underestimated his genuine commitment to every section of the constituency usually paid a price, which might be why the local Respect candidate lost his deposit in the general election.

As I look forward, I see much that can be done to build on Labour's achievements and to make Hove and Portslade an even fairer and more prosperous place in which to live and work. Despite much improvement, there are some pockets of deprivation and social exclusion that need to be tackled. In those areas, I shall continue to forge partnerships with the private sector and providers of public services to ensure that job opportunities and community support are fully extended to those who are most in need.

As the many hon. Friends who came to Hove during the election campaign discovered, Hove today is a modern, vibrant city, ethnically and socially diverse. I support that healthy trend, which is attracting people and companies to my constituency. This week, the world-renowned architect Frank Gehry will visit Hove to further his design proposals for the regeneration of the King Alfred sports centre. The scheme offers a startling opportunity for the people of Hove and Portslade, who will not only take pride in the prestige development, but benefit from its imaginative proposals for environmental and social sustainability. Mr. Gehry's design will give the people of Hove world-class sports facilities and a residential area offering 40 per cent. affordable housing, all of which will cost the taxpayer not a single penny. I am especially proud that such a prestigious development in Hove's best seafront location will be fully accessible to every section of our community, not only to the rich and privileged. For that reason, I shall engage positively with the development team to ensure the best possible outcome for all my constituents.

Nowhere is the social fabric of my constituency more evident than in the community-wide campaign for a new stadium at Falmer for Brighton and Hove Albion. I cannot stress in strong enough terms the passion and pride that my constituents feel for their team and the frustration felt by many at the protracted inquiry into its new home. The process has cost the club £3 million to date, but that has not detracted from the club's extensive community work, particularly with schools and those with special needs. The need to give young people that kind of incentive to participate in sport has never been greater, and enabling the development of the Albion will grant many children in my constituency a healthier lifestyle. My right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister has commented on the passion and good nature of the supporters' campaign. I agree with him wholeheartedly.

I see a new community stadium at Falmer as part of the regeneration of Brighton and Hove and the further strengthening of constituents' pride in their vibrant and inclusive city. I share that pride in my constituency, but stand here today with humility, eager to learn from my hon. Friends how to become the best parliamentarian that my skills will allow and to serve the people of Hove and Portslade to the best of my abilities. Mr. Deputy Speaker, please accept my sincere gratitude for calling me to speak today and for listening to me with such grace.

I congratulate Ms Barlow, who spoke from the very same place from which I made my maiden speech 35 years ago. She might not be encouraged to hear that, but she might at least be encouraged to know that this place does not kill us—we can live through it all and enjoy it even as we become older and, perhaps, wiser.

I am at a disadvantage, in that I cannot enter into the battle of the election that has been fought again in the House today. The Conservative party, the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats have all fought the battle again, but I have no one to fight with. The Social Democratic and Labour party Members are not here, nor are the Sinn Fein Members—thank God—and the remaining Ulster Unionist party Member. As a result, I am on my own, as it were, with my hon. Friends.

I was reminded by one of my constituents that when I spoke in the House the other day I should have mentioned a little song that they sing sometimes in Ulster about bottles—nine green bottles hanging on the wall. It was suggested to me that I should have said that there were nine bottles but they were not hanging, and that they were not green but orange. Perhaps that sums up the matter.

I was reading Edmund Burke the other day. He was an Irishman who spent his time in this place teaching the English people democracy, so he said. He wrote:

"That which is morally wrong can never be politically right."

That is something that we need to consider in this place.

I come from a province that has been torn asunder by terrorism. I come from a province that lost its democratic structures because this House thought that the way to deal with it was by taking away the democratic structures that it had. They were not perfect. I am sure that many of us think that the structure of this place is not perfect. However, it was the will of the people that put the structures in place. Alas, we have been through momentous years.

I asked for the figures for the three main years of the previous Parliament, given that some parliamentarians think that all the trouble is over and that the peace movement, as it is called, and progress are absolutely successful. In 2002, we had 350 shootings and 188 bombings. Three incendiary devices exploded and there were 120 incidents of attacks by firearms and explosives. There were 312 paramilitary attacks.

In 2003, we had 229 shootings and 77 bombings. There were eight incendiaries and there were 156 finds of explosives and firearms. There were 305 paramilitary attacks. In 2004, we had 185 shootings and 64 bombings. There were 21 incendiaries. There were 90 finds of firearms and explosives and there were 228 paramilitary attacks.

The darkness is still upon us. The murders are still prevalent, as are the killings. I take cognisance of your looks towards me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but we have been told that the Government will work to bring about the conditions that are necessary for the restoration of political institutions in Northern Ireland, and it is to that that I am addressing my remarks.

It is all very well for the Government to say that they will deal with terrorism, but they need to start with terrorism in their back yard, which is Northern Ireland. It must be dealt with. There is no use telling our people—I want to make this plain to the House—that we will do our best to rejuvenate the so-called agreement that has failed four times: it was set up, it broke down again and it was broken up. We must go down another road, which must be that no terrorist, whether they come from one side or the other, can be in any Government of any part of this United Kingdom. An ultimatum must be given by the Government that the day of terrorism is over and that people cannot shoot their way into Government office. They cannot murder people, rob banks and destroy their country and then demand that, because they have a mandate, they must get into government. The Prime Minister has promised that. I told the Prime Minister privately that I was a Blairite on that matter. I told him that I was a convinced Blairite, and that I was not changing. There are nine Members from Northern Ireland in the House because of it. The people do not want terrorists in the Government of Northern Ireland, and the time has come for the Government to deal with that.

Today, I talked with an emissary from the American Government, and I have talked to the people representing the south. They, too, must take a stand on that issue. They should unite, then move forward. If people do not want to get on the train of democracy, they will be left behind on the platform. The train of democracy must move forward in Northern Ireland.

It is not morally right for terrorists to be in the Government of Northern Ireland. I should like the House to get to grips with that issue, and the Government to keep the promise made by the Prime Minister, to which he referred when I questioned him in the previous Parliament. He gave an undertaking, and I should like it to be honoured. I should like the other parties in the House to recognise it and realise its importance. There is not a single Member in the House who would like to have the situation that we have in Northern Ireland in their own constituency. I make a plea to the House—let us get to grips with the issue.

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman and his party on what, by any objective analysis, was an impressive performance in Northern Ireland. However, in the spirit of the Queen's Speech, I am sure that he, like everyone else, wants a lasting peace in Northern Ireland. Does he accept that it would be right in principle to have an operational devolved Assembly? If that is the case, is he willing to commit his party to seeking negotiations to see if we can find an accommodation with the key players, accepting the very reasonable point that he made about the unacceptable level of underlying violence that still pertains in the Northern Ireland community?

Order. Before Rev. Ian Paisley replies, I hope that the length of that question will not set a standard for this Parliament.

The answer is simple. These IRA-Sinn Feiners have had that opportunity over and over again. I said at Leeds castle that my party did not, and will not, talk to terrorists, whether they are on the loyalist or Roman Catholic side of the fence, or are from a Unionist or nationalist background. However, while we were talking with the Prime Minister to try to find a way through, and he was negotiating with them, they were planning the bank robbery. Not only were they planning that but, according to the chief of police, they were carrying out recruitments, were writing up a list of men to be shot, and were planning a series of murders and incendiary attacks. They have had their day. This is not a time for talking, and for more lists of deaths, bombings and burnings. It is a day for action. I dispute with my friend, Lembit Opik, the idea that the people of Northern Ireland want negotiations. When I made my last speech in the previous Parliament he condemned me for not speaking to the IRA. The people have spoken, and they have said, "No more talks. They had their chance, and they didn't take it. Right, let's have democracy." I pray that democracy will prevail, and that the House will go back to basics, saying that democracy will prevail everywhere in the United Kingdom.

I say that with the backing not only of Protestant voters, but of Roman Catholic voters and also voters who want a united Ireland eventually but do not want the IRA-Sinn Fein. The IRA-Sinn Fein have been taken on and soundly dealt with by the people of Northern Ireland, and we must move forward without them. They are locking themselves out of the talks, not us. They made the choice. They said, "It's terrorism for us. We're holding on to our guns." We say democracy must and will prevail.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for allowing an intervention. I am an observer. I do not live in Northern Ireland, although I have some relatives there. We talk about democracy. When another party wins a number of seats—Sinn Fein has won a number of seats, as minority parties in other parts of the United Kingdom have won seats—there must clearly be some role for them in the democratic process. I do not talk to Sinn Fein for the same reason as the hon. Gentleman does not—one cannot have militarism and democracy side by side. But at what point in the democratic debate will the hon. Gentleman talk to Sinn Fein?

Let me make it clear that IRA members come to the Assembly. I debate in that Assembly. They do not drive me out of the Assembly. If they came to the House, we would not all leave. We would debate. However, there is a difference between debate and taking people into government. The hon. Gentleman would not take the Tories into his Government, and the Tories are good, respectable, law-abiding citizens. The Labour Members of the Government are good citizens as well. I am giving an illustration; I do not want to be misquoted. The hon. Gentleman would not take the Liberals into government, and I would not blame him. All I can say is, "You get me those who are democrats." There are democrats on the nationalist side. We would share power with them. That has always been our position. We have made that clear. We invited the Social Democratic and Labour party to join us in a voluntary coalition to get the Assembly up and running again.

Our position is clear: no terrorists or terrorist organisations. The Prime Minister has told us that Sinn Fein and the IRA are inextricably related. Those are not my words; they are his. The people in the south of Ireland have been telling us. The Minister for Justice has been telling us that the IRA are a lot of vagabonds, rascals and murderers. Then we are asked to share power with them. I will not be sharing power or talking with them. I have nothing to say to them but "Get rid of your guns. Stop your murdering. Prove that you are fit for office before you grab office and force the fact upon us."

I hope that in this Parliament my colleagues will put these matters before the House time and again. I may not see the next Parliament. I might be in a better place, looking down from a higher place, or I might even creep in. I trust that this Parliament will mark the establishment of democracy throughout Northern Ireland in which everyone, whether he be a Jew or a gentile, whether he be a Roman Catholic or a Protestant, whether he be an Orangeman or an Hibernian, will be able to say, "This is our Parliament and our country and we are ruling it within the United Kingdom." That is what I wish for my people.

I wish every one of the people of Northern Ireland the very best. They have done a great thing for me. I came to the House as a lone voice 35 years ago. I did not surrender my principles. I stood by them. I had good elections, I had bad elections, but now we have had the best election ever. There are eight more men and one woman to come after me. We have done excellently, but the work is before us. We must deliver the goods, and I hope the House will help the Ulster people to get the goods that they want. We want the same privileges, the same sort of government and the same democracy as other citizens have, and we are entitled to that as members of this great United Kingdom that we love.

I congratulate you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, on your reappointment as Chairman of Ways and Means. I also congratulate my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister on winning an historic third successive general election. I should like, too, to congratulate my hon. Friend Ms Barlow on an excellent maiden speech, and I hope that she will be with us for many years to come representing the people of the Hove constituency.

I consider myself privileged to have been elected as the first Member of Parliament for the new Glasgow, East constituency, following the substantial boundary changes that took place in Scotland at this election when we saw our representation reduced from 72 seats to 59. I should like to place on record my appreciation of the people of Glasgow for their support for me over a number of years, because I was first elected to the House in 1979 for the Shettleston constituency, which is no longer a parliamentary constituency. I should also like to thank all the party members and others who worked so tirelessly on behalf of the Labour party and myself in the election campaign.

During the last eight years, the east end of Glasgow has undergone a renaissance. There have been tremendous improvements in that part of the city, yet one of the most annoying and distressing aspects of all is the fact that the media, or some parts of it, still portray the area in negative terms, which is depressing for local people and unfair to the area. It would be much better if the media were to concentrate on the positive aspects of the east end to encourage its regeneration and to assist Glasgow as a whole.

No one would deny that there are problems, but the good things overwhelmingly outnumber the bad. A youth organisation that I visited in the greater Easterhouse area, staffed entirely by volunteers, has 500 young people passing through its doors every week. It is sad that so many people engaged in voluntary organisations, who are the salt of the earth, should get kicked in the teeth by negative comments in the media about the area. I am sure that that applies in other cities in the UK.

As one would expect from a traditional working-class area, the main issues raised with me during the election campaign were bread-and-butter ones: law and order and the national health service, both devolved to the Scottish Parliament; jobs; pensions; tax credits, which are very popular, especially with people on lower incomes; the taxation of low incomes and pensions; the future of the new deal if Labour were to lose the election; and moral issues such as abortion, euthanasia and cloning, which came up at all the hustings meetings and the various other meetings held throughout the campaign. However, the No. 1 concern of people in the east of Glasgow was the economy. People remember only too well what life was like for 18 years under the Tory Government, when the Queen's Speech was something to be afraid of and dreaded.

By contrast, there is much in today's Gracious Speech that will meet with universal approval. I welcome the proposal to introduce an offence of corporate manslaughter, and I hope that the legislation will not be delayed, as this is a long-overdue measure. Companies and their directors should be held responsible for their actions.

I welcome legislation to reduce casualties on the roads, but I hope that that will not be merely a breeding programme for more speed cameras. The proliferation of such cameras is one of the reasons why public-police relations are deteriorating, which is to be regretted. People lose their licences and their jobs, and they feel aggrieved. I am sorry to have to say that many people feel that the police would be far better engaged chasing burglars and other criminals than harassing motorists.

I welcome new consumer credit law to provide greater protection for consumers and to create a fairer credit market. There should be a limit on the rate of interest that banks, companies, stores and anyone lending money can charge. Some people need protecting from themselves. It is far too easy for them to get into debt by obtaining credit that they have no hope of ever repaying. We need to take steps to prevent that.

I welcome measures to give the police and local communities new powers to tackle violence related to knives, guns and alcohol. I regret, however, that no specific mention is made in the Queen's Speech of air guns. Sadly, just before the election campaign started, a terrible tragedy occurred in my constituency when a two-year-old toddler was killed by an air gun pellet. While I appreciate that legislation will not prevent some people from committing crimes, urgent action needs to be taken to tackle the problems caused by the misuse of air guns. I understand that the Home Secretary will consult the Scottish Executive on introducing proposals on this issue later this summer. I hope that that will happen sooner, rather than later.

On crime, I feel sorry for the police. I give them my full support and they do splendid work, but much of what they do is to some extent negated by the courts, which let down the law-abiding citizens of this country and its police force. If the courts were to make an example of some criminals, particularly those who commit acts of violence, crime would rapidly decrease. I cite an example from 40 or 50 years ago, which some Members may remember. Lord Carmont sentenced a few razor-slashers in Glasgow to 20 years' imprisonment, at a time when 20 years' imprisonment meant precisely that. Overnight, razor-slashing ceased. One way to deal with law and order issues in society is for the courts to take tougher action on criminals.

I welcome long-term reform to provide sustainable income for those in retirement. In addition, no tax should be levied on small occupational pensions, nor on small pensions for widows. In addition, we should consider reducing the age at which pensioners qualify for a free TV licence from 75 to 70. A TV licence is a substantial part of a pensioner's income, just as it is for people who are unemployed or on low incomes. Whether the TV licence is good value is a separate matter, but many of my constituents struggle to find the money to pay for it.

I also welcome measures to offer greater support for working families, such as extending maternity benefit and improving child care provision, along with reform of the welfare state in order to reduce poverty and offer greater equality. However, I am concerned about measures to reform the benefit system. Benefit fraud must of course be tackled, but so must tax avoidance and evasion by mega-rich companies and individuals, which must cost the country a lot more than benefit fraud does. Most people on benefits are not there by choice. They do not get rich, and although there might be the odd such case that the media can highlight, it is only "the odd case". The vast majority of people on benefits merely survive. They cannot afford the same lifestyle as that enjoyed by those in employment.

Many people are genuinely unfit for work, or do not have the necessary skills to find jobs in their area or the resources to move elsewhere. They cannot just get on their bikes and go somewhere else. In some areas, jobs are not available in sufficient numbers, so this issue has to be handled carefully, especially in Scotland, if the approach taken is to command universal support. For example, in my city of Glasgow 100,000 people—one in three of the available work force—is classified as economically inactive, whatever that means. Most of the constituencies in Glasgow—there are now only seven—have higher-than-average levels of unemployment and numbers of pensioners. They have people who are caught in the poverty trap, problems with child poverty, lower-than-average adult male life expectancy—it is substantially lower than in prosperous areas elsewhere in Scotland or in the south of England; indeed, it is lower by as much as 14 to 17 years—and people surviving on benefits.

There is a crime and a drug problem in Glasgow as, sadly, there is in many of our towns and cities today. But part of Glasgow's problem is its former industrial heritage, which has affected the health of many people such as miners, steel workers and others who worked in heavy industry. Their lungs were badly damaged by dust, and they have had to live on benefits since retiring or being made redundant, which many were; indeed, they never worked again when Mrs. Thatcher was in power.

Glasgow is Scotland's only metropolitan area and it attracts people to work and play—leisure, as well as work. It does not always attract people to live there, as many do not want to pay the city's council tax, choosing to live on the perimeter estates and commute. When people in Glasgow get a good job, one of the first things that they do is to move outside to somewhere that they perceive, for one reason or another, to be different. Conversely, if people have problems with alcohol or drugs, or their marriages break up, they tend to drift into the city, so we have a continual turn-around, which creates problems in many constituencies and many parts of the city.

I have said several times in the House that Glasgow alone cannot solve the city's problems, which must be dealt with and resolved. Glasgow used to contain about a quarter of the Scottish population, but the figure is now much lower. I should have liked to hear something in the Queen's Speech about dealing with the problems of cities such as Glasgow. It is not unique, as other cities in the UK have similar problems. What we need is perhaps some special taskforce with a senior Minister in charge—someone who can accelerate the necessary action to combat the problems and work with all the other organisations in the area, such as devolved Administrations, local government departments, and the private, public and voluntary sectors.

There is a need to speed things up, but it is not just a matter of consultation. The GEAR—Glasgow eastern area renewal—project, which started in 1976 and was wound up by the Conservatives in 1987 when it was only half way through its task, was a classic. Much time was spent in consultation and the writing of reports, but what is needed to tackle the problems of sub-standard housing, crime and litter and to create prosperity for the city is action. I would favour some sort of pilot project that, if successful in a city like Glasgow, could be adopted to tackle problems in other cities.

I welcome the Scottish Executive's recent decision to overrule the public inquiry and to complete the M74, which I hope will bring thousands of jobs to the city, lead to an improved environment, develop derelict land and divert much of the traffic that currently goes through residential areas on to the new road.

I continue to have concerns about identity cards and will await the specific proposals with interest. Another of my concerns is the reform of public services. I believe that public services are best carried out by public sector workers themselves. They frequently fail to get appropriate recognition for the job that they do. They do not deserve to be privatised or have their pension scheme altered after years of service. New entrants may have to be treated differently from existing staff, but that is another matter.

I am reluctant to intervene in my hon. Friend's excellent speech on the issues facing Glasgow. He mentioned his doubts about identity cards and I would like to assure him that, when I lived in France for 20 years, I carried my identity card with me at all times and had no difficulties. I believe that it will reduce fraud by at least a half and is one of the finest measures that we could possibly introduce. Is my hon. Friend open to persuasion at some time in the future?

I am always open to persuasion, but I remain concerned about the compulsory nature of the scheme and the cost. People living on benefits are genuinely poor and are unlikely to be able to afford the costs of the ID card. There are other important issues involved, too, so I will wait to see exactly what is proposed before taking any decision.

I am also concerned about the future of the Royal Mail and the Post Office, and I shall certainly not vote for any proposals to privatise them. I am pleased that postal workers will be paid a bonus for their excellent efforts over the last year and I would like to congratulate all the postal workers who delivered all five candidates' electoral addresses in my constituency so well in the recent campaign. There are often complaints about deliveries of election literature, but I did not receive a single complaint this time. An excellent job was done.

I have a close association with the Communication Workers Union. My hon. Friend may have noted that Royal Mail management is still trying to press the Government to hold a share flotation, even though there is a commitment, under the Warwick deal, to keeping the service fully publicly owned. I hope that he will join me in expressing concern to the Government that such a share flotation is not the way forward, given the mandate that we received at the election.

As ever, I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, and I assure him that I shall be happy to express my concerns on that matter. I believe in the universality of the postal service and postal rates. Moreover, I deplore the obscene bonuses and payments being paid to senior executives in the Royal Mail. They are only doing what they are already paid very well to do. I do not see why they should get a bonus for doing a good job, although I do understand why they should get the sack if they do not do a good job.

I am pleased that the Government will use their presidency of the G8 to make progress in tackling poverty in Africa, and climate change. I agree that Africa has to be a priority, but I hope that other needy areas of the world will not be forgotten. I am chairman of the executive committee of the UK branch of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. Last year, I had the pleasure of leading a delegation to the Pacific. We visited Kiribati and the Solomon Islands, two of the poorest countries in the world. However, although those countries may be poor, they are very rich in their populations. The people are wonderful, and the children are beautiful: words fail me when it comes to describing the welcome received by people from the UK.

Most Pacific islanders are very pro-British, but many are also very poor. Some people live on much less than £1 a day. Global warming is a big threat to Kiribati and other small islands in the area, where the highest point is often only a few feet above sea level. Poverty is a huge problem. The delegation saw at first hand how even very small aid projects can make a substantial difference to the people who live on those small islands. I therefore make the plea that we must not forget or reduce our aid to the poorest countries in the Pacific and the Caribbean, or in other areas of the Commonwealth or the world.

I hope that the G8 countries, and the Doha round of World Trade Organisation negotiations, will make substantial progress in reducing debt for the most heavily indebted nations, by making trade fair, controlling arms trading, extending education to the world's children and making poverty history.

