The Rt. Hon. Sir John Major KG CH

Tag: ERM

  • Sir John Major’s Interview with Amol Rajan – 18 September 2024

    Amol Rajan’s interview with Sir John Major, broadcast on BBC Sounds on 18 September 2024.

    BBC Sounds Link

     

    AMOL RAJAN

    Sir John Major is perhaps the most unlikely of our modern British Prime Ministers, the son of a circus impresario. He grew up in poverty and left school with just 3 O-Levels. Yet that didn’t stop him rising through the Tory ranks at remarkable speed, serving as Foreign Secretary, then Chancellor for Lady Margaret Thatcher, and then finally her replacement and successor as Prime Minister. His victory in the 1992 election saw him win more votes than any British leader in history at a general election, but battles over Europe, sleaze and the future of the Tory party led to his defeat in 1997.

    Tony Blair, with a Labour landslide, ended 18 years of Tory rule in which Major had been a central figure. Sir John rarely gives interviews these days, but the man once held as an emblem of meritocracy clearly feels as strongly as ever about what his party, his country and his generation need to do urgently to fix Britain’s problems, restore its pride and help it thrive In the 21st century.

    Here is Sir John Major. Sir John Major, very good to see you. Thank you very much indeed for agreeing to speak to me. I can’t help but note that you don’t often do interviews these days, so I must start by asking why you’ve agreed to do this one.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    It’s a rather unusual question, but I’ll give you a strictly truthful answer. There were two reasons, really. One, because it was a lengthy interview, and I do think a large number of the short interviews I see merely produce soundbite answers. They don’t really inform the public, and I think fewer, rather longer interviews would be more useful to the public. And secondly, though I probably shouldn’t say this, it’s 65 years since I joined the Conservative Party. I was, am and always will be a Conservative. But in recent months, a little longer, a few months, there’s not been a great deal I could say that I would wish to say in favour of what the previous Government were doing. That being so, I thought it better just to stay off the air. Now, of course, the election is behind us. The party’s looking again to the future, and I can return to speaking out, hopefully in favour.

    AMOL RAJAN

    [narrating]

    Now 81 Sir John is much more likely to be seen at a cricket match than in Downing Street. But he remains hugely influential in British politics, even though his seven years as this country’s leader hark back to a very different era. Sir John’s life story is by any measure remarkable. He is the son of a mid Victorian, his father Tom was born in 1879 and in his mid 60s when his son John was born. A circus impresario, he fell on hard times when a deal went sour and the family moved from a bungalow in Worcester Park, a suburb south of London, to a two bedroom apartment with a communal toilet in Brixton’s Coldharbour Lane. Sir John endured poverty and hated school, giving it little effort and leaving with 3 O-Levels.

    I met up with him at the Oval, home to Surrey Cricket Club, where he was once President, and just over a mile from the Brixton street that decades earlier Sir John had called home. Sir John. It’s not a bad sight, is it?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I mean, it’s absolutely beautiful.

    AMOL RAJAN

    When did you first come here?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I first came to the Oval, I can’t be precise to the date, early 50s, 1952 or 1953.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Did you come with your father?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    No, I came on my own, I would have been 10, and we lived in Brixton. I could walk here in 25 minutes, it was very cheap to get in here if you came just for the afternoon. So I was a regular attender, pretty much from the early 50s. I was here for the whole of the seven years that Surrey won the championship. This marvellous county team, arguably the best ever, though Yorkshire would disagree with that, and I just saw some wonderful cricket here. It brings back the most extraordinary memories whenever I come

    AMOL RAJAN

    Well, they’ve given us lovely sound effects of the leather on willow and I could talk to you for several hours about cricket and cricket alone, but my paymasters tell me that there are some other subjects that we should touch on. So let’s start with one other thing that we’ve got in common, which is a childhood in South London, but you resist the invitation and the temptation to cast your childhood as a sort of school of hard knocks. You’re humble about your humble origins, and I do think it’s a very unusual beginning for a Prime Minister. And I do think that it’s quite remarkable that you should have entered Number 10 from where you began. So I want our audience to understand where you began. Just describe, if you would, the circumstances of Coldharbour Lane, because it was really just two rooms and a lavatory, wasn’t it?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Well, there’s no lavatory actually, it was three floors down. Before I mention that, I should say my experience wasn’t unique, in the post-war period and in the early 50s, there were many families who lived in exactly the circumstances we did, or a good deal worse. There’s no point crying about that. I was extremely lucky in the family that I had, even if they had been unlucky in what life had done for them. But there were just two rooms, so there were five of us theoretically, my father, my mother, my older brother and sister, who were both older, my sister 13 years, my brother 11 years older than me, a parrot and a dog. There plainly wasn’t room for us all, so my brother moved out and actually lived in a shed for a long time, while they were repaying debt and there wasn’t much money.