In conclusion, I am proud to be a Member of this House in a period when we have had three terms of Labour Government. My Government have their priorities right and are doing a great deal to tackle poverty and help poor people, both at home and abroad.

I have been rather intrigued by many of the responses to the results of the election, not least by those who have claimed that the Conservative party was out of touch and received no response from the electorate. They have made out that we got it all wrong, but that is a little odd, given that the Conservative party got more votes in England than Labour did. In the overall total of votes, we ended up only two or three points adrift of the Labour party.

That does not suggest to me that we were that much out of touch with the voters, so I want to resist suggestions that we should go back to the drawing board, rethink our direction and alter it completely. I want to offer a template that might be of use to all parties in assessing the relevance of the Queen's Speech and determining the way forward. I shall suggest a number of key elements, to which I hope most hon. Members will sign up. Those factors can be used as a measure of policy proposals, in the Queen's Speech and elsewhere.

The element at the top of my list is nationhood, which is directly relevant to the remarks made by Sir Stuart Bell. Too often, we forget that ours is a very proud nation, and that most people in this country want this country to remain just that—a nation. They are proud of our identity and wish to retain it, and our ability to control our affairs and destiny. At the head of my list of material criteria, I put nationhood. Any development, in the European Union or elsewhere, should be measured against that, and if it threatens our nationhood, it should be resisted.

My second criterion is freedom, although I qualify that by saying that it should be freedom for responsible individuals, guaranteed by the rule of law, administered by an independent judiciary and with minimal state activity. Freedom is surely something that we all treasure and want to protect at all costs, but it must be a freedom regulated as I have suggested and defended by the proper institutions of the Government and the judiciary.

One need not dwell on democracy, except to say that it is surely sad that many people expressed doubt in the recent election about the integrity and validity of our electoral system. We have come to a stage where, as all Members and all candidates at the election must have heard from many voters, there is unhappiness about the fact that the electoral system can no longer be trusted in the way that we were all brought up to assume that it could. Democracy in this country must be defended in many ways, not least in that our voting system must be above suspicion and beyond fraud.

Security applies, of course, not only to the defence of the realm against attack from outside but to the security of our citizenry against inside threats of terrorism.

A sense of community, defined, I suggest, by geography, tradition, inheritance and a sense of identity, is something that we all greatly value.

In that context, I do not subscribe to the trendy concept of what I think is known as multiculturalism, which I think threatens our sense of community. I believe in the melting pot theory of history rather than in multiculturalism. Those people whom we welcome into this country from other countries and cultures should be expected to blend into our communities and to accept our traditions and the things that we value, rather than expecting us to see them altering our society when they choose to come here.

Is the right hon. Gentleman really saying that it is not possible to respect cultures from other countries and other religions while still preserving our own rich culture? Is he saying that that is impossible?

I am saying that that can cause unacceptable problems and difficulties. Where people who come freely to this country insist on maintaining their cultures, which are so different from ours, to the extent that it divides society, that is something that should be resisted. That is exactly what I am saying. Multiculturalism as a concept should be challenged rather than simply accepted without further explanation.

My next criterion is capitalism, which is by far the most historically effective method of wealth creation, and which, of course, is gender neutral, ethnicity neutral and class neutral. The beauty of capitalism and money is that they have no favourites and discriminate against no one.

Allied closely to that point, and, interestingly, reflected in a number of places in the Queen's Speech, is the criterion of choice. In fairness to the Government and the Prime Minister, I say that this is one regard in which they have moved very much in the direction for which we have always argued, which is to favour as much choice as possible in society, particularly within services provided by the state, be they health or education. As the Leader of the Opposition said earlier, where we see elements of the Queen's Speech that will be beneficial, we will be prepared to welcome and encourage them. Choice is one of those things. Choice is related closely to enterprise, the great generator of wealth and employment. It should be encouraged by low taxes and by my final criterion, deregulation.

I have not just dreamed up those criteria. I have not listed those things arbitrarily. They are in fact the principles of a wonderful organisation known as Conservative Way Forward, of which the chairman is my hon. Friend Mr. Chope. Those principles were drawn up in 1998 and endorsed by none other than Baroness Thatcher herself. I am proud to list them and to recommend them to the House. If we are prepared to sign up to nationhood, freedom, democracy, security, community, capitalism, choice, enterprise and deregulation, we will not go far wrong. I say that not just as a measure of the Queen's Speech, but to reassure my right hon. and hon. Friends that we need not agonise, examine ourselves or go into contortions over what the party believes in. I should have thought that we could all sign up to that set of principles. We can cleave to those principles and go before the electorate with confidence, and we can also use them to develop our policies.

If we look at the Queen's Speech in relation to those principles, it is obvious that it contains far too many Bills and too little substance. For the Government to come to this Parliament, Commons and Lords, and say that they want this number of Bills to be processed in one legislative Session, even a long one, illustrates all too well and yet again their attitude to the parliamentary process. Their attitude is one of arrogance and indifference, and it suggests that they do not believe that any adequate scrutiny will be necessary because we will simply process the Bills uncritically and see them on to the statute book. Well, I hope that that will not happen. I can see no way in which a Queen's Speech containing so much material can be translated into legislation even in the time that we have available between now and November 2006.

I do not believe that the matters outlined in the Queen's Speech can receive proper scrutiny in that time, never mind the fact that many of the phrases in it are completely vacuous. For example, it states that the Government will

"reform the education system to improve quality".

Well, that is the sort of soundbite that one expects occasionally from politicians, but I do not expect to see it in a serious Queen's Speech, especially at a time when pass marks in our education system are being systematically lowered. I read just recently that it has now been recommended that spelling should no longer matter in English examinations. How can the Government talk about improving quality in education in the Queen's Speech but at the same time systematically reduce quality in education by fiddling the system to give everybody better and better results? That cannot be right and I hope that it will be resisted.

Another vague promise made is that the Government

"will begin long-term reform to provide sustainable income for those in retirement."

What does that mean? What are we supposed to make of such a promise? It suggests that the Queen's Speech is a wish list, not a seriously thought-out set of proposals to achieve the ends included in the list.

The Queen's Speech also promises a Bill

"to give police and local communities new powers to tackle knives, guns and alcohol-related violence."

The problem is not that the police need new powers: it is enabling them to do the job that we expect them to do. Time and again, it has become obvious that an increase in police numbers or in the number of community officers—the Prime Minister mentioned them—simply is not enough, if we so constrain them with bureaucracy, red tape, and human rights and political correctness that they cannot do their job properly and we cannot have the confidence in them that we all desperately want to have. Once again, the Queen's Speech provides the wrong solution to a self-evident problem.

The promise in the Queen's Speech that bothers me more than any other, however, is:

"My Government will bring forward proposals to continue the reform of the House of Lords."

I have dark doubts that that means proper reform of the House of Lords, of the kind that we were led to believe might happen in the balmy days of 1996 and 1997, when we thought that the upper House would be given legitimacy and accountability. I suspect that the Government wish to reduce the effectiveness of the House of Lords, which it has demonstrated so well recently. They want to nobble the House of Lords and submit it to the same total control that they sadly now exercise over this House.

My right hon. Friend is on to a good point. Does he agree that one way of improving scrutiny would be to give the House of Lords more power and that the only way to do that legitimately is to introduce an elected element?

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. I very much agree with him and I am happy to say that that is our party's policy, as he knows. We are the champions of democracy in this case, while the Government apparently want to resist any move towards democratisation of our parliamentary process, especially in the upper House. We shall not get that in the foreseeable future, because the Prime Minister does not want it. He wants to continue to appoint his cronies to the House of Lords, thus single-handedly giving the Government greater and greater influence and voting power in the House of Lords in what is becoming a scandalous way. Sadly, some of the more recent elevations to the peerage demonstrate that yet again.

One of the great strengths of their lordships' House is not only that the Government do not have a majority there, but that they cannot control the timetable of proceedings, so a more worrying development in the short term is that, hidden behind the rather bland and meaningless words of the Queen's Speech is the thought that the Government want to get a grip on the House of Lords as they have successively done over the past few years on this House.

My right hon. Friend may not yet have had access to the 190-page briefing supplied to the press, although not to the House, as background to the Queen's Speech. It states:

"The Government is committed to legislating . . . to place limits on the time bills spend in the second chamber."

My hon. Friend is right. I do not have access to that document, which raises a point that you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, or Mr. Speaker may want to look into: how is it that Members of Parliament receive from the Government only a flimsy document containing meaningless phrases of the kind that I have just identified whereas, as my hon. Friend points out, members of the press were apparently at the same time issued with a briefing of—how many pages?

Two hundred.

A 200-page document giving much more detail about what the Government intend to do. Mr. Deputy Speaker, it must worry you and Mr. Speaker that Members of the House are yet again being treated with contempt by the Government. Typically, the press knows much more about the Government's intentions than we do, which is something that should be looked into and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for pointing it out. If the phrase that he quoted is correct, my suspicions are fully justified: the Government will go ahead and try, finally, to reduce the House of Lords to the same obsequious position in which we find ourselves in this place. They will thus be able to process all the Bills in the Queen's Speech in a way that guarantees that they receive almost no scrutiny.

I urge my colleagues to consider whether the principles that I have outlined commend themselves and to use them as guidelines for the development of our policies, which need not be very different from those on which we won more votes in England than the Labour party in the recent election. I urge my colleagues to resist any move, such as those I have outlined, to reduce the role of this Parliament vis-à-vis this Government.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the debate. It is always a pleasure to follow Mr. Forth. He is known as one of Parliament's plain speakers. He is also known for his choice of tie—today it looks very multicultural and I congratulate him on his choice.

I congratulate you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, on your re-election as Chairman of Ways and Means and I also congratulate my hon. Friend Ms Barlow on her maiden speech. I am convinced that she will be just as good at promoting the interests of her constituents as her predecessor, Ivor Caplin, who I remember with great fondness. As Minister with responsibility for veterans, he came to my constituency, strolled down Belgrave road and visited a senior citizens club where he received a great reception.

The right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst spoke of a victory for the Conservative party in England and Wales.

Only in England.

Well, the Conservatives did not win in Leicester. I am happy to say that the electors of Leicester, East returned me with an increased majority of 2,500 and a swing to Labour of 2.69 per cent. We also managed to win back Leicester, South, a constituency that was held by the Liberal Democrats for about 10 months, so Leicester has returned three Labour MPs. Of course, my right hon. Friend Patricia Hewitt is now Secretary of State for Health, so we look forward to massive investment in our health service in Leicester and in other parts of the country.

We got our result because we followed mainstream Labour party policies. We put before the electors of Leicester, East the Government's record over the past eight years, and we gave them the choice between what we were putting forward and that of the Conservative party candidate, who was a mainstream candidate pursuing the policies of the Conservative party.

Will the hon. Gentleman be able to impress us as much if he tells us the turnout in Leicester? He is giving great praise to the good people of Leicester for re-electing him and his colleagues, but perhaps he could tell us how many of them bothered to turn out to do so.

The figure was 63 per cent.—up on the previous general election—and the postal vote turnout was about 74 per cent., although it is impossible to say how many of those who received postal votes actually voted. Turnout affects us all in our constituencies and we would like as many people to vote as possible. I favour compulsory voting at elections because turnout would be very high indeed.

We put forward our mainstream policies, we put forward the record of this Government, and the people returned a Labour Government. I know that it is possible to play with statistics. One might say that the Conservatives won in this or that region or in England, and that the Labour party won in Scotland and so on, but overall we have a Labour Government—a properly and duly elected Labour Government—and those who accept the results of 1979 have to accept the results of 2005.

I pay tribute to the Prime Minister for leading us to an historic third election victory. I want him to serve a full term as Prime Minister, as he promised to do during the election campaign. It is very important that he fulfils that pledge because his work has not been completed—and judging by the number of Bills in the Queen's Speech the Government's legislative programme is very full indeed.

I want to make three quick points about three aspects of policy. The first concerns a subject that was mentioned by both the leader of the Liberal Democrats and my hon. Friend Sir Stuart Bell, namely, the Government's European policy. I welcome the number of Bills on Europe that are currently before the House. I welcome the fact that the Government are still committed to the enlargement of the European Union. They did not stop with the enlargement on 1 May 2004, which has brought huge benefits to our country. Some of my hon. Friends will remember the concerns expressed by Opposition Front Benchers about the number of eastern Europeans coming to the United Kingdom. They were all supposed to be applying for benefits and unemployment was going to go up. Of course, that has not happened. The arrival of the new members has benefited Britain enormously and contributed greatly to our economy.

It is right that we should introduce legislation that will allow Romania and Bulgaria to enter the European Union. It is right that the Government, and the Prime Minister in particular, are the champions of enlargement, and are therefore pushing the case for Turkey. I would like us to look again at the block that we put on the entry of Croatia, for the reasons that have been outlined. It is important that we do not put a cap on membership of the European Union. We should ensure that it is as wide as possible, providing our country and Europe with great opportunities.

If we are to meet the targets of the Lisbon agenda we need to make absolutely certain that we can compete with the United States, and to do that we need the widest possible reform. That is why I hope that when we take over the presidency of the EU on 1 July we will push forward that reform agenda—an agenda that was set out clearly in the joint letter from the Prime Minister and Chancellor Schröder in 2002. They detailed a long list of reforms that they thought were essential for the progress of the European Union. We have not ticked all those boxes, but we have a golden opportunity from 1 July onwards to ensure that that agenda really is part of what we hope to achieve. We simply cannot accept a common agricultural policy that is so out of date that it does not actually benefit the agricultural agendas of this country and other European countries—apart, of course, from the French.

I look forward to hearing the new Minister for Europe when he addresses the House tomorrow. I understand that he will be opening the foreign affairs debate because the Foreign Secretary will be absent. I welcome the fact that the Prime Minister has decided that the Minister for Europe should attend Cabinet meetings. I have always felt that it is essential for the Government to give Europe a much higher priority. It is impossible for the British Foreign Secretary to give detailed attention to the European Union agenda. We have had seven Ministers for Europe over the past eight years, but I am sure that my right hon. Friend Mr. Alexander will last longer than some of the others. The fact remains that we need to have that expertise at that level to take us through the presidency and beyond.

I well remember my hon. Friend Andrew Mackinlay being extremely beastly to me when I was Minister for Europe, chiding me for not visiting the Balkans, despite the fact that as Minister for Europe I, like my predecessors and successors, had almost a third of the world as part of my portfolio. Indeed, when I was first appointed I was asked by the then Foreign Secretary whether I would take on entry clearance in addition to my European portfolio, and I was told by the permanent secretary that to do so would mean that I had to give up Russia.

It is impossible for a Minister to do his job effectively unless he is given the time and space to do it. I know that the Minister for Europe can only attend Cabinet meetings, but I see no reason why he should not permanently attend Cabinet—perhaps in a kind of Chief Secretary to the Treasury role—thereby enabling two Ministers to represent the Foreign Office. It will stop Select Committees and colleagues being horrible to Ministers by saying that they have not visited this or that country. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock is very keen for the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry to visit Poland—that was one of his great campaigns. I do not know whether Ministers have managed to do so, but this will enable that work load to be shared.

On the European constitution referendum, I take a different view from that advanced by my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough. If France votes no in its referendum at the end of the month, I do not see why we should have a referendum. If a major country like France rejects the European constitution in a referendum, what is the point of our having a referendum?

One point would be this—there are already hints, as the hon. Gentleman well knows, that if the French give the wrong answer in their referendum, they will be asked again, and maybe again, until they give the right answer, and one way of preventing that from happening would be for us, in our referendum, to give the right answer and be done with it.

The right hon. Gentleman knows the answer and he is trying to tease me on this. The problem is that if any of the 25 EU members reject the constitution, the partners will have to come together and renegotiate. He knows how the European Union operates—it will not be done in five minutes. Even though I am very much in favour of the constitution and believe that it would be good for Europe and for this country, I believe that if France and other countries reject the constitution the great difficulty will be that the British people will get the wrong message, and people like the right hon. Gentleman will be saying, "Why vote yes? France has already said no and there is no point in voting yes because the constitution will not be adopted by the rest of the European Union."

We need to think about the issue and we should not pre-judge what will happen in France. I hope very much that the French will vote in favour, but if they do not we should seriously consider postponing our referendum—which we think will take place in the next two years, although we do not know the timetable. I hope that that will help the country to gear up to a proper debate on Europe, and it is important that the lead should come from the Government.

We now have a new team at the Foreign Office, with a new Minister for Europe who will be able to do a superb job during the presidency months. He will come out of the six months of the presidency with a bounce, as will this country. While we are conducting the Union's presidency, we should ensure that we engage with the British people on the issue of Europe. If France votes yes and we decide to continue to hold a referendum, we would then be geared up for a proper campaign, which will enable us to put the arguments before the British people.

Europe, which features in the Queen's Speech and will be the subject of a number of major Bills, will be one of the themes of the next 12 months or so, and it is very important that that debate should start in the House of Commons and then go out to the rest of the country, as my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough has said.

The second issue that I want to consider is immigration and asylum. Unfortunately, I was chatting to my new hon. Friend Helen Goodman, so I missed the point on multiculturalism made by the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst—this is not an invitation to him to make that point again—but I know what the Conservative party did during the election campaign. It tried to play on the fears of the British people that, somehow, immigration was bad for this country and that the asylum system was somehow the result of something that the Government have done over the past eight years.

I am a first generation immigrant: someone born in Yemen who came to this country, and whose parents were economic migrants from India who went to Yemen to find work. They eventually came to the United Kingdom to find work and to give their children an education that they considered to be the best in the world, exercising their rights as British citizens, having lived in a British colony and coming to settle here in the United Kingdom. So I say as first generation immigrant that immigration to this country has hugely benefited our nation.

I am surprised at the right hon. Gentleman for raising this issue in the way that he did, because in the debates on race and immigration in the House over the past five years or so I thought we had seen a change in mood—a recognition by the Conservative party that this country has benefited enormously from immigration, that we welcome the fact that we have different cultures and different religions in the United Kingdom and that we want people to progress in this nation.

People of Asian and Afro-Caribbean origins now sit as Conservative MPs—such people have sat as Labour MPs for as long as I have been elected to the House. Indeed, the only sadness from the Liberal Democrats' point of view is that their one ethnic minority MP lost his seat in the recent general election. It is good for this country that the House of Commons should be representative of society as a whole. It is good for my city, Leicester—which is almost 50 per cent. Asian in ethnic origin—and it is good for Britain. Therefore, it must be good for the message that we send out.

We have a tough immigration and asylum policy. I have a 90 per cent. immigration caseload. Some 90 per cent. of those who come to my surgeries on Fridays have immigration problems. I have never had a "yes" back from a Labour immigration Minister when I have asked him to exercise his discretion in favour of one my constituents. That is a really tough policy.

Mass immigration to this country has ended. People cannot settle here unless they are spouses or the elderly dependants of a British citizen. People cannot arrive here, as they could eight years ago, as visitors and settle in this country. People cannot switch from being students to settling permanently. It is very difficult to get a work permit, as I know, having today tried to get through to Sheffield and being passed to five different people in an attempt to get a chef to come to work in one of the restaurants in my constituency. It is a very tough policy, so it is wrong of the Conservative party to tell the people of this country that, somehow, the Government are easy going on immigration and asylum.

The real problem rests with the immigration and nationality directorate, although it is processing cases as quickly as possible. When someone applies for asylum, it is totally unfair and unjust to let their case hang on in the IND for up to two years and then to tell them at the end of the process—after some of them have married and had children in that period—that it is time for them to leave the country. We need to focus on enforcement and tackling delay. The policy is right—it is firm, but fair—but we must also ensure that, in some way, we enable those decisions to be taken as quickly as possible, so that people can be told when they must go and make the necessary arrangements. We cannot deal with that unless we deal with the IND.

The problems with the IND started under the Conservative Government. I know about that because I tabled questions when I was first elected and discovered that bags of letters were unopened at the IND because the people there simply could not deal with the number of applications. The problem is systemic and it affects all hon. Members who represent inner-city constituencies. People come to see us and say that the Home Office promised to let them have a reply in 13 days, but they have not had a reply two years later. It is not the policy that is wrong, it is the administration. Let us sort out the administration.

Finally, on immigration and asylum, I will oppose the Government's proposals to restrict the right of appeal on visitors' cases. That was announced by the Home Secretary when he produced the White Paper before the election. It is fundamentally wrong to take away the right of appeal for British citizens who wish to be visited by relatives—a right of appeal that the Government gave in 1997. We are putting far too much power in the hands of the entry clearance officers, and we should ensure that that is not allowed to happen.

On health, as I said earlier, I am delighted that my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, West is the new Secretary of State for Health. I share a road with my right hon. Friend—the Belgrave road—and I have known her for many years. She will make a real difference to the health portfolio. She will build on her predecessors' reforms to ensure that we have a very good health system. However, the issue is not just one of giving more money to the national health service; it is about ensuring that money reaches front-line services. I and all other hon. Members can give examples of constituents who, despite the huge amount of money that we have put into the NHS, have been subjected to delays while waiting for their operations. We need to deal with front-line services. We need to ensure that when people want to see a doctor, they can do so as quickly as possible. They should be dealt with by their GP and should not need to go to casualty.

We must also ensure that we look at the way in which our hospitals operate. Leicester has, in effect, been promised three new hospitals. These decisions were taken before my right hon. Friend was appointed Secretary of State for Health. The Leicester general hospital at Evington is being rebuilt. It is near the home of the mother of Lembit Öpik. We welcome that new hospital, but let us also look at sections of the health service that affect our constituents, such as charging people to park their cars when they visit their sick relatives in hospital. One of my constituents had to take his daughter to casualty at the Leicester royal infirmary. He parked his car right outside casualty. When he came out, he found that his car had been clamped, even though he had saved the ambulance the trip, and he had to pay a fine. That was unnecessary. Those are the issues that really affect our constituents.

Let us invest all that money—I thank the Secretary of State for Health for giving us all that money—but let us ensure that we have more front-line services and, frankly, fewer managers. We have delivered a lot in the past eight years and the people have endorsed our record. However, we still have a lot to do. I congratulate the Prime Minister and the Government on what they have done and I look forward to five more years during which we will continue to deliver great public services to the people of our country.

I am very aware that, in making a maiden speech, the tradition in the House is to avoid all matters of controversy but, after the remarks of Mr. Forth and Keith Vaz about the recent election result, I think that it is perhaps one tradition that I will need to tweak a little. In the face of a result that gives an overall majority to the Labour party with a share of the vote that is the lowest for any governing party since 1832, defenders of the electoral system must say to what share of the vote they are prepared to see Government support sink before they finally admit that it is not a legitimate mandate from the British people. Defenders of the system must answer that question now that the evidence is clear that we have a three-party system.

Let me try to get back on track and return to matters of less controversy by paying tribute to my predecessor, David Chidgey, as the Member of Parliament for Eastleigh. I am only the fourth Member of Parliament for Eastleigh since the creation of the constituency in 1955, and I hope that I am not indulging in wishful thinking in pointing out that the longest-serving Member for my constituency, Sir David Price, was elected in 1955 with a majority even more slender than my own—23 votes fewer than my munificent majority of 568. The MPs for Eastleigh who were elected with large majorities unfortunately had the shortest tenure. I give notice to anyone suggesting that they might retake the seat that that will only be after a fight from me.

My immediate predecessor, David Chidgey, whose contribution to the House and service to his constituents is soon to be recognised in ennoblement and transfer to another place, also retained his by-election win at the 1997 election with a slender majority and then won substantially more comfortably in 2001. Indeed, the fall in the majority at the last election is testimony to the affection in which he was held by his constituents. I will do my best to live up to that reputation and to maintain standards as an excellent constituency MP.

Eastleigh constituency is a varied part of Hampshire. It contains the town of the same name and many settlements to the east of Southampton. The town was created when the railway works of the London and South Western Railway were moved from Nine Elms in London in 1891, and that is why the recent announcement of the closure of the Alstom railway works—the last remaining connection with the great days of Eastleigh railway engineering—is such a shock to our community. For the third of the constituency that is Eastleigh town, Eastleigh still means the railway and all the skills and dedication that are necessary to make the railways work. We now face the challenge of finding new jobs to take the place not just of those at Alstom but at Manor Bakeries, which is most famous for the production of Mr. Kipling's exceedingly fine cakes. I see that a number of Members have clearly enjoyed them in their time.

On the plus side, Eastleigh has continued to grow as a logistic centre, thanks in part to its ideal position near the junction of the M3 and M27, and with Southampton airport, which is really Eastleigh airport. It is now the biggest single site employer in the borough.The engineering tradition is maintained in the south of the constituency at Hamble by Aerostructures, a subsidiary of Smiths Industries that makes key components for the aviation industry, including leading wing edges for both Boeing and Airbus aircraft. That is playing both sides for a clear win. The history of the aviation industry has long been intertwined with our area, and a notable event was the maiden flight from Eastleigh airport of the prototype for the Spitfire. Other important engineering names include CooperVision for contact lenses and, of course, the VT Group of defence shipbuilders and repairers, whose headquarters are in the middle of the constituency at Hedge End.

Hedge End has become a thriving population centre, with its origins as a distinct village like so many other centres in the constituency. Bishopstoke traces its origins to before the Domesday Book, while Fair Oak, West End and Botley are long-standing settlements to the east of Southampton. Botley was home to William Cobbett of the "Rural Rides" and was therefore an early exponent of rural radicalism. Further south along the Hamble river is Bursledon, which once launched one of Nelson's key flagships, and Hamble-le-Rice itself, which is now the headquarters of the Royal Yachting Association and the proud home of no fewer than three sailing clubs. Finally, Netley Abbey boasts a castle that has long stood guard against intruders along the Solent while the abbey itself is a ruined but picturesque reminder of the unorthodox means employed by one of our former monarchs to balance the public Exchequer.

All these areas have distinct and important identities as successful communities, with so much to offer in terms of quality of life. That is why one important political issue for me will remain how to balance the need for affordable homes for young local people with the enormous development pressures in what Keith Hill, the previous Minister for Housing and Planning, has called the "Solent gateway". Maintaining those communities and their identities is an important priority that suggests that development should be limited to brownfield sites and existing urban areas.

Another important political issue is the current state of the health service across Hampshire, whose trusts are now running a cumulative deficit of more than £50 million. Although there has been substantial increases in funding for which the Government deserve due credit, the increases have not kept up with the equally substantial increases in costs due, for example, to the junior doctors new contract. As a result, both the finances and other stress indicators, such as accident and emergency waiting times, ward closures and the need to fill nursing vacancies temporarily through agency nurses, all suggest that there is a lot of pain to come in the local health service. I, for one, will seek proper justification for the Government's plans to spend a fifth less per head on health in the Eastleigh and Test Valley South primary care trust than the national average and 40 per cent. less than the funding per head in the north-east.

We may, indeed, in the south of the country be relatively affluent, but we also face higher costs. The business of government is not merely to provide redistribution to the least well-off, important though that is, but to provide public goods for all those—rich and poor—who need them. We should no more run down the health service in the south than cut street lighting in prosperous areas on the ground that their needs are less than those in deprived ones.

Finally, let me say something about arriving in the House with a background of six years in the European Parliament. There is an enormous sense of relief that whatever one says is likely to be subject to the normal distortions of one's opponents rather than the random contortions of the interpreters. However, I am also surprised at the nervousness in the House about the encroachments on its power by the institutions of the European Union. It is obvious to me, as Member of the European Parliament for six years, that that Parliament deals with important but largely technical legislation that matters hugely certainly to business, the single market and our prosperity, but that the concerns of voters on the doorstep about health, education, crime, pensions, tax and the economy remain squarely and rightly in the national domain. Far from being a federal superstate, the European Union institutions employ fewer people in total than Hampshire county council, they have been repealing more legislation than they have put on the statute book for the past 10 years and they account for just one fortieth of total public spending by all levels of government. That is one of the reasons why it is such a signal honour for me to be returned by the people of Eastleigh to represent them in the House. This is still the cockpit of our democracy, and long may it remain so.

May I begin by congratulating you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, on your return as Chairman of Ways and Means, and my hon. Friend Ms Barlow on her excellent maiden speech. Chris Huhne made a fine maiden speech and I am sure that he will make a valuable contribution to our debates. He certainly has a hard act to follow in his predecessor, who was well respected here, which is evidenced by his imminent accession to the other place. I was going to congratulate my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State, Department for Constitutional Affairs, on her new appointment, but unfortunately she has just left the Chamber. I intend to refer directly to her responsibilities.

I welcome the Queen's Speech, especially the references to creating safe and secure communities and fostering a culture of respect. Such policies will be greatly welcomed throughout the country, not least in my constituency. At the forefront of such policies will be our elected local authorities. They are not mentioned directly in the Queen's Speech, so I hope that that points to a period of stability and a lack of interference by central Government, although I somehow doubt it. However, I have a great deal of respect for my right hon. Friend the Minister of Communities and Local Government and I know that he will have the strength of character to overcome the prejudices of the civil service when dealing with local government.

Thinking about democratic mandates brings me neatly to House of Lords reform. Unlike Mr. Forth, I do not believe that the effectiveness of the House of Lords is measured by how well it frustrates the mandate of the elected Government—whatever political colour they might be. If he believes that people in the country at large want another 500 elected politicians, with their salaries and expenses, he has not been watching events very closely.

I was pleased by the reference in the Queen's Speech to continuing the reform of the House of Lords. Although I must admit that that was not a prime topic of conversation raised with me on the doorstep, it remains a fundamental plank of the constitutional bridge by which we have brought the governance of the United Kingdom into the 21st century. Great steps have already been made in the direction of reform, and although the hereditary principle has been consigned to the political dustbin for all but the remaining few, the breezes of reform are yet to blow away the last vestiges of power held by a wealthy, privileged class. However, I am sure that many hon. Members share my amusement at the irony that the only democratic element in the upper House is the remaining hereditary peers, who recently had to hold a democratic ballot to select a replacement for a deceased peer.

There must be further reform to make the second chamber more representative and accountable. The status quo is not sustainable, and when the remaining hereditaries are gone—I hope that that will happen soon—it will be totally unacceptable for the entire House to be appointed by the Prime Minister, whoever that might be. On the other hand, an elected, or partly elected, second chamber would seriously threaten the primacy of the House of Commons and destabilise our system of government.

Before we enter into a debate on how representatives in the other place should be selected, it is important to decide what the functions of the second chamber should be. It has long been my view that the second chamber's role should be deliberative, revising and advisory. The job of holding the Executive to account is for the Opposition and Back Benchers in this place, not for the House of Lords. It should be a function of the second chamber that it can suggest, but not make, amendments to legislation. Such amendments could be deposited in the Vote Office of the House of Commons, but would have to be tabled by a Member of the House of Commons and debated and voted on here. There would be no more ping-pong or deliberate attempts to frustrate the will of the democratically elected House of Commons. Amendments would thus be more likely to be well considered and genuinely helpful, instead of being the politically motivated decisions that emanated from the Lords during the last Parliament.

I am interested by what my hon. Friend is saying, but does he agree that we should consider not only the powers and responsibilities of the upper House, which are important, but the way in which this House operates? Does he agree that an important aspect of reforming the system of scrutiny would be to enshrine in the processes of the House pre-legislative scrutiny, which worked effectively in the last Parliament?

I agree with my hon. Friend. The system of draft Bills that was tried in the last Parliament worked extremely well, so I hope that the Government will increasingly adopt it in the future.

The second chamber should give well considered advice, publicly debate the great issues of the day and make comment on the quality of legislation and governance, with its views commanding wide respect. It should be made up of people selected for their experience and knowledge and considered qualified to offer advice and guidance to the elected House. However, such a second chamber could not be guaranteed by elections.

There is more to our democracy than elected politicians. Many bodies—statutory, voluntary and professional—play an important, and indeed vital, role in our democratic society. I envisage the second chamber drawing its membership from those bodies. They would provide the gender and ethnic balance that still eludes the Commons, but is needed if a truly revising, advisory and representative body is to have any claim to legitimacy.

It would be possible to create a second chamber made up of such eminent people while making it representative and more accountable. However, that would not be achieved by creating yet another appointments commission because that would be only a small step towards more democracy. Experience shows that appointments commissions merely appoint people such as their members. Also, who appoints the appointments commission?

We must make the selection of representatives in the Lords more democratic by widening the responsibility for making appointments. Political parties should appoint representatives regionally, perhaps in proportion to the number of votes cast in the general election. Local government and devolved Assemblies should appoint representatives, as should business, trade unions, voluntary bodies, religious organisations and so on. We would thus create a representative second chamber with members who would be accountable to their appointing organisations. It would be separate and distinct from, but complementary to, the elected House of Commons. Such a new second chamber would add value to our system of governance and, in the words of our manifesto, be more

"effective, legitimate and more representative without challenging the primacy of the House of Commons."

Perhaps more important than widening access to power is widening access to prosperity and opportunity. I am proud to be a member of a political party with that as its central tenet of belief. The Labour Government have done much more than any previous Government to attack poverty and the causes of poverty, and that work must be intensified during this Parliament, both at home and overseas. I welcome the references in the Queen's Speech to such matters.

I was also pleased to hear the references to support for housing costs. Many of my constituents struggle to get on the first rung of the housing ladder, even though they live in the north of England, where prices are much lower than in the south. Some housing associations providing shared ownership schemes have offered welcome help and support to first-time buyers, but there is a snag to that. Shared ownership can mean that a housing association effectively owns part of a property while the buyer has a mortgage for the rest. The original intention was that the buyer would buy out the association and become the sole owner. However, the rise in property prices has meant that rather than a buyer having to repay the £15,000 contributed by the association, for example, he or she must pay many times that sum because the value of the house is now nearer £75,000 than the original £30,000. Such a sum is completely beyond the means of many home owners, so they are thus prevented from getting off the first rung of the housing ladder. I make a plea for a structure that recognises housing associations' contributions by allowing them to charge a reasonable amount of interest on the sum borrowed, but does not let them share fully in the increased value of the property, thus avoiding trapping people with a debt that they can never repay.

There is a reference in the Queen's Speech to help for consumers. Many years ago, I introduced a private Member's Bill that hit the statute book as the Sale and Supply of Goods Act 1994. I was proud of the legislation, which for the first time, amazingly, meant that goods sold had to be fit for the purpose for which they were sold. That principle now seems to have been enshrined in most of our commercial transactions. However, one thing remains glaringly exempt: the private sale of motor cars. The daughter of a friend of mine recently bought a car for £3,000. After taking it in for a service, she was told that it was a death trap. When she took it back to the seller, she was told, "Tough." Aficionados of "Only Fools and Horses" will be familiar with Boycie, the man from whom one should not buy a used car. Sadly, Boycie is by no means a fictitious character. I am afraid that he is alive and well in many areas. Although it may be a joke on a TV programme, it is not a joke for the many hard-working citizens who buy a used car only to find—sometimes only days later—that the car on which they have spent their hard-earned cash, or for which they have taken out a loan at an exorbitant interest rate, is not roadworthy.

It is probably impossible to legislate for rogues and charlatans to have scruples or, dare I say it, respect, but it is certainly possible to legislate to ensure that it would be illegal to sell a car with less than, say, nine months of a valid MOT certificate to run. That would give the buyer some measure of confidence in the roadworthiness of the vehicle and some redress with the testing station should it turn out not to be so. It would also afford much protection for hard-working families. I hope that the Government find time in the other measures that Her Majesty said would be laid before us to introduce such simple but essential protection to buyers, to say nothing of making our roads safer.

Although not referred to directly in the Queen's Speech, transport is none the less vital to the pursuance of many of the Government's objectives. It is an aspect of Government policy that needs to be elevated up the priority list, nationally and in the north-east. Driving down to the House yesterday, I noticed much ongoing work to improve the road network, and there were several instances of major improvements to the A1. None, however, were in the north-east. Ours is a much neglected region in terms of investment in the transport infrastructure and remains the only region in Britain not directly linked to the national motorway network.

Get real.

Does the hon. Gentleman want to intervene?

Yes. If the hon. Gentleman were to experience the congestion, the gridlock and the lack of investment in roads in the south of England, he might think twice before coming to the House and begging for money for roads in the north-east.

If I am ignorant of road congestion in the south, the hon. Gentleman is equally ignorant of problems in the north-east. I represent the north-east and am entitled to argue on behalf of my region.

Let me educate the hon. Gentleman. The links from the north to Scotland rely on miles on single carriageway roads. Our links to the north-west are on intermittent stretches of dual and single carriageway. Our links to the south are by two-lane motorway and then dual carriageway through North Yorkshire. The traffic congestion on the A1 western bypass through Gateshead and Newcastle rivals the worst cases elsewhere and, I suggest, anything experienced in the south-west. It will get much worse without early intervention.

The north-east badly needs a detailed regional integrated transport plan to link our conurbations and to serve our local communities. Regional transport plans, drawn up in the regions, by the people from the regions, should form an integral part of national transport planning. Bus operators have more interest in their licence to print money than in their licence to run buses. There is no effective control of bus services and no meaningful integration with other modes of transport, such as the Tyne and Wear Metro system. We need legislation to bring some regulation of local bus services back to local authorities so that they have an influence over the services provided to local people.

On what my hon. Friend says about integrated transport in the north-east, many of the problems in my constituency relate to bus travel. They were made worse following deregulation by the Conservative Government. Does he agree that one thing the north-east needs is a single passenger transport authority, or some other body, to control transport for the entire region? It is quite a small region, but it is still divided, with different types of transport in operation.

I agree entirely. That is my point. We need a regional transport strategy and a regional transport authority to plan and implement it. The Tyne and Wear Metro system is badly in need of modernisation, upgrading and, some would say, extending. I look forward to the co-operation of Transport Ministers in the sensible and detailed proposals of the transport executive, Nexus, to maintain that popular system at the quality and level of service to which people have become used.

We need more adventurous thinking in the Department for Transport, and I hope that the Eddington review helps to provide that. Our manifesto said that we will consider options for a new generation of high-speed intercity trains. My recent question to the Secretary of State about the use of the linear motor—the Maglev system—to provide fast, efficient and environmentally friendly intercity trains met with the comment that only one small stretch had been tried in China, and it was still in the experimental stage. Why, when the linear motor was developed here more than 50 years ago, are we waiting for some other country to develop it before we are brave enough to put a toe in the water? We should be leading the way in innovative and climate-friendly transport systems, not following others.

The proposed provision of free local transport for the elderly is very welcome, but it is restricted to buses and local authority boundaries. Unless that can be extended and applied to systems like the Tyne and Wear Metro, which accounts for 20 per cent. of all public transport journeys in the area, the system will suffer a drop in revenue, the flexibility of travel modes will be restricted, and those who live in areas served mainly by metro will have to pay, while those where buses predominate will travel for free.

Transport is one of the major challenges facing the new Government, and I hope that we see new and radical proposals to drag it into the 21st century. That would cost money, of course, but a fraction of the money going into London transport and the proposed Crossrail system would provide much needed relief and a boost to the economy of the north-east.

The north-south divide continues to dominate the harbingers of doom and despair in the northern press. Although things have certainly improved in the north-east—unemployment has tumbled, measures such as the minimum wage have hugely improved the lives of thousands of citizens, educational achievement has improved and new health services have been introduced—the disparity between the north and the south is not reducing as the current philosophy that all regions should advance equally maintains its breadth and its depth.

However, for most citizens the quality of life in the region remains high. Ours is a region of beauty and culture, with a proud history of contributing to the prosperity of this country. The efforts of people in the region to improve the lives and lifestyles of the population are showing real dividends. The Chancellor's target of full employment is welcome and achievable, but only if the region's economy is growing and sustainable. In that regard, Government assistance in bringing more research and development into the region, which has the lowest level of research and development, and the redistribution of the promised civil service functions out of London and the south, would be of much assistance. More respect for, and policies to assist, the manufacturing industry would be greatly welcomed in the north-east.

I also welcome proposals to bring about greater voter participation. Postal voting has proved popular. Although we need safeguards against abuse, the experience in Newcastle and Gateshead is that it has worked well, and more and more electors are requesting it. That was certainly the experience in the last general election.

In this historic third-term Labour Government, we have a great opportunity to bring about a fundamental and positive shift in the social and economic life of our citizens and the way in which our country is governed. I know that the basic principles of the Labour party will take us in that direction and that this Government will implement the policies to get us there. The Queen's Speech is the first step along the way.

My first words in this new Parliament must be to thank the electors of Salisbury constituency for returning me and for lending me their trust in my sixth Parliament representing that wonderful constituency. It was an interesting election campaign for a number of reasons. The turnout, I am glad to say, was good. It was better than last time, at 68 per cent., but back in 1992 it was 80 per cent. So we still saw too few people voting, and we need to ask ourselves why.

I suspect that one of the reasons is the dysfunction between the style of election campaigning at national level and what actually goes on in our constituencies. I am sure we all experienced that in the past few weeks. We live in a traditional part of England, and my electors would not let me get away without attending a lot of public meetings. In fact, I spoke at 22 public meetings in the election campaign. Those who say that it cannot be worth it because no one turns out might be interested to know that in total more than 700 people came to those election meetings. Obviously, some were small gatherings and some were larger. What was interesting was that the people who attended those meetings, which were held in the evening—after I had put in six hours on the battle bus each day going around the 106 villages outside Salisbury—had all watched the early evening news and wanted to talk about something completely different. Yes, they wanted to talk about our party's main points relating to police, school discipline, clean hospitals, controlled immigration, low tax and accountability—that was fine—but they also wanted to discuss a great deal else that simply did not feature in the national campaign. They wanted to talk about climate change and the environment, waste and recycling, housing, science—my constituency has a large science base—education, the rural economy and farming. They even wanted to talk about religion and politics. They talked about Europe and the constitution and about Englishness, which my right hon. Friend Mr. Forth will be glad to hear. They wanted to talk about our cultural heritage, Stonehenge, transport issues, and Salisbury courthouses and why the Government appear to be reneging on promises in that respect.

What is the reason for that dysfunction? I suspect it is that the media pundits have a Westminster village agenda—they sit in the Westminster village for a month and do not venture out into the real world. I wonder whether those who conduct the forensic textual analysis that continues day after day, night after night—those excellent and highly professional gentlemen John Humphrys, David Dimbleby, Jeremy Paxman and Jim Naughtie—are really in touch with the electors. Incidentally, they are all men—with one or two honourable exceptions, there was not a female voice to be heard among the commentators on the election. If they are not in touch, that might account for the low turnout.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, like pit ponies, members of the Westminster lobby should be allowed to roam around the country during the summers?

My impression is that they already do so quite a lot, but that is a sensible suggestion which the lobby should be encouraged to consider.

One person whose passing I lament—the next election will be the duller for it—is the distinguished journalist Andrew Marr, who has lent an important dimension to reporting of politics in this country. He has come at us from all sides and he is no respecter of people or pomposity—or, indeed, of party. He has given us a good run for our money and I wish him well for the future. He will be missed, but we look forward to seeing the next—no doubt even more distinguished—chapter of his life unfold.

What I wish to discuss this evening is covered by the immortal words of the Queen's Speech:

"Other measures will be laid before you."