    I can’t ever recall my mother buying herself anything new, never a new dress. No luxuries, never a hairdo, never a meal out, never the cinema, never a holiday, certainly nothing remotely as smart as a bottle of wine in the house. So that was the experience of millions of people at that time, so I’m not saying it was unique, please don’t get that impression, but it was very different from life as it is today. 

    AMOL RAJAN

    Was it happy?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Yes, it was. But my mother was a near saint in my view, largely because whenever there was half a crown to spare, it wasn’t spent on her, she would spend it on my father when he became bedridden and there was not a great deal of life left for him, except to talk, to remember the past, and occasionally have a small tot of whisky. So if she could save up enough money, she wouldn’t buy something for herself, she would buy a bottle of whisky for my father, who would treat it very sparingly, a very special occasion when you had a glass, but he loved it.

    AMOL RAJAN

    You were clearly supremely smart because you got into Rutlish Grammar School. How did you find that?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    That wasn’t the happiest of times, but let me emphasise that it was not the school’s fault so much as mine. When we went into Rutlish, it was moving up in the world, its prefects wore mortar boards. They were clearly aiming to make the school a much more attractive proposition, as seen from the 1950s. than it previously had been. And there was I, forgive me mentioning this because I don’t like doing so, but there was I in jumble sales school uniforms, who had to travel from Brixton to Wimbledon every day to go to school and back every day. So there was no chance of me doing any extra school activities, where so many friendships are born, or the the thought of going on school outings was just a non-starter. So I felt a bit alienated from school, as I say, my fault and our circumstances, but I absolutely rebelled in the most stupid way possible, in that I didn’t work.

    The only subjects I liked were English language, English literature and history. The rest I was completely disinterested in. So my school record was lamentable and a great disappointment to my parents. So I had to do the work I hadn’t done at school after I left it.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Why did you want to go into politics?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I guess it was in the blood.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Was it?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Well, it was in my blood.  I first went to the House of Commons aged 13.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Colonel Marcus Lipton at the village fete?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    You’ve read my book?

    AMOL RAJAN

    Yes, yes, that’s right, out of respect, to do research.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Marcus Lipton was a Labour MP, Colonel Lipton, very safe seat, Brixton at the time. He was a superb constituency member, I don’t know that he ever did a great deal in the House of Commons, but as a constituency member, he was brilliant. Everywhere you went, he would be there and I met him at the local church. The Reverend F. Franklin Cheney had invited me, the local vicar, and I met Marcus Lipton. We talked, and he realised when I talked about the things that I was concerned about, he was prepared to give me time and listen, and he realised that I was more likely to be Conservative than Labour. You regard that as surprising, but those were my natural instincts. Nonetheless, he said “have you ever been to the House of Commons?” and I said “no”, it had never occurred to me that I could go to the House of Commons. He arranged for me to have a pass to go and listen to a debate and I went, and Macmillan was in the House and Macleod was in the House, but came in and left. So I saw the great figures of British politics, but that wasn’t what caught me, walking into the House of Commons it was the atmosphere, it reaches out and grabs you. Well, it reached out and grabbed me, and I thought as I walked out of the House of Commons, this is where I’d like to spend my life.

    AMOL RAJAN

    [narrating]

    In an era when working class boys were much more likely to join Labour than the Tories, Sir John became a member of the Conservative Party on his 16th birthday. Two decades later, having worked in Africa and the insurance industry, he was an MP. Admired by Mrs. Thatcher, he was a survivor of the Tory battles of the 1980s who, after a brief stint as Foreign Secretary, would become her Chancellor and then successor.

    Well, there’s a lot to get into. Let’s start with where we are as a country, the country that you led for seven years. You used to say vocally, publicly, that you dreamt of a nation at ease with itself. Has your dream come true?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Emphatically not, indeed, quite the reverse at the moment. Wherever you look, not just in our country, but right across Europe and the United States, there’s a great deal of dissatisfaction and a large part of it has come about from one single effect, and that is the financial crisis of 2007 to 2008 which has cast a very long shadow. In many European countries, and in parts of America as well, there are people who quite against all past and all tradition have had no increase in their net quality of life, in their net standard of living since 2008 to 2009. Now, that is unprecedented. That being so, it’s hardly surprising that people are upset and irritable with government and irritable with democracy, and they most certainly are. 