I mind most something that is not specifically mentioned in the Queen's Speech, but throughout the Speech and the suggestions for legislation runs the theme of science, and it is science that I wish to discuss. The wreckage of science policy over the past decade or so is strewn across the political landscape of this country. Whether we are dealing with genetically modified crops, the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, nanotechnology, foot and mouth disease, the Energy Bill or global warming, the problem is that we in this country now have an anti-science culture. We have to tackle that problem, and as a member of the Science and Technology Committee in the last Parliament, I have no doubt that the right place to start is in education—in primary education, right at the bottom of the ladder.

It is extraordinary that, up to about the age of 10, young people are obsessed with dinosaurs and space. Their inquiring little minds look backwards, where they are enchanted by dinosaurs, and forwards into space, where they love sci-fi and all the games that are available. But after about the age of 10, they switch off. Science is too hard and too dull, the curriculum turns them right off and, in any case, all the other subjects are much easier. That is a real national problem. We have to grasp the nettle of science if we are to maintain our position as the fourth largest economy in the world and our nation's prosperity in the face of competition from China, India and the Pacific economies.

I strongly agree with the hon. Gentleman's sentiments, but does he agree with me that part of the problem—perhaps the major part—is the fact that when young people reach the age of 18, 19 or 20, they realise that the labour market is far better at rewarding accountants and lawyers than it has ever been at rewarding scientists and technologists?

I am delighted to agree with the hon. Gentleman. In fact, the problem is worse than that: all the best science graduates are snapped up by the City institutions because they are good at working systems and understanding mathematical models and computing. He is absolutely right, but we have to start with science education.

The problem facing any Government—the last Government had to face it and the current Government have to face it in spades—is that they are frightened of science, the public are frightened of science, and, with some honourable exceptions, journalists know little about science. The result is a lot of gesture politics in science. The Government think that if they set up citizens' juries, focus groups, stakeholder forums and consensus conferences, and if they pass the buck between the scientists and the decision makers in government, when something goes wrong they can say, "Well, we're all to blame aren't we? It's not only my fault." That is a real problem which much be tackled.

The solution starts with trust—trust in scientists and in their status. If we are to rectify that problem, we need more scientists, educated to a higher standard, and we have to give them their head in their field. The solution also requires trust in politicians. We should not usurp scientists. Although there is a certain amount of science that is either right or wrong, there is more in which value judgments about risk are required. Nothing is risk free, but we do not understand risk well enough and we do not try to explain it. If we continue to fail in that respect, we shall not engender trust. In addition, there is the problem of deflecting blame or not holding the right person to account if something goes wrong. It seems that there is always someone to blame. Take the example of foot and mouth disease. Whom do we blame for that? We still do not know. We do not know who was wrong—whether it was the scientists, the farmers, the vets, or the Government who should have been talking about vaccination. We try to deflect blame when things go wrong, but that is because we do not understand the nature of risk and the fact that nothing is risk free. One of the ways to tackle that problem is to create new demand for greater openness and transparency. There is uncertainty in all things, but continuous obfuscation by Government about serious matters affecting us all—whether it is GM crops, nanotechnology or anything else—does us no service at all. Worse still, if we are too secretive about the wrong things, we stifle innovation and discourage scientists from producing what they are capable of producing.

There is one point that I shall address head on: our energy sources and how we produce base-load electricity in future. It is extraordinary that the British debate on nuclear energy has been tainted for so long by the defence legacy of the past 60 or 70 years—the fact that early nuclear energy was produced in conjunction with defence trials and the defence uses of nuclear fission. That legacy continues to distort our perception today, and we have to get beyond it. We are tackling the problem of nuclear waste through legislation introduced by the Government in the last Parliament—I give them credit for that. If we can overcome that problem and the defence legacy, we can move forward.

We must not be deflected from our path by self-appointed pressure groups who are opposed to nuclear energy for a variety of reasons, but who have managed to skew public opinion in this country by exploiting fear, prejudice and sheer ignorance about nuclear process. We need a wholly new approach. First, we have to state clearly that safety is paramount in all our energy sources. That is so obvious and so far beyond dispute that it should not be a matter of argument between those who are opposed to nuclear energy and those who are not. I was interested in what the Finnish people did when they decided to move ahead with a new generation of nuclear plants, so I went to Finland—I declare an interest—to discover the facts. I wanted both to hear about technological developments and to understand the political processes that had led the Finnish people to conclude that they needed a new generation of nuclear plants.

One of the first things that I discovered, apart from the putting of safety first, was that they had persuaded themselves as a nation that they had a moral duty, first, to clean up the mess of previous nuclear generations and, secondly, to address climate change in a grown-up way, and to accept that in a no-carbon economy generated by nuclear energy, that is a moral position to adopt. It is preferable to high imports, even of natural gas, let alone other fossil fuels.

It was then a question of serious public education. It took the Finns eight years to reach the stage where they felt that they could take votes in Parliament. There was also the national interest, of persuading people that rather than being fearful of nuclear energy they should be interested in security of supply for the nation and the problem of base-load capacity, which can never be met by renewable energy such as windmills. In addition, there was the problem of storage of nuclear waste. There were local issues to be considered.

We are sitting in London but there are communities in the north-west—for example, around Sellafield, in Cumbria—where the entire population, one way or another, depends on the nuclear industry. We must understand that those who are living in such areas do not share the fears and do not countenance the prejudices that perhaps people have in the Westminster village. The national interest must be complemented by local interests in the highly skilled, highly paid, highly responsible and highly fulfilling jobs that are available in high technology industries such as the nuclear industry.

The issue of future waste is extremely important. It is an approach to science that we forget. We must work out before we start becoming involved in new science and technology what to do with waste products. Nuclear waste is a classic example. I have seen the future in Finland; I have seen how the Finns are handling the issue. I have been down the first of the new deep-level facilities that they are constructing. They are constructed on the basis that if someone has a bright idea in 300 years' time, it will be possible to retrieve the nuclear waste and treat it. Meanwhile, it will be safe.

Then there is financing. What a revolution! Imagine going to the City and saying, "We want to build a nuclear power station. Will the City sign up to a 60-year business plan?" That is the problem that we face. Of course, the City will not do that, but that has been done in Finland, where those involved have said that the Government will not be involved and there will be no taxpayers' money. There must be a consortium of people who are prepared to wait 60 years. All the big users of energy in Finland—60 private companies—got together to form a new company, which is putting up 25 per cent. of the capital straight away, over 60 years.

That financing system is extremely important. The short-term nature of financial investment in this country is a problem if one goes to the City, where 60 years will not be countenanced. If it were not for tax breaks, a windmill would not be built anywhere in the UK at present. Tax breaks, rather than anything else, are driving wind turbines at the moment.

There is a huge role for the Energy Intensive Users Group, which was formed many years ago. The group consists of the big users such as the steel and chemical industries, paper, glass, ceramics and gypsum. Alcan and Rio Tinto are two large companies that are involved. They are also allied to the Major Energy Users Council, which has been working since 1987 to bring things together. If only we could persuade the big users to become involved, we would be able to make proper use of the technology that is available.

The Government have a double lock on progress in nuclear energy. At present, the Government are in denial because they are split. It is all very well saying that industry must come to us, the Government, with proposals. I agree that a UK Government will probably never build another nuclear power station. That must come from the private sector, which will be prepared to take the risk if the two locks are undone by Government. The first lock is that it is necessary to have a licence to build a nuclear power plant and the second is the need for a second licence to operate it. Until the Government are prepared to concede that when everything else is in place—safety, waste disposal and finance, for example—they will be prepared to unlock the double lock, the industry will not be prepared to make the first move. It will not be prepared to take the risk.

These are the issues that we should be discussing in this Parliament. What I have described in terms of nuclear energy is replicated throughout science and technology in this country, whether it is nanotechnology, stem cell research or new technologies in a wide range of industrial processes on which the UK depends. It is up to us to start thinking differently, in a completely fresh way, about the nature of risk, the nature of investment and the nature of partnership between the Government and the private sector. That is what I hope to see coming out of the Queen's Speech and in legislation that we shall see in future. I hope that we shall also see a marine Bill, which we have been promised. Above all, we must take science seriously. It will take several Parliaments to change the tide in favour of science. I hope that the Government will be brave enough to grasp that point at primary school level right through to universities and beyond.

First, I congratulate my hon. Friend Ms Barlow on her maiden speech. Secondly, I congratulate Chris Huhne. The hon. Gentleman's predecessor was David Chidgey. I enjoyed his company immensely. He was a good companion of mine on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. The predecessor of my hon. Friend the Member for Hove, Ivor Caplin, was a fine Minister. We owe him a great deal. He made a real job of the portfolio of a Minister for veterans. He did much to advance the awareness of and the interest in veterans and their dependants in Government. Although others held the portfolio, Ivor Caplin was the first Minister who really identified with the post, which is one that will now endure in Government. The post was long overdue. It is to the credit of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister that he created the portfolio. Ivor Caplin distinguished himself in the stewardship of the office in a wonderful way. We should be grateful to him, as I have said.

I have listened to the debate. One of the good things about being called to speak late in the day is that it is possible to respond to and comment—

It is the middle of the debate.

There are many Members who have spoken in the debate who are now not in their places. I listened carefully to what they said and I shall make one or two comments. Mr. Redwood made a number of points and I shall refer to two of them. He referred to some concern, which is acknowledged and which we share, about the apparent lack of interest in politics. He set out some of the causes and solutions.

We have not heard since the election about the matter of Howard Flight. His dismissal from the Opposition Front Bench was a matter for the Conservative party, but I was worried that a party leader can end a person's career—

We are debating the Queen's Speech.

The hon. Gentleman asks from a sedentary position whether it is a matter to be raised in a debate on the Queen's Speech. I am responding to the right hon. Member for Wokingham. I am not making a partisan point. I have acknowledged that the issue is one for the Conservative party when it comes to whom it puts in to bat as chairmen or shadow Ministers. If we are seen as monolithic parties and if party leaders can stop people standing for Parliament, cynicism about this place will be reinforced. I see right hon. and hon. Members acknowledging that it is a valid point. We are seen in this place as being party men and women and never being able to express a critical point of view. It is time we addressed this position and recognised that a bad precedent was set.

The right hon. Member for Wokingham referred to tax. I rejoice that in the third paragraph of the Queen's Speech there is a reference to the fact that we will improve our essential public services. I do not know whether it is true or not, but the right hon. Gentleman alleged that £4 of every £10 of people's earnings is spent on tax. I rejoice, however, in the fact that we have people in employment who can pay tax. There is an increasing tax yield, so we can improve the quality of public services. That needs to be stated at a time when there is continuing criticism of our public expenditure policies and our priorities. One of the distinguishing features of the Queen's Speech is our belief that we can improve the quality and provision of essential public services because we have full employment, which was not the case when the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues were in government.

Mr. Forth and others said that the Queen's Speech was extremely vague, and I have some sympathy with that view. If we introduce reform, it should not do away with the rubric and the ritual, which I can live with. Doing away with such things is not modernisation. Modernisation is about increasing the accountability, stewardship and transparency of government. Today's Queen's Speech, as gracious as it is, is nevertheless pretty empty. The House of Commons should have been presented with the detailed legislative programme that, apparently, was distributed to members of the Press Gallery. In my view, there should be a White Paper. The new ministry should be presented to the House of Commons, and it should be endorsed by a vote in the Commons. There are historical precedents for such a parliamentary procedure, which is deployed in other Westminster-style legislatures and should take place here some weeks after a general election.

As an aside, it is cruel that hon. Members, wherever they come from, are expected to decant their offices within hours when they lose their seat. New Members are homeless and lack an office. It would be much more sensible if the mandate of their predecessors continued to the end of the poll or beyond, as happens in many other legislatures. Of course, there would need to be ground rules about things that Members cannot do during an election period, such as use the equipment and facilities of the House, but they should remain Members of Parliament until the new ministry is endorsed by the House of Commons. That would be a sensible reform.

The Queen's Speech should be a detailed programme, and the Prime Minister should present his new ministry to the House of Commons two or three weeks after the general election. That would allow an orderly transfer of ministries. However, it is not just Governments who change at general elections. It is in the interests of their constituents that Members of Parliament should be able to depart with dignity and new Members should gradually assume their parliamentary duties. I hope that that suggestion will be taken on board.

I hope that when he concludes our debate today, my hon. Friend the Minister will help me with something. I have looked in vain in the Queen's Speech for mention of an extremely attractive issue that appeared in our party manifesto—the promise that we would legislate to protect bank holidays, which would be additional to the minimum holiday entitlement. That electoral commitment would have a great effect on my constituency, which has a large retail sector in and around Lakeside. It is also important to people in the building and construction industry. I hope that the Minister will assure us that it will be legislated for in this Session. If that is the case, I would like to know why it did not appear in the Queen's Speech.

Is the hon. Gentleman really surprised that what was in the Labour manifesto is not being legislated for? Recent Labour manifestos have included such things as an undertaking not to introduce top-up fees. I think that he might have rebelled on that one.

I am drawing a line on that which is past. I shall start again. I hope that the Government will take advice and counselling from Back Benchers like me, stand by their manifesto commitments and reassure me that they will be fulfilled in this Session.

I listened intently to Robert Key, and much of what he said about science and our decisions about energy provision deserve serious consideration. However, when he said that people in Sellafield do not share other people's anxieties about the nuclear industry, two things occurred to me. First, throughout history, unfortunately it has been the case that people who have to work in a particular industry often have to convince themselves that it is safe. Those who worked at Chernobyl have been mentioned. I accept that there is a qualitative difference between standards in the old Soviet Union and standards in the British nuclear industry but, nevertheless, it is inevitable that people believe that their industry is safe, even though that is not always the case. Secondly, Sammy Wilson was in the Chamber when the hon. Member for Salisbury was speaking. People living in Northern Ireland and around Dublin bay in the Irish Republic have grounds for grave concern about what has been produced at Sellafield, so the situation is not as simple as has been suggested.

I hope, however, that in view of his speech, the hon. Member for Salisbury will endorse measures in the Queen's Speech to legislate for corporate manslaughter, as they are long overdue. If corporate manslaughter is on the statute book, the sanction of serious penalties including imprisonment will help to focus the minds of managers and directors on the fact that they can no longer treat things in a cavalier fashion. When tragedies occur, they cannot blame the lowest people in the railway hierarchy, the maritime industry or the nuclear industry. They themselves must recognise that they will face criminal sanctions and severe penalties. I hope that the hon. Gentleman welcomes that.

Does the hon. Gentleman remember the case of the MV Derbyshire, which sank in the China seas? We still do not know what happened and whether it was a design fault or an act of nature, so it may fall into the same category.

It would. At the back of my mind is the Herald of Free Enterprise. The people who ran that ship were trying to maximise profits and turnaround time with blatant disregard for the safety of passengers and crew. The individuals who were pilloried and received most of the penalties and the blame were not the directors but people who were low on the scale of responsibilities. Earlier, it was suggested that we should not oppose for opposition's sake. I certainly do not do so, but there are some things that we ought to embrace. I hope that all the parties embrace that proposal.

On the question of identity cards, when the Identity Cards Bill received its Second Reading in the last Session, David Trimble, the previous leader of the Ulster Unionist party and I challenged the Minister in charge to explain how he would deal with the common travel area between the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic. I remember the occasion, because it rankles with me that we were brushed aside as if that problem were irrelevant. It has still not been addressed. I am not opposed to identity cards, but I believe that legislation should have great clarity, precision and effectiveness. We have not been told, however, how the Government will deal with people who commute from the Irish Republic to the United Kingdom. We have a common land border, and many people also commute from the Irish Republic to London on Mondays and go home at weekends. Once identity card legislation is in force, everyone will have either an identity card or a passport in London—except for people from the Irish Republic. I am not criticising the Government, but I am alerting them to the fact that the arrangements have not been thought through. There is a common travel area, but, quite rightly, we cannot legislate for the Irish Republic—that would be a monumental cheek. Bearing in mind that I raised the matter some months ago, I invite the Minister to tell me tonight how the Government intend to remedy it.

According to the Gracious Speech, we are to have a fair and flexible system in relation to immigration and asylum. I listened to my hon. Friend Keith Vaz, who is no longer present. I thought he did a wonderful job of clarifying the position and challenging the Conservatives to say how and to what extent they would have reduced immigration. There is controlled immigration to this country already. I was frustrated by the fact that members of the Government Front-Bench team did not challenge the Conservatives more on this during the election.

There has been a conflation—that is the buzz word, I think—of asylum and immigration, which are two separate issues. I challenge those on the Conservative Front Bench to explain to us this evening through which categories of people immigration would be reduced. As my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East pointed out, immigration is strictly controlled. I deprecate the fact that the Conservatives use the term without spelling out the consequences and where there is scope for reduced immigration—even assuming that that is necessarily a desirable objective, which I do not accept.

On asylum, which is a quite separate matter, the problem has been in the administration of the applications, as my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East pointed out. We have a proud record under successive Governments of allowing people who suffer persecution to come to the United Kingdom. Like hon. Members in all parts of the House, I have seen in my surgeries people who have endured the most terrible atrocities against themselves, their families and their loved ones. Sometimes, commentators and some of our constituents do not fully understand what such people have suffered.

Reference was made to public meetings. I remember one public meeting that I had with representatives of the Churches in my constituency during the election. Although by and large the mood of the meeting was with me, I thought it important to remind those attending the meeting that 2,000 years ago there was a little boy who fled persecution in Palestine with his mummy and daddy. The new testament does not tell us whether the people of Egypt said, "All these Jewish carpenters are economic migrants, coming to take our jobs". It is interesting that Christ was a refugee from persecution. Sometimes I wonder whether we have moved on enormously in our understanding and compassion. It is fair to remind everyone of our obligations and duties and to give examples from 2,000 years ago to illustrate our commitments to our brethren.

The Conservatives made a big issue of hygiene in our hospitals. Over a long period some of us Members on the Labour Benches have also made an issue of MRSA, as it is commonly known. The hon. Member for Salisbury generously said that on many such issues it is difficult to apportion blame. It is now acknowledged that there is a real problem. My own view, which I want to share with the House, is that part of the problem was not with Conservative or Labour Ministers, but with Ministers who do not stand up to officials.

On 19 March 1997, I held an Adjournment debate in the House, to which Mr. Horam replied. He is a decent man, but he worked off a brief and basically said that the hon. Member for Thurrock was exaggerating and that there was no problem—the matter was under control. I challenged him, saying that figures were not being kept for infection rates in our hospitals, but the hon. Gentleman said that that was wrong. Baroness Cumberlege, who was a Conservative health Minister, said the same thing in the other place. Instead of challenging officials, Ministers often accept what they say and dismiss what Back Benchers, who have their ear to the ground, are asserting in the House of Commons. I hope Ministers will start listening to Back Benchers earlier, regardless of party, if they have a point.

I cannot help feeling that if people like me—I say this with some humility, uncharacteristically—and Lord Fitt, who raised the matter in the House of Lords in 1997, had been listened to, we may well have been on top of the problem of MRSA earlier. We would have understood that hospitals had a vested interest in covering up their deficiencies. The absence of corporate liability and the existence of star points for hospitals and a competitive environment led to a conspiracy of silence from the lowest level in the health service right up to the top, and reluctance to admit that there is a problem and that it should be tackled.

Both Conservative Ministers and the early Labour Administration fell into that chasm, listening to officials rather than to Members of Parliament. However, credit is due to the former Secretary of State for Health, now the Secretary of State for Defence, my right hon. Friend John Reid and others, who recently started to address the problem. I wish that had been done earlier, not just by my Government, but by Conservative Ministers, too.

We heard in the Gracious Speech that there is to be legislation to protect the natural environment. For me, that flagged up the green belt. During the election my opponent suggested that the Deputy Prime Minister personally was going to build 16,500 houses in one of the most beautiful areas in my constituency. There was not a scintilla of truth in that, but I want it stated and underlined that the green belt is sacrosanct. There is a good reason why that should be so. In my constituency and in the constituencies of many other hon. Members, there is a rich reservoir of derelict land—brown land—redundant industrial land, the development of which would be in the interests of environmental improvement. There is no need to encroach upon the green belt in my area and elsewhere.

Perhaps that needs to be restated. Let me be generous—perhaps there has been a misunderstanding. The green belt concept, which was created by a Labour Government, should be sacrosanct and we should be proud of it, as we are of the national health service. I hope that will be borne in mind. No doubt my hon. Friend the Minister will tell the Deputy Prime Minister this very evening what I have said and urged.

I referred to new Members who made their maiden speech. I made my maiden speech on the first day of the Session in 1992 and I was pleased to get it over. I revisited it to see what I had said then and what had come to pass. One thing I said was that the existing electoral system was indefensible. Secondly, I argued that we should be doing all we could to bring the countries of central Europe—Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic—into the European Union, and we have done that. In fairness, John Major started that process, but when history comes to be written, the present Prime Minister will be entitled to claim considerable credit and take considerable pride in the enlargement of the European Union. In today's Queen's Speech, it is anticipated that we will bring in Romania and Bulgaria, which I welcome. For me, the enlargement of the EU is an economic, commercial and political matter, but there is also a moral aspect. Those of us who have been able to enjoy parliamentary democracy since 1945 cannot deny those other countries the opportunities that come from membership of that democratic club. We should all embrace and encourage that where we can.

The third issue was Select Committees. I said that I had heard it rumoured—this was in 1992—that the Government might go slow in setting up Select Committees. I want a reassurance that there is no prospect whatever that that will happen this summer. It is extremely important that the Government are scrutinised by the Select Committee system, which has moved on considerably since 1992. It is important that one should refer to one's maiden speech from time to time.

The hon. Member for Antrim, North spoke about his party's endorsement in the Northern Ireland elections. I do not want to trespass into that, but the Government should ensure that there is proper scrutiny of legislation that relates to Northern Ireland, rather than dealing with it in an hour and a half in a Committee upstairs, with no opportunity of amending it. In addition, the Northern Ireland Assembly, which is costing a large sum of money, must be brought into force. Even if the Executive cannot be up and running, the Assembly needs to scrutinise measures endorsed by this House. That would be the appropriate democratic procedure and in the best interests of government.

My final point—[Interruption.] It has not been raised so far, so even if it is a boring point, it is a new point. The Queen's Speech says:

"My Government will continue to play its full part in international affairs."

With respect, no reference has been made in the House to the events in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, where the situation is grave. Elsewhere in the Queen's speech there is the theme of promoting democracy and human rights. There should be an early statement on Uzbekistan, because our policy, our stewardship and our representation in Uzbekistan needs to be discussed. I see Mr. Blunt acknowledging that. The Foreign Affairs Committee, when I was a member and previously, tried to argue with the Foreign Office that there should be an embassy in Kyrgyzstan. There is not one. It had a velvet revolution six weeks ago and there was no British representation there. Refugees are now crossing the border from Uzbekistan to the very small republic and fragile state of Kyrgyzstan, and so far as I am aware there is no British embassy there even today. That is a serious failure. I do not entirely blame Ministers; I blame Sir Michael Jay who runs the Foreign Office. He has been told time and again by the Foreign Affairs Committee that we should have an embassy and an ambassador in Kyrgyzstan, and he has refused. Our representation in Uzbekistan has been seriously flawed. There are some issues in Uzbekistan, unrelated to Craig Murray, concerning what has gone on in the embassy, which require serious examination. Two articles in The Guardian and The Observer have alluded to that. It is now time for a statement on the region. The Select Committees with appropriate jurisdiction should examine what has happened there and why there has been neglect in that area, and ensure that there is an early improvement in our representation in that region, which is critical in terms of its geopolitics, energy and human rights. I regret that that has not been done.

Members groaned when I started to make this point, but I hope that they will agree that that was an original point, which it is valid to raise in the House. I thank the House for its patience, but I hope that those points will be picked up by the Minister when he replies.

I am conscious that a number of colleagues wish to speak, so I shall try to be short and I will abandon my notes. It is always a pleasure to follow Andrew Mackinlay, not least because I contested his constituency 25 years ago in 1979. As he took us for a tour around Grays and Tilbury, I reflected that that was the election when the Conservatives promised to let people buy their own council houses, and thinking back over those 25 years it is interesting how much those Conservative ideas of the first Thatcher Government have dominated the political landscape ever since. This Government, in the last three Parliaments, have had to act within the parameters that were set by what was achieved in the Thatcher years following 1979.

The hon. Gentleman raised another important point that I do not think the House had taken on board; I certainly had not. It is an example of the contemptuousness of the Government generally towards the House that while those in the Press Gallery are given a huge and detailed briefing on every Bill, there is no similar briefing in the Vote Office. The media has 200 pages of briefing, but there is nothing for Members of Parliament. That is illustrative of the way in which we constantly have to seek to extract information from Ministers and Departments by tabling questions. It is almost some sort of parlour game. It should not be. If this is to be a grown-up Parliament where we all contribute seriously to debate, I can see no reason why that information should not be made equally available to us.

Every Queen's Speech lists, almost frenetically, all the Bills that are to be debated. This one, with 40-plus Bills, must be something of a record, but it seeks to give the impression that the more Bills there are, the more problems the Government can tackle. The truth is that although the first paragraph refers to the economy, the Government are running out of money, and sooner or later in this Parliament we will either see taxes rise or services cut. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the Opposition pointed out today in an excellent speech, the Prime Minister seriously curtailed the ability to raise taxes by ruling out increases in national insurance and the basic rate of tax, so where will the money come from? In areas such as mine in Oxfordshire and the south-east, it will come through stealth taxes. For example, the amount of money that is made available to local government from central grant will be cut, council tax will then rise, and the Government will cynically seek to blame those political parties that control district and county councils for increasing council tax and reducing services—when in truth it is central Government and the Chancellor who are to blame, reducing grant and skewing the grant system so that their friends in the north get more while people in the south get less.

The Queen's Speech makes no reference to the horrendous situation that will arise in the next few months as a result of council tax rebanding and revaluation. Ministers say that that will in some way be fiscally neutral; that the take will not be increased. In Wales, for every house that went down a band, three houses went up. That will be a real issue in constituencies such as mine and for much of the south. It will be particularly hard for people on fixed incomes, such as those in the public services. Much is made in this Queen's Speech about reforming the public services, but it is not much good reforming law and order if there are no police officers. The Thames valley police force does not have the necessary police officers because the cost of living is not taken into account when they are recruited. Metropolitan police officers can earn £6,000 a year more than police officers in Banbury and Bicester, and Met police have free travel from Banbury and Bicester, so it is not surprising that Thames Valley police is constantly haemorrhaging police officers. Likewise, it is not surprising that the Oxford Radcliffe Hospital NHS Trust is often in financial difficulties if the only way that it can recruit nurses is from nurse agency banks where they receive premium rates of pay because it does not take into account the cost of living problems in the south-east.

None of those issues is addressed in the Queen's Speech. As this Parliament proceeds, many Members will have to explain to their constituents that they are becoming worse off financially because the Government are simply taking more and more in stealth taxes, while they receive fewer and fewer services—for which the Government seek to blame the local deliverers of those services.

The Queen's Speech also makes no reference to the increasing lack of democratic accountability. It talks about the reform of the House of Lords, but what about reform of unelected institutions such as the South East England regional assembly? The sort of issue that caused concern on the doorsteps during my election campaign was the housing numbers being imposed on places such as Banbury and Bicester without any democratic debate. That is a real undermining of district councils. I do not know why on earth people stand as district councillors when key matters such as how fast and how far communities should expand seem to be determined in Dorking or Guildford by unelected officials. No one quite knows or understands whole layers of planning systems that deliver new housing numbers.

One group that has been particularly hard hit is pensioners. One of the most amazing sentences in the Gracious Speech is:

"My Government will begin long-term reform to provide sustainable income for those in retirement."

Where have the Government been for the past eight years if they are now only just beginning to address the issue? There should be a quick rendering of the alleluia chorus. It will be interesting to see whether there are more than a couple of lines on this issue in the Press Gallery briefing. Like so many others issues, it was kicked into the long grass during the general election campaign. It was one of many difficult issues that the Government should have faced up to into detail, but simply did not.

The frenetic activity of some 40 Bills cannot alter the fact that the economy on which all this is built is beginning to crumble. This Government are running out of money. Many of these Bills are interesting and worthy, and I certainly share in the delight expressed earlier at the introduction of a Bill on corporate manslaughter; indeed, Anne Jones and her family, constituents of mine, will be also be delighted. However, during this Parliament in areas such as mine—those in the south, the south-east, Oxfordshire and the Thames valley—the burden of taxation will go up and the quality and level of services will go down. I suspect that this issue will form a fundamental part of the debate in this place during the next five years.

First, I congratulate you, Madam Deputy Speaker, on your well-earned reappointment. Many in this House have on many occasions had reason to be thankful for your guidance and kindness. I also congratulate those from all parts of the House who are making their maiden speeches. I hope that their stay will be long and constructive.

I must start by expressing some disappointment at the regressive view taken by Mr. Forth concerning the nature of a multicultural society. I urge him to rethink and to remember the words of Roy Jenkins, which were very profound at the time and still resonate with us today. He said that we want a society in which we can have cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance. That provides the ideal for a society in which everyone is valued, and everyone can make a contribution in an equal way.

Wolverhampton is a very good example of a city that is rapidly developing a cultural diversity that enriches the whole of that city. Indeed, people there find tolerance, friendship and a welcome, despite difficulties arising from time to time, which we must expect. None the less, we make it more difficult to appreciate cultural diversity if economic diversity is so great that many lives become a battle just to make ends meet.

The Gracious Speech suggests that the Government have put education at the heart. Many in this House will endorse that priority, but we may think that there are different ways of achieving the same objectives. It is obvious that I, coming from a west midlands seat, have a considerable interest—as many of us in that region do—in manufacturing, and especially in engineering products. We have had a considerable setback with the loss of Rover in recent months, and although the Government did what they could it was never going to be sufficient. Part of the Rover problem is that it is simply not big enough. We have spoken of Europe today, and perhaps at some stage there will be an opportunity to develop a truly European motor industry based on indigenous companies such as Rover, Citroen and Peugeot. That would be a way of ensuring an indigenous motor industry in Europe capable of competing with the rest of the world. Despite such setbacks, productivity in manufacturing generally, and particularly in engineering, has massively outstripped productivity in society as a whole. Manufacturing output, while certainly not surging ahead, is just about managing to hold its own.

Exports are an extremely important part of manufacturing industry. Regardless of the euro debate that we will doubtless have at some stage, or of the more immediate argument concerning the constitutional treaty, in manufacturing terms we are all Europeans now. The days when a company's biggest rival was just at the end of the street are gone for ever; now, our fiercest competitor is just as likely to be in Berlin or Beijing. We have to adopt an international mindset if we are to succeed in continuing to lift our people's living standards. Even smaller companies must consider adding a European dimension to their development strategies. Britain exports or dies. Currently, we are not recognising that problem—and it is a problem—as fully as is necessary.

I want to put in a plug for the national exhibition centre, which plays an extremely important part in providing a shop window for Britain's exporters. My plea to our Front Benchers and to the House as a whole is to recognise that more needs to be done for our exporters at every level. The NEC has an important role to play in that regard, and it ought to be seen in the role of a competitor with the big European venues, in order to give us a competitive edge for our exporters throughout the nation, but particularly in manufacturing.

The driving force for the improvement in the knowledge economy is education. It was fashionable at one stage to measure the success of education by growth in the gross domestic product in real terms. That seems somehow to have faded, and we take it as read that education is failing. But the truth is that if we return to that extremely sensible measure, we can see that our students, pupils, teachers and others working in education are deserving of our thanks and congratulations, rather than the brick-bats that are too often thrown at them. The growth of the knowledge economy on which our prosperity relies, now and in the future, is critically dependent on more and more people being educated to a higher level. The question is, does the Government's programme as we understand it measure up to what we require of it?

I have no problem with increasing the higher education intake. It has to be paid for, and we might need to return to the debate about how we do that and the part that student fees and the taxpayer have to play. Additional funding for further education institutions has assisted greatly in recreating the solid infrastructure of post-16 education that many in this House, of an older generation, took for granted before the Thatcher era.

Excellent progress has been made in pre-school and primary school education. We have thrown a lot of money at it, and perhaps value for money has not been everything that we would have wanted, but such progress is real and solid. Sure Start and the development of child centres are making a terrific contribution, certainly in my constituency, towards reducing inequalities. President Lyndon Johnson's 1960s head start programme for disadvantaged inner-city children, while ultimately proving politically unsustainable with the advent of the Nixon Administration, none the less provided a model on which programmes worldwide have been based, many of them successfully. Ours is headed in the same successful direction, and I wish considerable success to all those involved in it nationwide and I offer many thanks for their work.

The Government's programme outlined today declares that education remains the main priority. There is a promise to improve choice on the back of further reform. It will be in the development of secondary education that the Government must expect to have to justify their plans, which appear seriously to compromise the ideals of comprehensive education.

The comprehensive school system has certain features that, if lost or compromised, make the delivery of its prime purpose extremely difficult. The prime purpose is to ensure that the opportunity to learn is available to all children of all abilities, crucially recognising that maturation rates vary considerably between the children of both the same and different sexes. Selection by any means that leads to the separation into different schools or institutions at a fixed moment in the process of maturation prevents an appropriate education from being delivered to an individual whose development may have accelerated or may be temporarily retarded. My concern is that the ideal of choice, so essential in the competitive world of retail consumerism, will be thrust into the world of education in an unreconstructed way, reducing what should be a carefully thought through decision that will affect the life chances of a child to the level of an impulse purchase—not this Purchase!

There is no doubt that choice in education is currently a cause of some concern. The area of the country with the widest choice of schools is London. It is unsurprising that London also has the greatest percentage of so-called failing schools. By the way, a mere 2.3 per cent. of London schools are judged to be failing—hardly the most difficult problem to manage that I have ever encountered. Certain schools are nevertheless branded failing schools and the biggest percentage is, as I said, in London. As choice grows—whether paid for directly in fees to a private institution or through people moving house to get their children into a school near the top of the league tables—the number of schools judged as failing will increase. The truth is that many of these failing schools are often working heroically against enormous and overwhelming odds. I do not believe that there is any serious evidence to suggest that more technology colleges, academies and grammar schools will somehow, by increasing competition for pupils, lift standards in disadvantaged areas where parents have neither the means nor the social skills to join an ever-faster race to the so-called best schools.

In the early 1970s, Rodney Lord, then working for Sir Keith Joseph in the Department of Education and Science, conducted research into the factors that most influenced educational outcomes. I shall not delay the House with details of his methodology; suffice it to say that what he discovered was what most of us knew then and know now—that the strongest influences were, first, the parents who had achieved in school themselves, and secondly, the proportion of experienced teachers present on the school payroll. That is unsurprising and pretty obvious, but should never be overlooked. I need to know from Ministers how schools with poorer catchments will be able to attract such parents and teachers in the face of competition from the proposed academy developments and all the ballyhoo with which they will be launched.

It seems to me fundamentally wrong that a business tycoon with £2 million to spare can become the master of the fate of perhaps thousands of youngsters, many with unsuspecting parents. Like many others in the House, I am frankly horrified that a religious crackpot—I do not apologise for the language—can take control of a secondary school and preach the discredited doctrine of creationism. The Education Minister in the House of Lords, who will be given the task of sorting out London's education, has a choice to make for himself. He can re-read Crosland and apply its values to modern London or he can regress towards the dame schools of the 19th century, when choice was abundant if you could afford the penny a day, but quality was abysmal.

Speaking for my constituency, I want to thank teachers, head teachers, assistants, nursery nurses and all the non-teaching staff who work hard to provide a good education that will allow young people to be part of a prosperous Britain. They should be capable of competing with the best, but also capable of understanding the values of co-operation and mutuality in our ever-smaller global community. For an overwhelming number of young people, the most important start that they have is a solid education delivered by dedicated teachers in an institution that does not exclude them from appropriate education either because they are the children of parents who are unable to grasp the importance of education or because certain subject specialties are not available on site.

The educational sociologist Bernstein said that education could not compensate for society—and he was, of course, correct. In the absence of a truly equal society, however, we have to make education work for all our children. That can be delivered, in my view, only through a modern comprehensive system of education.

First, I should like to say how much I enjoyed both the maiden speeches today. Andrew Mackinlay made a thought-provoking, non-partisan and excellent speech, and I also agree with Mr. Purchase that the whole idea of choice in education has to be predicated on winners and losers. I could not agree with him more about that.

We have heard a fairly vague, but longish Queen's Speech today and we are promised some 46 Bills in 18 months. If anyone believes that, they should go and lie down. I believe that it will go the same way as the last Queen's Speech. It is packed full of goodies and baddies and packed full of stuff to make us think that Labour is now hitting the ground running. If we reflect on what is contained in it, hitting the ground running is a barely credible notion; indeed, it seems to me that the Queen's Speech is hardly even reaching the ground.

Before I get into a lather of criticism, I should like to mention one or two parts of the particular egg that may be palatable. The charities Bill is one, because I agree that charity law needs reforming. I approve of the Bills on common land and on consumer credit, though the devil is always in the detail. I also agree that the corporate manslaughter Bill will recommend itself to the House. The child contact and inter-country adoption Bill and some other measures may be welcome.

There are also, Madam Deputy Speaker, some pretty awful measures in the Queen's Speech; in particular the incapacity benefit Bill. We are not journalists but mere politicians, so we do not know much about what will appear in that Bill. However, we do know from what the Secretary of State has already publicly said that he wants to move 1 million people from the incapacity benefit list on to something else. In other words, he wants to bring 1 million people into work. Like others in the House, I have no objection to people going to work when they should be working. I have no truck with that at all, but the carefully manufactured leaks over the weekend talk about "curbing" the payments to people receiving such benefits.

I feel somewhat worked up about this matter because a friend of mine, the late Mr. Gwyn Jones, received a letter on 11 March whose contents I shall explain. Mr. Jones lived in my village and was therefore my constituent. He had been terribly ill for 10 years, and in need of heart, lung and liver replacements. He varied from being extremely ill to being merely ill, and it was patently obvious that he would never work again. The letter was from Mr. Jones's "personal adviser" who was writing to arrange a meeting. It explained that the records showed that he had recently passed "a personal capability assessment", and went on to put pressure on Mr. Jones to attend the Dolgellau job centre the following Friday. Mr. Jones was on his deathbed when he received this letter, and passed away a few days later.

Needless to say, I am angry about that. If that is how payments are to be "curbed", I am more than just angry—I am disgusted. I hope that a Minister will tell the House what the Government's real intentions are. The soundbites give the impression that money will be taken off those who are the most vulnerable in society.

As I said, I do not object to people not being paid when they do not deserve it, but I want to repeat a point that I have made before. Since becoming a Member of Parliament, I have conducted hundreds of tribunal appeals on behalf of people turned down for incapacity benefit. Between 90 and 95 per cent. of those appeals succeeded. I am a barrister by profession and I like to think that I am a reasonable advocate, but I am not that good. The figure that I have quoted suggests to me that those applicants should not have been turned down in the first place.

Under the present system, general practitioners have to fill in a form on behalf of applicants. One young lad had been invalided out of the Royal Air Force after losing both a shoulder and a leg. Even so, the doctor involved in his case said that the lad could walk 100 m in a matter of seconds. That is an example of abuse, and if time permitted I could give many more examples. However, my point is that GPs—who are paid £125 or £130 for the few minutes that it takes them to fill in a form—often say that people are fit for work when it is clear that they are not. I do not care about the amount that the GPs are paid, but the system needs to be reformed.

To be fair to them, the Government have changed the basic form involved. A slightly more user-friendly version has been piloted in Glasgow, and I am pleased about that, but abuse by medical officers engaged by the Department is still widespread.

On the previous occasions that I have mentioned the problem, I expected to receive letters saying that I was ignorant and that I misunderstood the system. This is the third time that I have mentioned the matter on the Floor of the House, and not one GP has told me that I am wrong. To my way of thinking, that underlines that a real problem exists.

One of the big issues in Wales has to do with affordable housing. Real steps need to be taken to provide that, and a leak over the weekend suggested that some assistance would be extended to first-time buyers. I can see no such provision in the list of proposed Bills, but I hope that I am wrong. Housing is a major issue in Wales and the UK as a whole. We need to enable young people in particular to get on the housing ladder. That can be done through the use of part-ownership schemes, community land trusts, planning controls, the provision of social housing or the cheap sale by local authorities of land to community land trusts. It grieves me that young people in many parts of Wales never have a chance to live in their own community. That can never be right, but I am sure that the same problem is replicated throughout England and Scotland.

My party issued a consultation paper on housing a few months ago. I invite the House to have a look at it. We do not pretend to have all the answers, but we think that we have a few that might work.

The House will shortly debate the ID cards Bill again. I have never been convinced that ID cards are a good idea. A strange climate of fear was engendered last time the matter came up, which was intended to soften up opposition to the original Bill. That opposition was very strong in this House, and I believe that it will be so again.

We have been told that there are two main justifications for ID cards—that they will help in the fight against terrorism, and that they will contribute to the reduction of benefit and other fraud. The Government are at pains to stress that ID cards will be voluntary at first, but how will that assist in the apprehension of terrorists? The awful individuals who perpetrated the 9/11 atrocity and the Madrid bombings carried ID cards, so what justification for them can there be?

The first sentence of the initial Government consultation issued last year said that ID cards would not become compulsory. I believe that there has been a change since then and that, once introduced, such cards will inevitably become compulsory within a few years. Furthermore, if ID cards are so necessary in the fight against terrorism and if they are such a useful tool, what will happen in the 10 years or so that it will take to implement the legislation in full? The ID card system will cost billions of pounds, but could that money not be used more efficiently by putting more police officers on the street?

In addition, an ID card system will require a national database. How confident can we be that the necessary IT will be up to the job? I am sorry to say that the Government's record on IT is lamentable given the serial failures of the Child Support Agency systems and a similar failure at the Department for Work and Pensions. Are we not heading for another costly and damaging IT disaster, and to what purpose?

One fascinating aspect of the ID cards debate is that no Minister has ever explained how such cards could combat terrorism. We are still waiting for that explanation.

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that one consequence of a failure of technology in respect of ID cards would be that innocent people would be held to ransom, not guilty people?

I agree. Terrorists are very sophisticated, and will manufacture everything that they need. Moreover, Government figures show that it is expected that ID cards will save only 5 per cent. of benefit fraud in any given year, so that justification is a non-starter as well.

In 1996, the report from the Scarman Centre looked at the use of ID cards in Europe. It found that in Germany, the Netherlands and France, people from ethnic minority groups were stopped for card inspections disproportionately often. Are we therefore looking at the reintroduction of a form of the sus law in this country? I certainly hope not.

In conclusion, my party believes that ID cards are illiberal, irrelevant, expensive and unproven, and that they have no place in our society. We will be happy to campaign against the proposal alongside all other parties that feel the same way.

The Queen's Speech contains a reference to a government of Wales Bill. We do not know what that Bill proposes, so I shall reserve judgment. However, I wager that it does not contain any provision to establish a Parliament for Wales, which is what my party wants. The commission chaired by the eminent Labour peer Lord Richard QC sat for 18 months and recently reported. All political parties were represented on the commission, and many of the participants began as agnostics on the matter. Even so, the commission unanimously stated that the National Assembly for Wales was not working. It made it clear that the only way forward was to give it the full legislative powers that are enjoyed by the Scottish Parliament.