    Of course, there are other things that were not the result of any individual national government, the Covid pandemic, for example, was something that was unexpected. The Ukraine war, with all the difficulties created for governments right the way across Europe because of the increase in fuel prices, they were things no government could reasonably have anticipated were going to happen. And so, in addition, to the knock on effect from 2007 to 2008, you had these two mega events. The net result of all of those, I think, is a great deal of dissatisfaction and a great deal of pressure on democracy with the belief that it has been failing the electorates. You’ve seen that in the volatility of the electorate in the last two general elections.

    AMOL RAJAN

    A lot of people, a lot of voters, do think democracy is failing them, particularly young people, for reasons that we’ll get on to. Just before we do that and go back to where we are as a country today. Labour are back in power after 14 years. Given your answer to my first question about your party, would you say, did your party, the Conservatives, deserve to lose?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I think there’s a time when democracy needs a change of government. Although I was the leader of the party at the time, I could see that, in 1997 we had been in government for 18 years, and it was perfectly true to say that we were tired and that we were running out of fresh ideas and we were running out of fresh people to make Ministers and reinject the government with vigour. So looking back absolutely personally, I can see why the country changed their minds in 1997, and of course, the same thing applies, although it was only 14 years on this occasion, but 14 years plus the difficulties of the pandemic that I’ve just been talking about,

    AMOL RAJAN

    We’re talking shortly after some data published showed there’s been a really significant fall in this country in national pride. Very significantly, fewer people are proud to be British and are proud of this country’s history. Why do you think that is?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I think because they’re not seeing us succeed. I think there are a range of reasons, that’s partly because of their own personal experience, it’s partly because many of the things that they took for granted appear to need reform, appear to be broken. If you look at the post war settlement, most of that is now out of date, and yet, I see no one on the political horizon anywhere around the world who’s going to gather people together and look again at a new settlement that might be appropriate for the 2020s. It’s a different world from 1945 and 1946, and  it hasn’t updated the fundamental structure of Western democracy.

    AMOL RAJAN

    You think we need a new settlement?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I think it would be very helpful to have a new settlement. Let me give you one illustration, and it’s an illustration for which I do not have a solution. But if you look at the permanent five Security Council, they are no longer the five most powerful nations in the world as they were in 1945 and 1946. Of the five of them, they all have a single nation veto for action. So with China and Russia, many of the things that the UN really was really established to do, to prevent wars, for example, they are stymied completely because there’s a one nation veto. Now I would like to see the permanent members increased, there are big countries like India, Brazil, Japan, who perhaps usefully ought to be there and certainly I’d like to see an end to the one nation veto. I think it would reflect the world we live in, rather than the world that was.

    AMOL RAJAN

    That world is changing very, very fast, and some people don’t like how it’s changing. When you were elected into Parliament in the late 1970s throughout the 1980s, you often saw riots on the streets. One of the first things that we’ve seen in this country after the election of Sir Keir Starmer’s Government has been major rioting. Why do you think we’ve just seen riots on the street in this country?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Well, I think it’s a function of the general dissatisfaction. If people are broadly happy with the direction their life is taking, then they don’t riot. If they aren’t happy, then they are much more likely to be subjected to things like rioting when seductive voices suggest we all ought to do this, we ought not to do that, and encourage people to take action against it. When people are content, or more content than they are at the moment, they resist those siren voices. At the moment they’re not, and so those siren voices have had some success.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Let’s get into some of the hard policy choices that come from that. One of the choices that the Keir Starmer Government has made concerns the early release of prisoners and prisons was a big part of your thinking. Obviously, when you were in power, prison reform is a subject on which you have been outspoken in the past. How would you have approached the dilemma of, on the one hand, wanting to be tough on rioters, but on the other, the fact being the prisons are full, and therefore you need to release people?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Well, let me go back in history a bit for this, because it’s quite an interesting background. I was a humble Parliamentary Private Secretary in the home office in the early 1980s when Willie Whitelaw was Home Secretary, and I will never forget the day he burst into our morning meeting having just been told that the prison population had reached 40,000. “Terrible” he said, “how could it possibly be 40,000?”, but it’s now more than twice that. You ask ourselves this question, is there twice as much crime? No. Is there twice as much violent crime? Well, the public don’t believe it, but actually violent crime overall has been falling for some time. Are the police more efficient in catching criminals? Are they twice as efficient in catching criminals so they filled up the prisons? Well, I would think probably the answer to that is, no, they’re not twice as efficient as they used to be.