A White Paper is to be issued later this summer and it is vital that it implements the Richard commission proposals in full. It would be wrong to withhold law-making powers from the people of Wales simply because a handful of Labour Back-Bench Members were afraid of losing their seats.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

No, I will not give way. The hon. Gentleman has not contributed to the debate, but has merely intervened twice already. I am sorry, but other people wish to speak. If he were prepared to sit through a whole debate, I might be prepared to take an intervention.

To return to my theme, the National Assembly is in favour of an anti-smoking Bill, but it wants to make regulations and to decide which places can waive the need for it. The Bill will say that it is possible to exempt certain places from the general law. By the end of 2007, all enclosed public places and workplaces will be smoke free, except some licensed premises. The National Assembly for Wales is unanimous in wanting the right to decide where those places should be. As things stand, my understanding—more importantly, the Assembly's understanding and that of the Chairs of the appropriate Committees and all the political parties—is that that will be done here. That undermines the whole devolution process, and I ask Ministers to respond on that important point.

There are things to commend in the Queen's Speech, but there are also matters of considerable concern, and I believe that they will give rise to huge debate in the coming weeks and months.

I am happy to follow Mr. Llwyd, who has obviously given some thought to his speech. I have to say, however, that I did not agree with much of it, because I do not think that the mandate received by the Government supports his position. Of course, I respect his right to continue to challenge the Government's position, but it is important to note where we have come from.

Before he slips out of the Chamber, I am pleased to congratulate the Under-Secretary of State for the Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend Mr. Murphy, on his well deserved promotion. The fact that he is therefore no longer my Whip will mean that he is not on my back all the time, which is very helpful. We may again strike up the friendly relationship we used to have before he went to the Whips Office.

I have been interested in many contributions today and have enjoyed being in the Chamber for them. I would like to hire Mr. Forth and to take him round all the constituencies in Scotland to prove two things. First, even when I am in my loud tie phase, when I go out jazzing, I do not wear ties as bad as his. Secondly, if he keeps up as he did today, we will be returned with a massively increased majority at the next election. His was the best speech, and I shall take it away to frighten every member of my electorate who did not vote against the Conservatives at the election. The Conservatives came fourth in my new constituency, for the first time. They were put there by the Liberal Democrats, who came third.

In my constituency, we had debates on the hustings, and the general tenor was respectful and humorous. At the end of the day, we all felt our opponents had not dropped into the positions that some of the national leaders of the parties did as they conducted the election. Our electorate appreciated that. The question is: how we did it. Even the Conservative candidate had been against the Iraq war in the public prints for a number of years, so everyone on our platform was against the war and we all had things to say about it. I am sure I shall have things to say about it here in future. In Linlithgow and East Falkirk, I took over 75 per cent. of the constituency of the former Father of the House, Tam Dalyell, and added it to 65 per cent. of my own old constituency. In fact, Labour won there: despite what people may have thought about his particular fixations on certain topics, the spirit of Tam Dalyell was in fact the true spirit of Labour. I am sure that that was helped by the fact that he is married to Kathleen Wheatley, Lord Wheatley's daughter. They are very much at the centre of what people who vote Labour wanted in the constituency. The notional majority was 11,500, and I held it with 11,200. That shows that there is a clear commitment to a Labour vote in the area. People are looking for certain things from the Labour Government, and I hope that we can deliver for them.

I echo concerns expressed about turnout. I repeat something I have said ever since I was elected: we have to bring in compulsory voting in the United Kingdom. Some 10 years ago, I went with a Select Committee to Australia to talk to its election commission, and I was impressed by its universal system under which anyone can vote at any point in the country some weeks ahead of the election and then be registered as having voted back in their home constituency. My son lives in Brisbane now, and he took advantage of that at the last election. Although victory went to the Liberals, he still felt he had participated.

People have the choice in that system to say, "None of the above". They do not have to vote for one of the parties, but they do have to use their democratic right to vote. We should look seriously at that, and I do not know why people are afraid of it. Perhaps it is because everyone can, as they have done today, stand up and say, "Although you got more votes than us, we won", or "Although we got more votes than you, we didn't win", or "We did really well compared with where we were before", as the Liberal Democrats always say. The reality is, though, that they are not the Government, and if the system were based on everyone having to vote, everyone could see that the result was the will of the people, which we can never quite be sure about in our electoral system at the moment.

So, how did we do? We have a third successive Labour Government, and a monumental task and a tremendous challenge and opportunity lie ahead for that Government, with many mandates. We put a concise document to the public, but one packed with promises and commitments. People chose those commitments. I was struck by the number of times elderly people came up to me in the constituency and said, on pensions, "I have never been better off." That happened again and again. I originally wanted pensions linked to earnings, but it is clear that what we did, using pension credit and the minimum income guarantee, has lifted a vast number of pensioners out of hardship and given a brightness to their future that they did not expect.

We must move forward. I certainly support the idea that everyone in future should be compelled to pay into a pension scheme at their place of work. The firm should pay in, and the employee should pay in. Anyone who argues against that from the business side is trying to find a way out of paying people a decent wage so that they can afford to make a compulsory contribution to their future when they retire. I hope that the Government will look seriously at that.

There is a mandate for ID cards, despite what the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy said. I put ID cards on the pledge card that I put out in my own name and with my photograph on it. I took it up every single time at the hustings. We talked about it seriously in sensible discussions, and about 75 per cent. of people saw no problem with it. It does not matter whether ID cards are just about combating terrorism. It is sensible that people should be able to produce an identity card containing a biometric statement, and as we said in the manifesto:

"We will introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register".

The manifesto also says the scheme will be rolled out initially on a voluntary basis, but it should eventually be compulsory. It should substitute for a passport when we go around the European Union. It should be capable of being put through a scanner so that people can be identified.

I see fraud all the time in my constituency. People I know came as visitors, then sent their passports back to their country of origin where they were stamped for a fee by a corrupt official. They remain in this country. There is no way of challenging that, except by using sleuths to find those people out. If they had to prove who they were and what right they had to be here, it would stop fraud.

I have twice had parts of my identity stolen. Once, a bank did not even check the electoral register and gave someone of a different name a credit card at my address. I had to stop that myself. I do not know whether the person was ever prosecuted. It is easy to steal people's identity, but more difficult to do so if there is a proper chip system in an identity card. It is time we brought that in.

My hon. Friend Mr. Marshall mentioned our commitment to the Post Office. Our manifesto commitment is that we

"have no plans to privatise it."

But the manifesto also says:

"We will review the impact on the Royal Mail of market liberalisation".

I am fed up with two things. One is Ministers saying, "It's not my responsibility, guv. It is the regulator's". The other is the regulator saying that he does not have to take into account the concerns of the consumer, just the concerns of the Competition Commission. Services are about people, especially public services. The private sector has to face up to the fact that it does not answer to people, as in the financial sector which has been ripping people off in this country for at least the last decade and probably for longer through the use of hedge funds and other dodges it gets up to. It is ripping off the investor, as Equitable Life did, and we need to stop that by making Ministers, rather than some second-hand regulator, responsible for how services run.

It has not been said in the House—but it should be—that the major Opposition party in the election had a scurrilous, shameful tone to its campaign on immigration that deeply damaged our communities, whether they have few people with other ethnic origins or many. People now live in fear of persecution, and it was a shameful thing to do. It was a parallel of what happened in Australia, which my son explained in some detail to me. The Aboriginals were scapegoated, as were people from Asia, who had provided tremendous benefits to Australia. That scaremongering worked in Australia, but through the good grace of the British people it did not work here. Instead, it damaged the Conservative party, which will not live it down for a long time—at least, for as long as I can stand up and remind them of the shameful behaviour of its leader and other party members during the election.

We must now stabilise the situation. We are committed to introducing a Bill on immigration, and it is important—as my hon. Friend Andrew Mackinlay said—to distinguish between immigration and asylum. Illegal immigration, and the trafficking and smuggling of people, is now more lucrative than smuggling drugs for the cartels that run such operations. We are a target for their activities, as are many other countries that may provide a better economic future. Some people are trafficked to be abused or for prostitution, but many volunteer to be trafficked. Their families use all their wealth to buy a passage, by a clandestine route, to this or some other country. We have to work out how to stop that, because it must be our target, not the few individuals who drift in for a wedding, stay on and then eventually get caught and sent home.

As my hon. Friend Keith Vaz said, we also have to calm the fears of the people who live in large ethnic minority communities and have contributed greatly to this country, but who now feel the target—a legitimate target, according to some—of a form of xenophobia and racism that has always underlain the English personality. England has never decided what sort of country it is, and that is where the problems arise most often.

We must prevent exploitation of immigrants. Illegal immigrants—Chinese and other Asians—are exploited regularly, but so are legal immigrant groups, such as Lithuanians, Poles and Indian graduates. The latter are being treated appallingly in some areas. They are paid very poorly and forced to live in crowded circumstances while working in hotel chains in Scotland. We must give those people the same wages and rights as other workers in this country; otherwise, our workers will complain about jobs being taken by people who undercut them and we will also have immigrants to this country being abused.

I hope that the Government will find a way to prevent immigrant families with children from being incarcerated. We have fought a campaign in Scotland and now families with children are put into Dungavel detention centre, the former prison, for only a few days. That should be repeated throughout the country. I hope that we will prevent abuse and, at the same time, encourage and applaud those legal immigrants who come to our country.

My second major topic is incapacity benefit reform. We made it clear in the manifesto that we would do something about that. The tone was at times not acceptable to me, but it was in the manifesto and we have won a mandate on it. We said:

"We will help people who can work into rehabilitation and eventually into employment . . . We will build on the successful Pathways to Work programme and reform Incapacity Benefit".

My worry is that we will reform incapacity benefit before we create the pathways. I made the point before the election that the yellow brick road has not reached my constituency yet. However, we have had the proposal to shut down the job centre in the hardest hit area of my constituency. That does not make any sense. We cannot on the one hand take away people's access and on the other promise to find them a way back into work. Everyone deserves the dignity of work and an adequate reward for that work.

I worry about some reports we heard before the election that Ministers, even the Prime Minister, intended to end people's ability to lounge on benefits. Well, I heard my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, East describe the effect on some wards in his constituency with unemployment rates of more than 50 per cent. There is a cloud over communities in areas hit by economic inactivity, such as those in West Lothian, outside Livingston. Job losses started under the Conservatives and continued under our Government. The people's lifestyles are debilitated, because they have to live on benefits or very poor pay. In the communities that I have inherited in West Lothian, unemployment has fallen by only 27 per cent., but it has fallen by 37 per cent. in communities around Livingston and 39 per cent. in my former constituency. I phoned the enterprise company the day after the election, after about four hours' sleep, to ask what we could do. I was told that there was no problem, because the area had the same average unemployment as Edinburgh's, at 2 per cent. I do not know what planet that company lives on, but it does not know the communities in Armadale and Whitburn. As my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, East said, it is economic inactivity that is the problem—how many people have not got jobs but are not on the register. They are not registered so they do not count in the eyes of the enterprise companies. Those people can be written off, and that was done by the Thatcher and Major Governments. We have to solve that problem. After all, the Labour party is pledged to support working people. The first posters for the Keir Hardie Government said that the Labour party was the party for all who work—I have the centenary banner—and that is what we should still be. The pathway must come to every community before the benefits are cut. We should use a carrot, not a stick. It will not be Back Benchers who rebel—the Government have a mandate for the Bill and we will not know how it will affect people until it rolls out—but the communities I represent. They will march on the job centres and take on the Government, and they will not vote for us at the next election, when we should win an historic fourth term.

When it comes to the European Union, we should be better at scrutiny. In the last Parliament, the CBI criticised us for letting too many matters through without proper scrutiny. I have sat on the European Scrutiny Committee for the past seven years, but we were not the problem. The problem, the chief executive of the CBI said, was other Members who did not take the process seriously. He was right. That is why we ended up having to fight a rearguard action on REACH—the registration, evaluation and authorisation of chemicals—which could have destroyed the chemical industry in this country and probably throughout the whole of Europe. We have to fight many battles after the event, because Parliament does not pay attention to what is happening in the Council of Ministers and does not scrutinise what comes out of Europe properly. I hope that that will be improved in this Parliament.

Should France vote yes—I hope that it will—we will have a massive opportunity to repair some of the damage done in the election by the tone of the talk about immigrants. The treaty is for 25 countries, 10 of which were recently behind the wall of a dominant communist regime. Those countries want to be a full part of the European Union and if we do not have this treaty, we will have to guddle along with the wrong weighting of votes. The new countries would not be able to mould a new system that suits them as well as us. I agreed with the leader of the Liberal Democrats when he said that we should work together. As he pointed out, 58 per cent. of people were in favour of the treaty and wanted us to move back to the centre of Europe. I hope that the Prime Minister sees the chance to underpin his legacy by taking us back to the centre of Europe through a new treaty that provides a working model that will keep the European Union stable for the next 10 years.

Bulgaria is probably ready for membership, although I am not so sure about Romania, which we visited just before the election. I know that deals have been done so that it can join in 2007 at the latest, but it has a long way to go and we must press it hard to make itself fit for membership. I hope their Government will take that seriously and that the process is not about giving America—rather than the UN—a base in Romania, rather than bringing Romania into an enlarged EU for a sensible reason.

There are two personal campaigns that I hope will be taken forward during the Government's next term. I am the chairman of the all-party group on haemophilia and I am concerned about the payments given to people suffering from hepatitis C. The bereaved families of people with hepatitis C who died after receiving contaminated blood products should be included in the scheme. They are not at present. The Government give ex gratia payments—they do not call it compensation—of £20,000 for people with hepatitis C and £25,000 if the person has cancer of the liver or another serious complication, but it was a shameful decision not to give those payments to the families of those who died after contracting hepatitis C from contaminated blood products. That was unsustainable and immoral. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Government should not have been buying contaminated blood from US blood banks that took supplies from drug addicts and people in jail. In the other place, Lord Morris described that as the single greatest medical blunder of the century of any Government. That is true. The plasma was extracted from those products and given to people in this country causing HIV and hepatitis C. Recently, people have been infected with CJD prions from the same contaminated products. It would cost only a small amount to deal with that shameful omission, and I hope that the Government will do so.

Finally, I want the Government to take action on Palestine. A wall is being thrown around people; it does not just go around the green line but into Palestinian enclaves. In my constituency, we have the Antonine wall and we have just twinned with the town of Jayous, which is cut in half by a wall. The inhabitants are not allowed to leave by gate 25, which is permanently locked. Lemons are falling to the ground and rotting. The Israeli Government are denying people their livelihood. If we want a settlement, there must be real autonomy for two nations—the Palestinian people and the Israeli people. We must stop the Israelis from preventing British Gas developing Gaza gas, an offshore field that would bring money to the Palestinian people in Gaza and help them to rebuild their economy.

I hope all those things can be carried through by the Government. It was a splendid Queen's Speech, and we were elected on an excellent manifesto.

I remind the House of my interests recorded in the previous register.

I join in congratulating you, Madam Deputy Speaker, on your reappointment and I congratulate all Members who have made maiden speeches today. I look forward to a return speech from my hon. Friend Mr. Evennett. If it is of any comfort to him, when I returned as Member for Sevenoaks the manager of my local tyre depot gave me the following advice: a retread is perfectly serviceable provided that it is correctly balanced. I am sure that my hon. Friend's speech will be correctly balanced and we look forward to hearing from him.

I begin with a complaint, which will be obvious to the House from my earlier intervention: that we in the House were not provided with the 200-page detailed guide to the Queen's Speech, describing precisely the provisions of the various Bills. My hon. Friends will be astounded to learn that it even includes 30 pages about 14 Bills that were not mentioned in the Queen's Speech but that will probably be brought forward. I see no reason why that 200-page guide should have been provided to the parliamentary Press Gallery at 9 o'clock this morning but not to Members of the House this afternoon. It may be beyond your power to deal with such things, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I should be grateful if the matter could be noted so that we avoid that problem on a future occasion.

It was a big Queen's Speech, which is fitting for the style of big government. I did not find in it much humility or much sense of listening from the Prime Minister. The solutions that were rolled out have been tried and tested over the past eight years—more Acts of Parliament, more controls and more spending. They are the same solutions that have not worked over the last eight years. We have already had Act after Act redefining antisocial behaviour and recriminalising petty offences.

However, as I think the Prime Minister recognised at the end of his speech, Acts of Parliament cannot on their own create a civil society; only we can do that in our communities. We cannot be directed or controlled to do so. The British response to the tsunami disaster earlier this year was a good example of that. When the tidal wave struck, the Government were on holiday, but the public were not. Without being told what to do or directed how to respond—perhaps indeed because they were not told what to do or directed how to respond—people came forward in their thousands and donated in their millions, leaving Ministers struggling to catch up. It is exactly the same with the Queen's Speech. I have a sense of the Government flailing around, chasing superbugs, closing failing schools, banning hoodies and all the rest of it, without proposing a proper programme.

There are three central failures in the Government's programme: a lack of substance behind the campaign to restore respect; the fact that reforms in our public services are still not real and radical; and the fact that the Queen's Speech does not tackle some of the serious issues that Parliament should be confronting.

I begin with respect. So far, it is simply a Government slogan. We cannot create respect by Act of Parliament, by creating lots more criminal offences. I say to Ministers that if respect is missing it is because the balance is wrong. It is because the Government have created far too many rights but insisted on far too few responsibilities. Through signing up to European rights and human rights, they have opened up the flood gates to claims against public bodies—against our hospitals, our schools and our teachers. A person can sue their NHS trust, but their general practitioner or consultant cannot sue them for not turning up for their appointment. When so many NHS appointments are missed I can see no reason why we do not impose a refundable charge to make people take more responsibility. They would value the free NHS more if they had to take that responsibility.

It is the same with schools. It is all very well to say that parents can change the management of schools, but head teachers cannot enforce anything. The home-to-school contracts that the Government rightly promoted are not enforceable. Parents have a right to a place of education and to some preference, but there is no corresponding duty on them to produce their child on time, with homework done, fresh and ready to be taught. Where is the Bill that will give heads and schools power over admissions and that places a proper duty on parents? Where is the Bill that will deal with school discipline?

We are to be confronted with two massive education Bills, but the background briefing on the main education Bill simply says:

"We will remove barriers to learning by continuing our zero-tolerance approach to poor behaviour."

If for the past eight years we have had zero tolerance of school behaviour, it is time that the Secretary of State and her Ministers went out into schools more and saw what teachers have to put up with. We must redress that balance. I would like home-to-school contracts to be made properly enforceable. I would like parents to be required to put down a deposit on a school place, which would be refundable when their child finally left school but would give them a stake in the education service and help them to value the service that they get.

My hon. Friend is speaking with his usual mix of perspicacity and wisdom. Will he elaborate on this point? The Prime Minister has now alighted on the word "respect", which has just a hint of gangster rap about it. Would he not do better to speak about obligation, duty and responsibility, in the way that my hon. Friend has? As my hon. Friend said, those begin at home, and they obviously carry through to school. Would not the legislative programme be better framed in those terms than in the vague terms that the Prime Minister is using?

That must be absolutely right. I believe that it is the undermining of responsibility among families—among parents—that has led to a lack of respect. I shall not elaborate in great detail because others want to speak, but the problem lies not just in our schools and our public services, but also in our court system. Little has been done over the past eight years to make criminal justice local, rapid, public and efficient. Fines that are not paid are simply waived. A Government cannot say that they will restore respect unless they redress the balance between rights and responsibilities.

I could go into every area of the public service, but I will not do so tonight. Let us simply consider the planning system. Nothing in the Queen's Speech restores confidence and respect in the planning system. The Secretary of State can simply overrule my district council, which wants to protect a famous local pub, The Farmers, and Travellers can continue to abuse the green belt by submitting wholly bogus applications for retrospective planning permission. We need to redress the balance.

Secondly, there is still a lack of real reform. Let me give the House just one example. We all lived through the fire service dispute. As part of that agreement, over two years ago, it was agreed that we would move to a system of regional fire control centres. Personally, I am not in favour of that—I would like to see my fire control centre stay in Kent—but that was the Government's policy two years ago. Today, only one of those fire control centres has even been identified, let alone built and opened.

The deployment of our teaching force, and of our police force, is still a matter for collective negotiation—for centralised bargaining, rather than for head teachers or area police commanders, and as a result we find schoolchildren washing around shopping centres at 3.15 in the afternoon, and we find the public not getting the police presence that they want. The Prime Minister lamented it today, but he has been in charge for eight years.

What happened to local pay? When, on Wednesdays, I read the Guardian supplement, The Guardian Society, that "Almanach de Gotha" of public sector recruitment, I see no reference to local variations, local rates, and local terms and conditions. Instead, we still have centrally agreed terms and collective agreements.

Thirdly, the big issues have simply been spurned. There was nothing substantial in the Queen's Speech or in the Government briefing about pensions reform. That is perhaps not surprising; there was nothing in the Labour manifesto about pensions reform. There is no serious action on the biggest threat to economic security that our people faced. When we debated the Pensions Bill last summer in the House, I warned that for the private sector, the Pension Protection Fund would quickly and easily be overwhelmed. I still think that it will be. For the rest, we have the Turner commission, seemingly sitting for ever.

The problem is obvious. People in the private sector need to save more, earlier, and the Government need to make up their mind, after eight years, how to encourage them to do that. We can no longer defend the advantage that those in the public sector have—this applies to us as well as to the rest of the public service—through a final salary scheme, the cost of which appears on no public sector balance sheet and which discriminates. In the end, we must find a better way of remunerating those in the public service while encouraging them to make more private provision for their pensions on an equal basis with the private sector.

The education element of the Queen's Speech is sadly lacking. I am concerned about the serial and surreptitious closure of so many university departments after years of underfunding. The matter has not been debated enough. I suspect that the solution that the Government have come up with, which they have not yet implemented, of tuition fees next year, will give us the worst of all worlds—a tuition fee that does not increase to any significant degree overall university income. I certainly intend to watch the effect, as we approach the start.

Another issue is the continuing underachievement in our schools. Someone spoke earlier today as though all secondary schools were marvellous success stories. I can tell my hon. Friends that we in Sevenoaks enjoy very good specialist and grammar schools, as well as a good choice of independent schools, but that choice is not available to many of our citizens, particularly those in the larger cities. The scale of underachievement in inner London is quite striking.

Across inner London, 52.8 per cent. of pupils do not achieve a minimum of five A-to-C grade GCSEs. In some boroughs—Haringey, Southwark and Westminster—things are far worse. That is a massive indictment of all the billions of pounds that the Government have poured into secondary education. City academies, the right to change school management and all the rest are not really the answer.

I believe personally that, in inner London, where local education authorities have failed so badly, we need to put real power into the hands of parents. In a homogenous area, where travel is easy and there is no particularly affinity with a badly run local council, I do not understand why we do not introduce a city-wide education voucher. A third-term Government of whichever party ought to be a bit more radical about that.

The final omission from the Queen's Speech is any serious measure to deal with productivity. In that respect, I agree with Mr. Purchase. When the Chancellor appeared before the Treasury Committee just before the election, I asked him whether he had got anything wrong during the past eight years, but my hon. Friends will not be surprised to learn that he did not "fess up". However, he said that productivity was the one issue that he wished he could do more about, and he is right.

United Kingdom productivity, measured by gross domestic product per worker, is still 20 per cent. behind that of the United States. Even on the other measure—GDP per hour worked—it is still 14 per cent. behind the United States. It is behind not China or the far east, but the United States. Instead of tackling that problem, the Government have allowed us to slide further towards the continental economic model, with more and more social regulation and higher taxes.

These are the Government's failures: they are failing to match properly rights with responsibilities, to drive through real reform of the public services and to tackle the really big issues. That gives us the opportunity to frame our response in more aspirational terms—and, if I may say so to those on the Conservative Front Bench, perhaps in more aspirational terms than we managed to use during the general election campaign. It may have been practical and desirable, but bringing back matron was not particularly aspirational. It ought to be possible—I hope that it will be possible under a new leader—for us to propose a better, more aspirational framework that encourages responsibility, while protecting the vulnerable and keeping taxes low.

It is a great privilege, honour and opportunity for me to speak after eight years having been out of this place, and it is pleasure to be here and to debate the Loyal Address and the Queen's Speech. I represented Erith and Crayford until 1997. I am now privileged to represent Bexleyheath and Crayford, which is 40 per cent. of my old parliamentary seat, with the addition of Bexleyheath. During the time that I have been out of the House I have been at the front line of teaching. I have been a lecturer in a further education college and, subsequently, a freelance, so I have seen at first hand the real world, particularly in relation to education, and I shall come to that a little later.

I wish to begin by paying a compliment to my defeated opponent, Nigel Beard, who I succeed as the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford. I highlight the interest that he took in Treasury and economic matters in his eight years in the House. He served as a member of the Treasury Committee and participated fully in its deliberations. He was a man of considerable experience in science and technology and served on the Select Committee on Science and Technology when he first came into the House in 1997, having had a career as a scientist with ICI Zeneca. I pay him tribute.

The constituency of Bexleyheath and Crayford is part of Greater London. It is located in south-east London and is on the borders with Kent. It is a very good place for getting into London and out into the Kent countryside. It is part of the London borough of Bexley and a great place to live and work. It has tremendous shopping opportunities in Bexleyheath Broadway and Crayford town, and there are also a wide variety of smaller shopping centres such as those at Pickford lane, Long lane and Midfield parade. They have good local shops and the area also provides good opportunities, with cinemas, restaurants, golf courses, a Superbowl and numerous beautiful parks and open spaces, such as the one at Martens grove near where I live in Barnehurst and Hall Place mansion and gardens that are of Elizabethan and Jacobean origins. Crayford also has a lot of history. It has been an historical site since Roman times and there is an historic church on Watling street. More recently, there have been interesting historical developments with the defence industry contractors Vickers.

Despite my constituency's location and its environmental attractions for residents, it still faces real problems—problems that I had hoped would have been addressed in the Government's programme as set out in the Queen's Speech. During the election campaign and over the past few years, there has been increasing concern about quality of life issues in my borough and more generally. As we heard on the doorsteps in the campaign, the biggest concern is, without doubt, the problems caused by crime, antisocial behaviour, vandalism and graffiti. Our area has been plagued with increasing problems in that respect and they cause real concern.

In the evenings—particularly Friday and Saturday evenings—in Bexleyheath, groups of youths engage in binge drinking, intimidation and abuse. That means that many residents, particularly the elderly, are not willing to go into the town to enjoy the facilities and opportunities provided by the restaurants and the cinema. They are worried about the gangs of youths that gather and are sometimes drunk. Those problems are also faced by families who wish to go out in the evening.

Those problems are not just in Bexleyheath—they are in Crayford town and in the shopping centres that I have mentioned. Gangs of youths misbehave and engage in threatening and abusive behaviour, so I was delighted to see in the Queen's Speech that the Government

"is committed to creating safe and secure communities, and fostering a culture of respect."

Great words, but what do they actually mean in terms of action for my constituents? As my hon. Friend Mr. Fallon has highlighted, "respect" is a wonderful word—but if the commitment is not backed up, what use is it on Friday and Saturday nights in my constituency?

The stories that I hear are distressing and infuriating. At my first surgery last Friday, a business man came in who was worried about the behaviour of youths, and pensioners told me about their concerns about graffiti and so forth. Other members of my constituency have tales of considerable concern. A particularly worrying case involved a lady who came home late one evening with her husband. As they were walking home from Welling, they were verbally abused by drunken youths. That is not the sort of society that we want. We want respect brought back and such people dealt with. Of course, we know that problems can come from the home and that people have responsibilities, but if we go down the route of increasing disrespect, where will we end up?

I am worried about the 24-hour licensing that will be brought in during the autumn, although it was introduced during the previous Parliament. I wonder whether that will cause more antisocial behaviour in places such as Bexleyheath, which is a magnet for people from Kent, Essex and south London, and whether it will lead to an increasing problem of growing disrespect and binge drinking. Naturally, I am extremely worried about the situation.

Crime and antisocial behaviour were the main issues on the doorstep in Bexleyheath and Crayford during the general election campaign, but several local issues of concern were also raised. Transport is a big issue in my area. We have no underground, yet a large commuter contingent needs to get into town to work and go to their places of business. We are naturally worried that the rail service running through the constituency is not up to the standard that we would like. It is poor and has deteriorated over recent years. Proposals have recently been made to cut out the service to Victoria via Bexleyheath. We have been campaigning to maintain the service because the proposals would cause difficulties for not only commuters but pensioners and families, because they would have to change trains at Lewisham to get to Victoria. We hope that the authorities will heed our campaign and not cut the Victoria service. We are also worried about the possibility of a reduced service on the line to Cannon Street and Charing Cross. We must have a decent service in the area.

A further worry that came up during the general election campaign—it is my major concern—was the proposed Thames Gateway bridge. That matter causes significant concern throughout my constituency and the borough. I am against the bridge as it is proposed because it would cause a huge increase in traffic throughout the borough, and in my constituency especially. One of our problems is the number of juggernauts, cars and lorries on local roads and the consequent congestion in my area. We are plagued by traffic in Bexley and the Thames Gateway bridge would make the situation worse because juggernauts and large lorries would use Danson road, Brampton road, Long lane and Knee hill as a cut through from the A2 if the bridge were built. I am worried not only that residents in the area would have the nightmare and nuisance of noise and suffer environmental consequences, but that the value of their properties would diminish and their quality of life would decline. I hope to pursue several local issues over the next few months as we go through the measures in the Queen's Speech.

Of course we welcome several aspects of the speech. We are pleased to support some measures, but others are vague and woolly. Several of my hon. Friends have highlighted the vagueness and generality of the measures in the Queen's Speech, although I, too, have not been privileged to see the press pack containing more detailed information.

As a trained teacher and someone who has been in education for the past eight years, I am worried about the value for money that we are getting from our education system. I am also concerned that too many children leave school without the qualifications that they need to be able to live a rich and fulfilled life. I shall consider education carefully during my time here and participate in debates on Bills.Education is important, not just for an individual's future but for the country's future. Hopefully, well educated children will learn respect and have an important part to play in society. Perhaps we can diminish the antisocial behaviour, the binge drinking and the problems of yob culture within our society. Education is a passport to success and a good future. Conservative Members should give careful consideration to the Government's proposals on education. In the past eight years, we have had a Government who talk an awful lot, but there has not been a lot of action. Certainly, money has gone into education, but standards have not improved.

We are fortunate in Bexley because we have a good education system. We have kept grammar schools and have real choice and diversity in our education provision. We have a wide variety of technical schools, single-sex schools and church schools, as well as our grammar schools and some good comprehensives, but we have to look to the future—to where we are going. We need to ensure that we get value for money and that our young people get a real opportunity for the future. Therefore, I shall look carefully at the Government's education Bills when they are presented to the House and when we debate them.

Aspects of the Queen's Speech offer us opportunities, but there are great disappointments too. It is a privilege for me to be back in the House and to be able to participate in it, but the Queen's Speech is thin and the opportunities that have been missed are considerable. The Opposition will do all that we can to ensure that the issues raised by my constituents during the election campaign, and those that we feel passionate about, are raised with great enthusiasm here. We will hold the Government to account.

I welcome my hon. Friend Mr. Evennett back to the House. We are pleased to see him and congratulate him on his born-again maiden speech. May I also say that I enjoyed the speech by my hon. Friend Mr. Fallon, who made important incisive comments?

On the first day of a new Parliament, it is fitting for all Members to recall who sent them here. I register my thanks to the good people of Blaby for returning me to my fourth Parliament. I hope that it was an expression of trust. It may have reflected the fact that C came before L on the list when it came to deciding whether to vote Conservative or Labour. Nevertheless, I felt that it was an expression of trust and I am grateful to them. I shall serve all people of my constituency, whichever way they voted, or even if they did not vote, to the best of my ability for the next four or five years.

The election was not a triumph for the Conservatives. We all know that. One must congratulate the Government on being returned to office. I think that it was unwise of the electorate, but the people have, indeed, spoken. However, it was not a triumph for any party. The Government saw their majority savagely reduced. The Conservatives increased their numbers, but we did not win. I think that the Liberal Democrats saw their vote reduced overall. They got a few extra seats, but they did not do particularly well. No one should pretend that it was a great triumph. It was not a great triumph for democracy when the turnout remained so low.

There is much in the Queen's Speech, with 40-odd Bills, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford said, it is curiously thin for one with so much in it. I shall dwell on a few points that arise from it. First, however, I am struck by the fact that far from relishing victory, we see empty Labour Benches on the first day of the new Parliament. Where are Labour Members? Why are they not here, relishing the fact that they are back in government? We find ourselves in the dire dog days of this Administration. The Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs laughs, but where are her Members? She was a Whip and should have ensured that a few people at least showed an interest in the Parliament to which they have been returned. These are, without a doubt, the Prime Minister's twilight days. He has said that these are his last days, although we do not know whether they will last three and a half years or four, three months or six months.

It is extraordinary that, whereas we have returned enthusiastic for the fray, Labour Members do not look as though they are keen on joining in. That is partly because, under the present Prime Minister, new Labour has promised so much and achieved so little. That has spread the cynicism that has led to low turnouts, and the dissatisfaction with the system that we all saw in people's reactions on the doorstep.

We have heard a lot about education. Why, after eight years of a Labour Government and with huge amounts of extra money put into the education system—I do not criticise that—is a higher proportion of children now going into private education than has since the Butler Education Act of 1944? Why are more people than ever before opting for private health care and private operations for which they have to pay themselves rather than through insurance? In the Queen's Speech, we are promised another immigration Bill—is that the fourth or the fifth? Why do we need it? It is because the Government have created a huge mess in the immigration and asylum systems. Famously, the Prime Minister has not got a clue how many failed asylum seekers are in this country.

My hon. Friends the Members for Sevenoaks and for Bexleyheath and Crayford referred to that part of the Queen's Speech that says that the Government are determined to foster "a culture of respect" in our society. That sounds good—although no one knows what it means—but who destroyed respect? Why is there so little respect in our society now? That is a complex issue and I do not claim to have all the answers. I suspect that many people are responsible, not least the media, but I suggest that there is a connection between deference and respect. What we have now is a culture of rights in which there is no deference, no respect and no responsibilities, as we have heard. Ali G and his "respect" and "gangsta rap", as I believe it is called, is perhaps what many young people think of when one talks of respect. Personally, I respect each individual for his value as a human being—each person is valued in the sight of God and should be valued in society, too, whatever they do. However, it seems to me that the liberal left has reduced respect by denigrating so many institutions in this country. We need only look at the empty Benches opposite to understand that.

I remember Peter Mandelson, when he was a Cabinet Minister, in that chattering class way laughing about the "chinless wonders" in our armed forces. I do not think that he ever apologised for that. Perhaps he should have. Today on the television, Lord Hattersley was sneering quietly about the fact that we had a state opening of Parliament, because he is a republican. The House of Lords has been reformed, but I am not sure that it is a better place. Grammar schools are denigrated and under attack from the Government. Under the Labour-Liberal coalition, property rights in Scotland have been subjected to astonishing attack, and the right to roam attacks property rights in this country as well. The fault is not entirely on one side, but the problem is one of reducing respect for other people and their property.

Over the past eight years—in fact, over the past 40 years—we have seen the fostering of the culture of rights. The 10-year-old who tells a police constable who remonstrates with him, "I know my rights—don't you lay a finger on me," is a deeply worrying phenomenon. That culture is backed up by the so-called Human Rights Act 1998. Human rights sound marvellous, but the Act, against which some of us warned eight years ago, has contributed to the lack of respect and the yob culture that all of us are now supposed to turn against. For an example, let us take Travellers. They know their rights, they know about human rights and they know about legal challenges, but in my constituency just before the election they were defecating on the doorsteps of law-abiding citizens.

So-called modernising also reduces respect. Roy Jenkins might not be the best example I could use, but he was quoted earlier and, all credit to him, he came a long way—from a Welsh mining village, I believe. He delighted in speaking the Queen's English perfectly. Some people took the mickey out of him for so doing. We now have a Prime Minister who speaks with an accent that was never heard when he was at Fettes or at Oxford. This is a dumbing down and a denigration of perhaps what people used to look up to.

Modernising is in with the new and out with the old, change for its own sake. Consider all the fuddy-duddy old ways that the Government have been kicking. We should respect the history of this country and not apologise for it. What do we apologise for? Should we apologise for the potato famine in the 1840s or the slave trade, or any other such nonsense?

We should stand up for and support those who are in authority such as head teachers. We should show deference to the position of a head teacher or a police officer, people who are serving society. We should defer to and respect a nurse, a waitress, a road sweeper or a doctor, or even the Prime Minister, because of the positions that these people hold. We may not respect them enormously but we should acknowledge that which they are meant to be doing for us all.

The ghastly liberal left-leaning media have contributed hugely to the iconoclasm and the lack of respect that I believe has led to many of the problems that we are talking about. We need to foster a culture of respect. The Government have denigrated our institutions when they should have been standing up for them.

Deference to a position—for example, to a head teacher—is not obsequiousness. Instead, it shows mutual respect. The Government's determination to equalise and dumb down has led to a person who has, for example, got excellent A-levels or a very good degree, discovering that there is no respect from others for his or her achievement. People say, "A-levels are devalued these days", and respect for a degree is devalued as well.

We should be proud of this country, of its institutions and of its democracy. That brings me on to what was perhaps the most disturbing element of the election campaign from my point of view. I am proud of the House and this mother of parliaments, so called. However, just before the election, Judge Richard Mawrey said that postal voting in this country was worthy of a banana republic. I think that I am quoting him correctly. Indeed, the mother of parliaments was reduced to such a state. He went on to say that the postal voting system was

"an open invitation to fraud."

There are so many postal voting forms that they are thrown out like confetti. I have several in my office. I could easily have used them all. Like most Members, I am registered in two places, as is my wife. We could all use them because there is no cross-checking. I do not know whether right hon. and hon. Members realise but if Tipp-Ex is used on a postal vote—cross out one mark and put in another—that will be fine. According to electoral law, one is explaining to the returning officer that that is one's choice. If an envelope is ripped open and then resealed, that is fine. There is nothing in legislation about that, yet that is what has been happening.

There is no proper identification of postal votes. As I have said, there is no cross-checking. It is not only Members who are registered in two places. Universities and colleges have been registering all their students. Enormous numbers of students have been registered at both home and university. This is a matter of concern. There should be cross-checking.

Regrettably, most students did not vote rather than voting twice, but that is something else. In Leicester, it was reported on the Jeremy Vine show that there were 450 foreign students in one hostel—it catered for foreign students—who had all been registered for postal votes. Is no one checking this procedure? Some people were sent postal votes who had never applied for them. I know many people who found themselves in that position. Those who did want a postal vote because they were going on holiday or who lived overseas—I received many letters from people in such circumstances, and I am sure that it is the experience of other hon. Members—never received such a vote in time. I have received letters from people in Spain, telling me that they had applied for a postal vote. They live in the country for six months each year but the form never arrived. They told me that they would have voted for me, which was nice, but they could not do so.

There have been endless complaints. People went on holiday expecting to receive their postal vote more than a week in advance, but did not. I understand that postal votes, according to legislation, have to be out only on the day before the election. That is ridiculous, and it negates the purpose of postal voting for overseas voters or people going on holiday. The system is hopeless. It should be reformed from top to bottom, and I hope that the Bill we have been promised will do so.

I am ashamed on behalf of my country of the postal voting fiasco, and the Government should be ashamed of themselves for introducing it. It has destroyed the integrity of our electoral system, as there is no trust in, or respect for, a system that was changed in the name of so-called modernisation. The change was introduced, hon. Members may recall, to increase participation. I thought then, and I still think, that it was introduced to increase participation by Labour voters, as the Government were worried that they might stay at home in future. On 5 April, Mr. Raynsford, who was previously the Minister for Local and Regional Government but has now been reduced to serving on the Back Benches, said in the House that individual registration in Northern Ireland had reduced the number of people on the electoral roll, which was a bad thing. I am not the only person who knows that the "vote early, vote often" mantra came from Ireland. Of course registration went down, because many people were wrongly on the electoral register in Northern Ireland.

The judge in the Birmingham fraud case said that the Government were guilty

"not simply of complacency but of denial".

We must restore the integrity of the register and the voting system as a first step towards restoring trust in, and respect for, our political system. We should end postal voting on demand, and should have individual registration, as recommended by the Electoral Commission. We should have proper identity checks, perhaps at polling stations, and there should be cross-checking to discover whether people are registered in two places. We must limit postal votes, which should be sent out well in advance so that people can vote if they have registered.

Turning to service voting, on 2 February, in response to my question, the Prime Minister told me that all service voters would definitely have the opportunity to vote. When I was in Iraq at the end of January, however, a straw poll revealed that eight out of 10 soldiers were not registered. That is an unscientific poll, but a large number of service voters were not registered at all. One of them told me, "I didn't think that we were allowed to vote." The Prime Minister promised that everyone would have a form to register as a service voter before 11 March, the cut-off date for registration for an election on 5 May. Those forms never arrived. They may have arrived in some places, but I could give the details of many establishments where they did not do so.

What chance did someone in Iraq, Afghanistan or on the high seas who had registered as a service voter and received a postal vote have of returning that vote if they received it two or three days before the election? Typically, the forces' Iraq post takes 10 days in either direction, so there was not any chance of returning those votes. That, too, shames the Government, who have effectively disenfranchised the service personnel whom they have sent into dangerous parts of the world to do their bidding and serve the country.I was in the Army for 15 years, but I only recall registering once—I probably changed my details once or twice—as I had a proxy. Typically, a spouse, parent or, in my case, a brother acted as a proxy in elections. I hope that my brother always voted the right way—to a certain extent, one must trust people.

In the service voting fiasco, the Government deliberately dragged their feet. Ivor Caplin, who was a defence Minister in the last Parliament, said on 20 January that

"the situation is not nearly as bad as it seems"—[Hansard, 20 January 2005; Vol. 429, c. 1002.]

He was right—it was much worse. I should like the Government to instigate a proper investigation to find out how many service personnel had the opportunity to vote on the Government's shambolic policies. I have already written to Sam Younger of the Electoral Commission asking him to do so. I wish he would spend more time investigating such subjects instead of sending us lots of glossy brochures that do not say very much.

I turn briefly to another couple of points. On Northern Ireland, we heard a rather good speech from the leader of the Democratic Unionist party. The Government's well-intentioned Belfast agreement, which many of us feared was built on sand, has produced exactly the opposite result to that which the Government hoped for. It has polarised opinion, so that the Democratic Unionists, who used to be considered extremists, are now the authentic voice of the Unionist or Protestant side—whichever one wishes to call it. I have no problem with the Democratic Unionists, but I have a worry that the people who were once referred to as extremists now romp back with nine seats to the one that the official Unionists got. At the same time Sinn Fein, despite the Northern bank robbery, the McCartney murder and everything else, increased its representation by one seat.

The reason for those results goes back to the matter of respect and trust. The Unionist community voted for the Belfast agreement because the Prime Minister promised that there was no place in government for those who had not given up violence for good. That message stands on its own.

Finally, I shall deal with the single farm payment. The environment and agriculture were mentioned only briefly in the Queen's Speech. I am a farmer and I have just had to fill in the forms for the single farm payment. Sadly, no Minister from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is present. I challenge any DEFRA Minister to fill in those forms. I meet many of my farming colleagues in my constituency and get on very well with them. They have told me that they believe the forms were introduced to drive decent old family farmers—not necessarily the best educated—out of business and get them to leave farming. Perhaps one or two other hon. Members have filled in the forms. I challenge anyone to fill them in and not to think, "My God, what is all this about?" They are so complex that all DEFRA Ministers should have to sit down and fill them in before they talk about farming.