    So what has happened? What has happened is, in the interim, whenever there’s been something wrong, one Home Secretary or another from both parties has decided we have to be tough on crime. The easiest thing to do is add to the tariff. Now, there are many people who should be in prison, people who are violent, people who are habitual criminals, I thoroughly agree they should be in prison. But I think I would argue that there are many people who have misbehaved, but they ought to be treated by non custodial sentencing of one sort or another.

    AMOL RAJAN

    So we’re locking the wrong people up in some cases?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I think there are some of the wrong people we’re locking up and I think we’re locking up too many of them. It’s not for me to pick up precisely who they should be, but it seems to me we have something like, I think 6,000 women in prison. I don’t think there’s 6,000 violent women in prison, many of them will be there for relatively simple things and they could have been punished another way. The problem about saying sending people to prison ‘isn’t it a deterrent?’, you can argue that case to violent prisoners, yes, I accept it’s a deterrent and you must do it. I’m not a softy about that, but what I do think is where people are marginal and you send them into prison with the crowding we’ve got, they’re probably in their cells for most of their day. There’s very little recreation and in very few prisons is there actually any attempt at rehabilitation.

    The vast number of people in prison, an astonishing statistic, actually have a mental capability of about 11 or 12 years old. They need some assistance so that when they come out of prison they haven’t just learned the things they learned in prison, which may be an addition to how you commit crime, but they’ve learned something that will enable them to get out of prison and find a job and create a different life for themselves. If they haven’t gone to prison, but they’ve had a non custodial sentence, it’s more likely that can happen. Now from the point of view of the public, should we not be focusing where we can, and it’s not everywhere, but where we can, should we not be focusing on turning people who have committed crime away from further crime once their punishment is over? I think we should, and I don’t think we’re doing that as effectively as we should.

    AMOL RAJAN

    As you say, for 30 years, the direction of policy has been against what you say. So why has prison reform of the kind you’re advocating now, and in fairness, have advocated for a long time, why has that prison reform not happened? Why is it not fashionable?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    It’s not happened because it’s just too easy to say  ‘we must deter these people, we must punish them, we must send them to prison, we must make sure they don’t they don’t offend again’. The point is that last point, actually you send the wrong people to prison, you may well be encouraging them to offend again, because when they come out, what do they do? They may have lost their home, they may have lost their marriage, they may have lost their job. Who is going to employ them? You’ve just come out of prison. How many people? They’re not all as forward thinking as the Timpson family, who take in a lot of former prisoners and rehabilitate them after they’re out of prison.

    Now I repeat, I’m not some soft liberal saying we should understand everything that’s gone wrong and treat people excessively leniently. Where necessary, there should be hard sentences to protect the public. My point is, I believe we’ve sent a lot of people to prison who are not of real danger to the public, who are foolish and have been dishonest, but there are probably better ways of punishing them than incarcerating them in a prison system that can’t take them in any decent circumstances. What is truly horrifying, most of our prisons are very old, they were built for one person in a cell 150 years ago. There may be two or three people in a cell now, and they may be in there for 23 hours out of 24. What does that do for someone when they’re there? How alienated from society are they going to become?

    AMOL RAJAN

    Do you think your position that you articulate now is a vote winner?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I think it could be explained if you mean, is it going to be bitterly attacked by people to say, I am tough on crime? Yes, of course it is.

    AMOL RAJAN

    I just mean that you’re completely out of kilter, as you yourself acknowledge, with the direction of policy, and have been for the last 30 years. And it’s very striking to me that I hear very, very few people, the Timpsons being an exception, very few people, making the case you’re making in a General Election.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Well, I suppose most people think it’s not what the electorate wish to hear. It is in a civilised society what I think the electorate has a right to hear. We haven’t got a really hawkish nation who’s out to punish people, of course not. If we had, why would so many people from abroad wish to come to this country? I don’t see them queuing to get up into China or queuing to get into Russia or Iran or North Korea, I do see people with hope in their hearts trying to come here, because they see us as a place of hope. I think you need to examine policies and see, have we got that right in the past? There are some areas why I appreciate my view is very much a minority view, but I think I’m under the belief that we are a democracy in which a majority view should be aired.

    AMOL RAJAN

    You mentioned millions of people around the world do want to come to this country, as you say, with hope in their hearts. But do you think the scale of immigration that we’ve seen to this country in recent years is one of the reasons that in your first answer, when I asked you if this is a nation at ease with itself, you said, no?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Absolutely, I could have done that. People are fearful. I mean, with the best will in the world, we could not remotely take even a majority of the people who actually wish to come here. In a sense, we should be proud that people from all around the world look on us as a bastion of freedom and wish to come here, but we are a small island. We need to recognise what we are, we are 70 million people in a world of 8,000 million. Let us get ourselves in context and we are a small island. There is a limited amount that we can do, and I think we should do our limited amount. But beyond that, the public and governments are quite right to say, we simply cannot take people beyond a certain number.

    AMOL RAJAN

    So why has immigration been too high? Why has it got to the levels it has, over 700,000 net, Do you think?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    There’s been a big change, of course, since Brexit. Lots of people from Western Europe who work, particularly as it happens, in the hospitality industry have left, and other people have been actually encouraged by the Government to come here, and then with the people who come here by boats, who haven’t been encouraged to come here at all, but do because they’re not quite sure where to go. Of course, there isn’t the space for all these people, I see that, but how we deal with them is a separate question from whether we actually have enough room to take them. No, we haven’t got enough room to take them, but the manner in which we deal with them, the manner in which we process them, the manner in which we deal with them when we say we can’t have them here is a separate matter.

    AMOL RAJAN

    You mentioned the boats. Are you glad to see the back of the Rwanda scheme?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Absolutely.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Why?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    If you really wish to know, I thought it was unconservative, unBritish, if one dare say it in a secular society, unChristian and unconscionable. I thought that really, this is not the way to treat people. We used to transport people, nearly 300 years ago, from our country, felons who at least had had a trial and been found guilty of something, albeit that the trial might have been cursory. I don’t think transportation, for that is what it is, is a policy suitable for the 21st century.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Let me challenge you on that because a lot of people, some in your party, some outside of your party, some that were once in your party, would say what’s really unconservative or unChristian is allowing this boat crossing to continue. The way you stop it, this was the argument of the former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the way you stop it is by having an effective deterrent. You could tell that the Rwanda scheme was going to be a deterrent because other countries were looking at it and were thinking about whether or not they might do a similar thing. So isn’t it actually the compassionate view to take all measures necessary to stop the boats, as someone once said, and isn’t the threat of deportation to Rwanda part of that policy?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    It doesn’t seem to have been working, the threat has been there for some time and it hasn’t stopped people coming. Are they seriously saying to me that somewhere in the backwoods of some North African country, they actually know what the British Parliament has legislated for? I think not. I absolutely think that is not the case. So I’m not sure that it is the deterrent at this stage. If it had actually happened, it might have been, but it would still have been odious in my view. But there are ways in which we can deal with this, better ways. Every nation in Europe has got this problem. Let me put it in a wider context, because it’s a long term problem,

    AMOL RAJAN

    And it’s a hard problem to solve.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Which is why, over the last year, I kept my mouth shut about what I thought about it. It is a very hard problem to solve, and my sympathy goes out with Ministers trying to do it, because it is difficult. But let us put it in a proper long term context. There are people coming from all around the world who are coming here, and the more autocracies grow in other parts of the world, the more people have a life without the freedoms that we enjoy, the more they will seek to come here. There’s also the problem of Africa. Over the next 50 years, the African population is going to grow disproportionately to the rest of the world. In the next 50 years, it’s highly unlikely that the degree of investment in Africa will be able to provide good towns, good facilities, good hospitals, good education, all the things that they will need. A lot of people from Africa over the next 50 years will look for something better for themselves and their families, and they will come north and they will try to come to Europe. This isn’t just a short term problem.

    So how did we solve that problem? I don’t think we solve it just with the Rwanda scheme, and in any event, that would only be a tiny part of it. It’s only a tiny part of the immigration, let’s get that point perfectly clear. But I think if the European and other countries worked together and decided they would tackle this problem at its roots. Let us seek out where these rubber boats actually are manufactured.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Often China?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Often China. Let us ban their import into the whole of Europe, for example. Let us work together beyond China, where the boats have gone to, where people go there and seek out the gangs working with the local countries, not just Britain, but working with our partners all across Europe. It doesn’t mean you’re reinventing the European Union, they have a similar problem to us. Collectively we can provide a bigger deterrent. If we find they’re coming out of a particular port, you can actually police their port outside and turn the boats back almost where they start.