In conclusion, when the Government came in eight years ago, they said that things could only get better. If I am honest—I see a Whip in the front row—I, like many people of Conservative persuasion throughout the country, shared a little of the optimism surrounding the brave new Government, the young Prime Minister and the dynamic nonsense. Do we now believe that Britain is a much better place? Do we feel more at ease with ourselves?

Some things are certainly better. I was ambivalent at the time, but I applaud the Chancellor's decision eight years ago to give independence to the Bank of England. Whatever we say, there are improvements in hospitals. In many cases waiting times are down, but so they damn well should be, with the amount of money that is being spent on such things. Generally, do we feel that things are that much better? I believe that there is a sense of hugely raised expectations that have been dashed. That has led to cynicism, a lack of trust in politicians and a lack of respect for politicians and for our democratic institutions like Parliament, which should hold out hope and optimism for the people of the United Kingdom. The Government are failing in that and are failing the people of the country whom we are all here to serve, when there is not enough hope for the future, as we would all wish.

I congratulate you on your re-appointment, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and I congratulate the three hon. Members who have made maiden speeches today—the hon. Members for Hove (Ms Barlow) and for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) and my hon. Friend Mr. Evennett. I reserve most of my praise for my hon. Friend. It is great to see an old colleague coming back after eight years. What took you so long, as we say?

Education's loss will be Parliament's gain, but my hon. Friend will see some changes since he left the House in 1997. The worst change is that we now occupy the Opposition Benches. I had hoped that we would return to the Government Benches. Another change is the new hours of the House, which I do not like at all. It is good that we have gone back to sitting until 10 pm on Tuesday, but it would have been better if we had got Wednesday and Thursday back to a later time as well.

We have talked about the lack of respect and how to engage people in the democratic process, and another matter that I find problematic which my hon. Friend will notice, particularly in Committee, is how all legislation is timetabled these days. The automatic guillotine falls, and we simply do not have the opportunity to scrutinise the legislation in the way that we should. However, it is wonderful to see my hon. Friend back in his rightful place.

This is my fourth term, as it is that of my hon. Friend Mr. Robathan. I had a good result in the Ribble valley, although the celebrations were tempered by the death of my agent, Keith Brunskill, the next day. Keith was a tremendous supporter of mine. He supported me through my summer tours over 14 years in the Ribble valley. The Queen's Speech refers to respect, and everybody I know who knew Keith respected and admired him. He was a community man and did so much for everything that he became involved in, whether it was politics, the church or just his local community and the village cricket team. My thoughts are with Kate, Mike and Vivian. He was a tremendous man and will be a great loss to us.

I have had five private Member's Bills so far and if I am as lucky in this Parliament as I have been in the past my next one will be the letter-box Bill. Having delivered thousands of leaflets over four weeks, I want to see legislation stipulating that letter-boxes should be horizontal and in the middle of the door, with no brushes, so that the leaflets go through smoothly. [Interruption.] That will clearly be a popular Bill; it may be my leadership bid. Everybody else is standing so I do not see why I should not. It was a hard-fought campaign.

Andrew Mackinlay referred to his maiden speech, and I remember mine in 1992. It was at half-past 1 in the morning. It was on Maastricht and it was an awful speech. I spoke mostly on what I liked about Maastricht, which were its opt-outs. This Queen's Speech refers to the European Union constitution, and I say to the Minister: let us bring on that referendum and give the British people an opportunity to vote on it, irrespective of what France does on 29 May. If it votes no, so be it, but let us give the British people a chance to vote on the European Union constitution. I have no doubts about what they will say. We had to drag the Prime Minister into having a referendum in the first place. The only reason he caved in in the end was that he wanted to save what he thought were a few seats at the European Union elections that were coming up, and I am not so sure that he was successful at that, because it was quite a dreary result for the Government. But he promised a referendum and I hope that we will have that. It would not be a bad idea if we had the date of that as quickly as is possible.

One reason why I did so well in the Ribble valley, with the Lib Dems only just clinging on to second place, was my support for BAE Systems. We have talked about manufacturing today, and the Ribble valley has all the technical and manufacturing skills required to help to make the Eurofighter. The Lib Dems were against tranche 3 of the Eurofighter, and that went badly against them. The Labour party candidate was in favour of it and he increased his vote. I want to ensure that we have the manufacturing skills required to manufacture products such as the Eurofighter jet, that we give those skilled workers our full support, and that we have the work for them in the future. We also need to ensure that our armed forces have the defence capacity that they desperately need for the job that they will have to do in the future.

The Queen's Speech also refers to support for rural services, but we do not really know what that means. We have talked about the vagueness of the Queen's Speech and its thinness in parts—none of us had the 200-page document that all the journalists had—and I heard what my hon. Friend the Member for Blaby had to say about farming. When I was knocking on doors during the election campaign, one youngster of 18 or 19—a farmer's son who works on the farm—said to me, "Mr. Evans, will I have a job to go to?" If we want a countryside that everybody can visit and working rural villages, the primary point is to ensure a farming industry that can sustain the families that live in and around those farms. This is my worry, and given the Government's desire to support rural services, I hope that they will support farming, which props up our rural areas. But we must also ensure that this is more than just words. We must ensure the survival of our rural post offices and buses, which allow people to live in such villages and to have a full life.

A children's Bill is also mentioned in the Queen's Speech. At the tail-end of the last Parliament, I asked the Prime Minister about the tragic case of a young boy in my constituency who died in the care of a child minder. Shortly afterwards, I met the then Minister with responsibility for children, who said that the Government were going to introduce a children's Bill. Having listened to what she and the Prime Minister had to say—I believe that the Prime Minister was being sincere—I hope that the Government will look at the facts of this tragedy. If they consider this children's Bill an appropriate vehicle, I hope that they will ensure that safeguards are included in it, so that our child minders are fully trained and know what to do when accidents or emergencies happen. Training and certification also have to be better. What happened to Joshua was an absolute tragedy, and if we can learn lessons from it, we can ensure that it never happens to anyone else.

The Queen's Speech also refers to a Bill on road safety—an issue which Mr. Marshall mentioned. I enjoyed everything that he had to say on dealing with speed cameras; it was absolutely superb. The current situation is clearly over the top. There are far too many speed cameras throughout the country, and not all of them are in the right places. He said that people are losing their licences and he is absolutely right. I do hope that we will take a more intelligent approach to speed cameras and to the points system.

We also need to spend the money raised from speed cameras—well over £100 million a year—more intelligently. We need to spend it on ensuring that the roads are made safer. There have been several tragic accidents and deaths on the A59, which runs through my constituency. A particularly tragic incident occurred between Sabden and Clitheroe, and the cost-effective answer was to stop the traffic turning right into Clitheroe along the A59. A few months after that was done, there was another accident in which somebody tragically died. What is needed there is a roundabout. No doubt that would cost more money than the cones that are currently littered along the A59, but they are not an effective road safety answer. Let us ensure that some of the money raised from motorists—money raised on the back of a road safety argument—is indeed spent on effective road safety measures. I hope that we will see a lot more such measures.

We have talked a lot about crime today, and about drugs. I asked the Prime Minister whether he thought that he made a mistake in reclassifying cannabis from class B to class C. He went on a bit, saying that the Government will have a look at this issue. If the commission that they have set up recommends returning it to class B, they will do so, but why did the commission not examine this issue in the first place? Why did it not look into the various consequences of reclassifying cannabis, taking on board the various psychiatric disorders that cannabis causes, and then make a judgment as to whether it was right to reclassify it? It is a very dangerous experiment and the Foreign Secretary has already said that the Government may have made a mistake. If so, let us be big about it, admit the mistake and reclassify cannabis as a B drug. A mistake has been made and it has sent all the wrong signals to youngsters up and down the country. The impacts of the reclassification were never taken into account.

The electoral system has already been mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Blaby, and I am also very concerned about postal votes. It seems that a number of people who did not ask for them received them; that some who wanted them did not receive them; and that others received more than one. We must therefore listen seriously to what the Electoral Commission has to say about the problem—[Interruption.] I see my hon. Friend the Member for Blaby is waving a spare ballot paper for us. We must take this matter very seriously indeed. We must ensure that the electoral system in this country is rigorous: there are ways to achieve that. Let us learn the lessons of the 2005 general election and bring forward a Bill that all political parties, not just one, will support. We need effective measures in place to ensure that people receive the voting papers that they need.

In my own constituency, more than 100 people were turned away at one of the polling stations in Fulwood simply because the clerks supervising the ballot were overwhelmed. When someone phoned through to ask for more clerks, the request was denied. A police officer then turned up—not to ensure that everyone could vote, but to quell the 100 people involved and to tell them that, sadly, it was 10 o'clock, so they could not vote. It was announced on the television that 100 people in the Ribble Valley were turned away from voting. We must learn the lessons there, too. When people turn up to vote and there is a queue, there must be a system in place whereby doors can be shut or a police officer called to prevent people from joining that queue after 10 o'clock. Anyone joining the queue before that time, however, should be able to vote. We talk so often about encouraging people to vote, yet these people were turned away, which is wrong.

Finally, I want to talk about democracy in the mother of Parliaments. Mr. Clelland mentioned that reforming the House of Lords was not the No. 1 issue on the doorstep, but spoke almost exclusively about it during the rest of his speech. I want to ensure that we have a rigorous and effective Parliament, and the Government well know that they have been returned on the basis of just 36 per cent. of the vote. The last thing we want to see in this Parliament is a Government with 36 per cent. of the vote completely nobbling the second chamber. The Government are not content just to pack it full of their own cronies to gain the upper hand in numerical terms. They were upset by what happened at the tail end of the last Parliament, when not just Conservative or Liberal Democrat peers, but Cross Benchers and Labour peers repeatedly told the Government to think again on anti-terrorism legislation. The Government said that they could not do this or that, but every time the Bill came back here, we did think again and it was revised and sent back again. We ended up with an improved Bill, which both Houses were happy with. Of course, the Government said nothing about that during the election campaign, but waited until the election was over. As I said, not happy with packing the House of Lords full of their own supporters, they now want to neuter it so that the second chamber becomes ineffective against the mighty Labour Government—elected, I remind the House, on 36 per cent. of the vote.

On the day after the election, the Prime Minister said that he was humble and would listen to what the public had to say, and we all took him on trust. We will carry on taking him on trust, but he has to ensure that his policies reflect the percentage of the votes that he secured. He may wish to introduce many measures, such as ID cards and reform of the House of Lords, but he should think again. That is what the second Chamber is for. It tells the Government to think again, and the result of the 2005 general election is telling the Prime Minister the same thing—that he must think again. I hope that that is what he will do.

I begin by congratulating all those hon. Members who have made their maiden speeches today. That is a very special moment. When I made my maiden speech, I was fortunate enough to address a full House on the rate capping Bill. How times change: the House is rarely full these days. Even so, I extend to all those making their maiden speeches my best wishes for the future.

In particular, I congratulate my hon. Friend Mr. Evennett on his speech today. We entered the House on the same day and shared the same office for a time. In those days, conditions for newly elected Members of Parliament were rather different. Today, they are allocated offices immediately, but I occupied a broom cupboard for my first 10 years in the House. I wish my hon. Friend well in the future. He has been missed from the House, and I am sure that he will serve his new constituents well.

My hon. Friend Mr. Evans spoke about the Government's mandate after the election. We can argue however we like about the numbers involved in the Government's re-election, but there is no doubt that there is an enormous disparity between the percentage of the vote that the Labour party achieved and the number of seats that it has. I hope that the leader of the Labour party will reflect on that result, and on the enthusiasm shown for the Gracious Speech.

I am delighted to have so many new colleagues on this side of the Chamber. I wish them all well, but I admit that I had not thought through all the implications. I charged into the Chamber earlier expecting to drift into my normal place on the green Benches, but now I realise that I will have to use my prayer card in future to secure my place, as the Conservative Benches are likely to be full on important occasions. If that is a nuisance, it is one that I welcome.

As a number of Conservative Members have observed, it appears from the Gracious Speech that the Government's current buzz word is "respect". I do not know whether that is a result of the new political party that caused the Government some damage in the election, but it is galling to hear this of all Governments saying that they are going to make respect the issue for this Parliament. I have no respect for a Government who, on our very first day of meeting, think that it is okay to brief the media before hon. Members. I have no respect for a Government who took us to war on a false premise, or for one who immediately reinstate Ministers who have only just resigned. Under this Government, Ministers never resign because they have done something wrong.

Finally, I have absolutely no respect for a Government who told us that there was nothing to worry about with postal votes and that nothing improper would happen. We tried to scrutinise the legislation on postal voting before the election, and all of my colleagues tell me that they are very worried about the matter. Given that several hon. Members have only small majorities, I wonder how many challenges will be brought forward.

I have no respect for this Government. Respect has to be earned, but they have done nothing to earn respect since 1997. I see nothing in the 45 Bills proposed in the Gracious Speech that will bring back respect.

I am delighted to find, however, that I am respected by a number of my constituents. I am delighted to have been returned to the House with an increased majority. I was gratified to receive this morning from one of my constituents—I will not name him—the following letter:

"I have to write to say how very sorry I am to have said to you that all politicians are"—

I shall not use the word, but it begins with W—

"when you called looking for support prior to May 5th. It brings tears to my eyes when I think of the look on your face and you had the good grace not to reply. I don't know what came over me, as you do so much good for people.

There is no need to waste your valuable time replying to this letter. I just hope I can lay this matter to rest, in my own mind. Congratulations on your win and once again, I am so sorry.

Kind regards".

I should say that I had him down on the canvass returns as a "Don't know".

The first thing that our attention is drawn to in the Gracious Speech is the economy. I agree with my hon. Friend Tony Baldry that, no matter whom one spoke to from the business sector during the four weeks of the election campaign, the economy is very flat. I have no doubt that there will be tax increases to come. Thank goodness the Conservative Benches have the numbers that we need properly to scrutinise legislation, and I am confident that we will be able to scrutinise the tax increases and all the other matters that trouble me.

The Prime Minister gave us an assurance that taxes would not increase. If we are to have respect, surely we can hold the Prime Minister to account. He said that taxes will not increase, rather as his manifesto said at the previous election that tuition fees would not be introduced and that the Government would legislate to prevent them. We now have tuition fees, of course, but what makes my hon. Friend think that the Prime Minister was misleading the public when he said that taxes would not increase?

I am concerned because of the track record of this rotten Government since 1997. They appear to be serial sinners, and I am not optimistic that they will deliver on their promises this time, particularly on not increasing taxes.

We are told in the Gracious Speech that there will be a "programme of reform" and that the Government will

"accelerate modernisation of the public services to promote opportunity and fairness."

What does it mean?

That is a very good question. We will hold the Government to account on precisely what they meant by that part of the Gracious Speech.

We have also heard over and again about education, education, education and how terribly important it is. In my constituency and that of my hon. Friend James Duddridge, education is indeed of major concern. We do not have enough secondary school places, for instance, and my hon. Friend and I will be on the doorstep of Education Ministers to see what help can be given so that our constituents are offered real choice.

As a member of the Select Committee on Health, the national health service is a major interest of mine, and after four weeks of talking to constituents it is clear that there are huge concerns about it. My hon. Friends will remember that the Labour party suggested before the general election that the Conservative party would, if given power, privatise the national health service. I wonder whether my hon. Friends were puzzled, then, by the part of the Gracious Speech that tells us:

"Measures will be brought forward to introduce more choice and diversity in healthcare provision".

That will involve private health care. Again, the Government say one thing before an election and, the very day the new Parliament opens, they tell us that they will do something else.

The only point on which I disagreed with my hon. Friend Mr. Fallon is that I think that we should bring back Hattie Jacques. Most of my constituents agree that matrons are needed, and I hope that traditional hygiene will be brought back to our hospitals.

Does my hon. Friend, as a member of the Health Committee in the last Parliament, know how many NHS patients are already being treated in private hospitals? We suggested that and it is a sensible idea, but I believe it already happens in some 250,000 cases a year.

My hon. Friend is right and Conservatives have no problem with that. However, I resent bitterly the Labour suggestion before the election that a Conservative Government would mean the end of the national health service, because people would then have to pay for health care. That simply was not the case. My hon. Friends intend to hold the Government to account if they attempt to honour their promise in the Queen's Speech and tinker with the private health sector.

The Queen's Speech also promised that the Government would begin long-term reform to provide sustainable income for those in retirement. In a previous election they said that they would help senior citizens, but in their first Budget they raided pension funds of £5 billion. Now they have the gall to claim that they will begin to help senior citizens. They will have difficulty with respect from senior citizens after their previous pledges on pensions.

I do not wish to upset my hon. Friends, but I am in favour of identity cards. In the 1980s, I successfully introduced a ten-minute Bill that enabled voluntary identity cards to be introduced and I am still a great supporter of them. When someone is born, they are issued with a birth certificate, and when they die their relatives are given a death certificate. There would be enormous advantages to having identity cards, but I do not want to fall out with my hon. Friends on the issue. If we cannot agree on compulsory ID cards, I hope that they can be convinced that it would be worth while introducing a voluntary scheme.

The Queen's Speech also says that the Government will tighten the immigration and asylum system in a way that is fair, flexible and in the economic interests of the country. In Southend, there is huge injustice in asylum and immigration. Genuine asylum seekers are not allowed to remain. People who come here as immigrants and have been accepted have huge hassle getting permission for relatives to come and stay for a couple of weeks. However, people who should not be in the country, and who have papers saying that they should have been removed, are still here. The system is an absolute shambles, but I have no faith that this Government will have the nous to do something about it.

I genuinely do not understand how the Conservatives propose to control immigration. What categories of people who come here now would not be allowed in by the Conservatives? We have different views about who to blame for illegal immigration, which we need to address, but the Conservative manifesto promised to control lawful immigration. Who will be excluded and how will they be selected?

If I were a clever Minister, I suppose I would say that I will write to the hon. Gentleman. The leader of my party made our policy clear during the general election; it would include a quota system, with points according to skills and there would be a much fairer system than we have at present. Furthermore, I deprecate the views that the leader of the Labour party expressed on the issue throughout the election campaign. It was right that my party had the guts and the courage to raise the issue and we were at one with the feelings of the general public about the huge injustice involved.

There is one thing in the Gracious Speech on which I certainly shall agree with the Government. It concerns the welfare of the child. I am pleased that a Bill will be introduced

"to establish a barring and vetting scheme, and other measures to provide better protection for children and vulnerable adults".

Too often on the Health Committee, we heard of cases such as that of Victoria Climbié—children suffering in terrible circumstances as a result of the failure of various organisations. I welcome legislation

"to safeguard the welfare of children in circumstances of parental separation and to improve the process of inter-country adoption".

I am concerned that the Government intend to press on with the measure on compulsory treatment of people with mental disorders. That is a difficult issue and my colleagues and I feel strongly about it.

The Government tell us that they will bring forward a measure to help reduce casualties on the road. For goodness sake! The Government made it illegal to drive a car while using a mobile phone, yet that law is not being enforced. Every day, people drive using mobile phones; they tuck the phone under their ear and do not concentrate on what they should be doing. Every day there are fatalities and accidents because people drive while using mobile phones. If the Government are serious about reducing road casualties, they should enforce that law. I asked Home Office Ministers how many extra police officers have been deployed to enforce the measure: none whatever.

I am concerned about a matter that my hon. Friend has not brought up. The Queen's Speech states:

"My Government will take forward proposals to introduce an offence of corporate manslaughter."

As a member of the Health Committee in the last Parliament, does my hon. Friend think that corporate manslaughter could extend to the chief executives of hospitals where the cause of death was MRSA? Might it extend to the death of soldiers when the Secretary of State for Defence had not allowed proper equipment to be issued? Could the offence of corporate manslaughter extend to such cases? Will it be confined to the private sector or should it cover the public sector as well?

My hon. Friend makes a splendid point. If the Bill is not guillotined, we shall have great fun in Committee and on Report. The points that my hon. Friend articulated mean that we shall have to consider the measure very carefully indeed.

Despite all the 40-odd measures—thin though they may be—would not it be better if we had fewer laws, but ones that were enforced, rather than lots of garbage legislation to which nobody pays the slightest attention, so that we have had to have five asylum and immigration Acts in eight years?

My hon. Friend reminds me of what I should have said at the start of my speech: we legislate too much and the laws are simply not enforced. That is why there is an enormous feeling of injustice in this country.

I am appalled that the Government are to continue with their so-called reform of the House of Lords. They have made an absolute mess of its reform so far. I should have thought that they would have learned by now that it does not matter how many Labour people they put in the House of Lords; at the end of the day, they will do their own thing. In my view, the House of Lords worked splendidly before the Government interfered with it. Since they started interfering with it, they have got their fingers well and truly burned.

The final point that I wish to make is on foreign affairs. It is very unfortunate that there has been a less than robust plan for the transitional Government in Iraq. Much more work needs to be done in that area. The Gracious Speech ends with a paragraph containing the words,

"develop the strong partnership between Europe and the United States".

I do not know who put that paragraph in. It badly confused me. We will hold a referendum on the European constitution, but my party wants to be at the heart of Europe but not governed by Europe. Although we think that the United States of America is our greatest ally, we find the posture of the present Prime Minister, who on one day was totally enamoured of Bill Clinton and on the next totally enamoured of President Bush, somewhat confusing. My party intends to put Britain's interests first.

I look forward to the next 18 months, but I am really looking forward to it on the basis that my party has 54 new colleagues, with which we can well and truly hold this rotten Government to account.

Debate adjourned—[Mr. Cawsey.]

Debate to be resumed tomorrow.