    There’s a range of things that, so far as I know, haven’t been looked at although perhaps they have and have been turned down for reasons I don’t know, but I don’t think they’ve been looked at. There are policies that are going to have to be in place for a long time, because I’m afraid now the scale of this migration has grown and the problem has grown as it has. It will be quite a long term problem, whomsoever is in government, and almost whatever they do, so we must find a better way of dealing with it. I think if we deal with it collectively we’re more likely to have a policy that would be more effective.

    AMOL RAJAN

    I’m very strongly struck by the clarity of what you say about legal migration and the strength of what you say about illegal migration, because people watching this should know that you spent many decades actually advocating for what you described as the heroic story of individual immigrants who come here because they want a better life for them and their family. You’ve also advocated the idea of a multiracial society. You once wrote:

     “Our house was multiracial for a time and it provided a good primer on poverty for a future Conservative Prime Minister, I knew the immigrants as neighbours. I played with their children. I shopped with them in Brixton market. I saw them for what they were, men and women seeking a new life in a land immeasurably wealthier than the ones they had left behind. Instead of inciting fear, the bigots should have gone to the Oval where, when the West Indies played, it was carnival time. The atmosphere was full of fun”.

    This idea that the bigots should have gone to the Oval prompts me to ask you whether or not you worry that bigotry has seeped into the Conservative Party?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    You say the Conservative Party, I don’t know why you single out the Conservative Party. There’s a degree of bigotry in the country, there always has been.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Is there in your party?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I think there probably is in a number of parties, I don’t think it’s solely within the Conservative Party. Certainly some of it is in the Conservative Party, some of it is in Reform UK, I’ve no doubt some of it is in the Labour Party. Don’t forget, when you look at politics, people tend to think that fascism and communism are at opposite ends of the political pole. They’re not. They meet. They’re next to one another. So it’s not fair to say it is just the Conservative Party.  There are people in the Conservative Party who advocate policies I would disagree with. I wouldn’t call bigots that, they’re entitled to their view, and I’m entitled to my view.

    One of the things that has gone wrong in the Conservative Party is that these days, they seem to think it’s better to be part of the faction of the party, rather than in the party as a whole. But that has been going on for a long time. I well remember in the 1980s, Margaret sitting there musing when she looked at someone, ‘Is he one of us?’ and she was looking at another Conservative MP. She wasn’t advocating division, but of course, that sort of idea encouraged people to set up different groups. We’re left wing conservatives. We are one nation. We’re a different form of group on the other side, and family feuds are always worse than feuds with people with whom you have nothing in common. 

    That has happened within the Conservative Party and it has happened within the Labour Party. I think we are going to find that the present Government, with its huge majority, will find that huge majority is very, very difficult to cope with, because there’ll be a lot of people in it who have views very different from the mainstream view of the most senior members of the Labour Party. We shall see, but I think he’ll have great difficulty with that.

    AMOL RAJAN

    What kind of health is the Conservative Party in today?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    It’s had a whopping great electoral defeat, it’s had three or four of those in its history, and it has recovered on each occasion. I may be deceiving myself, though I don’t think so, but I think a large part of our nation is, by instinct, centre right, not far right, but centre right. The only party that can legitimately appeal to the centre right is the Conservative Party and that is what we have to do. We have to decide where our natural support really lies and appeal to them.

    People may have made a misjudgment about the last election, we lost five seats to Reform UK, and people are jumping up and down, and some rather reckless people are saying, well, we must merge with them. Well, that will be fatal. We’ve lost five seats to Reform UK, we lost 50 to the Liberals and and we lost a huge amount to Labour. We lost the vote on the left more than on the right, and we have to focus on that centre right position. We’re not an ideological party, I do think traditionally we have been a common sense party. I’m always suspicious of ideology. Heaven protect us from the ideologues, they have bonkers ideas sometimes, sometimes they’re brilliant, but sometimes they have bonkers ideas that lead people astray. I think we need a common sense solution to the problem, and how can we encourage people to believe that that is what the Conservative Party is going to stand for in the future. And I’m optimistic. We have had such a bad defeat, we have got a base upon which we can build in a wholly new and, I think, potentially effective way.

    AMOL RAJAN

    You say you’re optimistic about the Conservative Party, a number of questions follow from that. First, have you made up your mind about who you’ll support to be the next leader?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I will look and see what they have to say. I’d like to support someone who’s going to look at the long term problems and make a suggestion as to which direction we should go. I’d like to look at someone who’s going to try and bring the party together and bring people back into the party who are genuinely centre right. So I’m more concerned with what they say than their individual personality. As to whether I have made up my mind, no, I haven’t.

    AMOL RAJAN

    I heard a story about how after you were voted out of office in 1997 you said to a young George Osborne, who was then your press advisor, I think it was his job to collect press cuttings for you and he’s had quite a career since. You said to him that the great danger for your party was to be taken over by its right wing. What’s the great danger today?

    AMOL RAJAN

    I don’t think the Conservative Party should be taken over by any part of it, there are different strands of conservatism. We need the right wing. What we don’t need is the far right, people who’ve attracted themselves to the right wing, who perhaps would be more comfortable in Reform UK than with us, but I don’t want to dispense of the right wing of the Conservative Party. They are a very important, valuable part of the Tory party, and so are the centre and the left of the Tory party. What I want is for them to reach a concordant so that they can agree and so that we don’t have these factional disputes within the party. They have done enough damage to us in more than one election over my lifetime.

    AMOL RAJAN

    But why do you say it would be fatal to merge with Reform UK? A lot of people think Nigel Farage should be in the Tory party.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I don’t share that view.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Because I don’t think he’s a Conservative and he spent most of his time in the last few years telling people how much he dislikes the Conservative Party and would like to destroy it. I don’t think that’s a terribly good background for bringing someone into the party.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Just before we get into Europe, where that takes us, something strange is happening to conservative parties all around the world, isn’t it? Because you say conservatives stand for common sense, but I think one of the insights of conservatism is this idea that social goods are easily destroyed, but not easily created. And yet, all around the world, lots of conservative parties, like Trump’s Republicans, like perhaps the Conservative Party in this country, have been attacking institutions. They’ve been attacking democracy. Why has that happened do you think? Why have conservatives been drawn to those anti democratic tendencies?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I find it baffling that they’ve done that. I mean the previous government talking of the blob, the blob are people who work for the Government and who are the mechanism to transfer the Government’s policies to reality. Doesn’t seem to be very sensible to insult them, and the whole series of other people, judges were enemies of the people I seem to recall many people said. Half the nation who voted to sustain our position in Europe, a position the Tory party had had for 40 years, were insulted as remoaners. They’re not remoaners, they’re people who consistently supported a Conservative Party that existed for a very long time. So I find it very difficult to understand why people actually took that particular view, and I think insulting people whose votes you need and whose votes you’re going to ask for does not seem to be a very good form of candidacy, but that is what people did, and we saw the result at the general election.

    AMOL RAJAN

    What has Brexit done to and for your party?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Brexit has been the most divisive thing that has happened in our party in my lifetime, it is less important what it has done to our party than what it has done to our country.

    AMOL RAJAN

    That was going to be my next question. What do you think it has done?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I don’t think it’s done anything good, if I may just reflect on it for a moment. It’s made our country weaker, poorer and that is emphatically not in the interests of our country. It has broken us away from alliances that were useful to us. The world saw us as a member of the European Union. When we spoke, they believed we had 500 million Europeans essentially behind us in what we spoke, it was a megaphone to magnify our power in the world. Similarly, they saw us as the closest advocates in Europe, in the United States, we were inside the European Union that helped the United States keep an eye on European policy, and they think we’re less close to the United States. So you take two of the three most powerful blocs in the world, we were the closest ally of one, and we’re now less close than we were, and we were part of the other, and we are no longer in the other. So instead, we are isolated and outside.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Did it have to be thus? I mean, could Brexit not have, if delivered in a different way, could it not have fulfilled the promise of those who advocated it, which is that it would make us richer and more free? 

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    It’s done exactly the reverse, hasn’t it? I mean, what’s the one thing that is consistent about the British nation for the last 400 years? We are a trading nation and what have we just done? We have broken away from the largest, richest free trade market the world has ever seen, and we were in the middle of it, as a leading part of it, and we have broken away from it. And what do we get instead, rolled over fresh trade deals with countries like Australia and New Zealand, who are old friends of ours, but the deals done with them were worse than the deals they rolled over. And if you disagree, go and ask our farmers what they think of the deals that were done. And the deal with Europe has gone. What is going to replace that? What is there that’s going to replace it? What has happened to all the benefits of Brexit that we heard about?

    AMOL RAJAN

    Maybe they’re yet to come.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I don’t recall people saying during the election campaign, in 10 or 15 years time, maybe 20 we will have some benefits of Brexit. It was going to be milk and honey straight away, and it wasn’t milk and honey. Brexit was sold to the nation on the basis of things that haven’t happened and couldn’t have happened. There was a great degree of misapplication of reality, if I can put it in that delicate way.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Do you mean lies?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    That’s another way of putting it. What was actually told to the people about what Brexit was going to be about. A large amount of that came from Conservative sources, not all of it. There were some very senior Labour sources who were part of that at exactly the same time. But I don’t see the great advantages that were going to come from Brexit have come yet and I don’t see any likelihood that they’re suddenly going to magically appear in the future. Let me offer you another illustration, one that most people won’t have come across. Europe has about 20 strategic agreements with countries around the world, all around the world, which cover a whole range of things and which are useful to both parties. We are their nearest neighbour, we turned down a strategic agreement because the politicians, Tory and Labour, were too foolish to agree that we actually have to have a closer relationship with Europe.

    I’m not bothered about the political loss of Europe very much, I am very much bothered about the trade loss. A Cambridge econometrics report published recently, there’s been a whole series of them, but I’ll just pick out one. I think every one of them, I can’t think of one that actually says we are better off because we’ve been through Brexit, they all say we’ve lost a vast amount of money. Cambridge Econometrics, if I remember, said we’d lost trade worth 130 billion. That would have been a huge amount of tax revenue for the Government and we wouldn’t be facing tax increases in the forthcoming budget if it hadn’t been for that sort of thing. We wouldn’t just have taken away fuel payments for the elderly if we hadn’t lost all that money, why do people not look at the practical example, the practical effect, that we are poorer. That is not some statistic, being poorer means taxes are higher, expenditure on public services are lower. That’s actually what it means, and that is what has actually happened because of the false promises of Brexit.

    People said we were going to get our sovereignty back. Up to a point that’s true, we now have sovereignty to be poorer, we have sovereignty to be less influential. I don’t think that was the sovereignty that people wanted when they voted in the Brexit debate. The Brexiteers now say ‘oh, well, get over it, it’s all gone’, but if my house had been burgled, I would be pretty fed up if the burglar then said, ‘well it’s all over now forget about it’, and I think so would most people. I think we have to remember it, because I think we have to make sure that nothing like this happens again. What is so dispiriting is that neither the Conservative Party, nor the Labour Party, nor even except in slogans, the Liberal Party, actually seem to be looking for a way to ensure we get back as many as we can of the trading advantages that we have lost.

    AMOL RAJAN

    So would you advocate going back into either the single market or the Customs Union?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I don’t think it is politically practical at the present moment, but I think it will happen. The next generation, the young generation, when they voted, voted overwhelmingly to stay in the European Union. In 10 years time, when they and their compadres are in Parliament and running the country, it may be possible to get back, but the Brexiteers did a good job in making it difficult, because we not only insulted our neighbours, but in addition to that, we have lost all the special advantages we had, the rebates, the opt out from the social chapter, all sorts of things like that, which they opt out from a single currency. All those things are gone.

    If we sought to get back, we would probably have to accept them, or we couldn’t get back. So it may be that that is going to be more than Parliament at any stage I can see will accept in the foreseeable future. What they’ll do in the long term future, who can tell because who knows how circumstances will change? But the Brexiteers did a very good job in dividing us from Europe, even though they did a very bad job improving our prosperity and our wealth when they did so.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Let me put two principled objections to what you’ve just advocated to your position. The first is about trade deals. The argument of those who advocated for Brexit in 2016, and advocate for it now, is that by virtue of leaving Europe, we are free in future to strike trade deals around the world, which should, in theory, it may not have done in practice yet, but should, in theory, make us richer to be in a trade deal and trade deals with the growing part of the world, in particular in Asia.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Do you think the European Union aren’t going to do that? 500 billion Europeans will strike a better trade deal with the growing part of the world than 70 million Brits can crazy. If there are trading opportunities that they can take, they will take them, and they will grow the European Union. And they will because of the sheer size compared to our size, they will probably get a better trade deal with whomsoever it is than we would.

    AMOL RAJAN

    But it’s Europe’s deal, not Britain’s.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    We were part of Europe. We benefited from the deal. What matters, to put it at its crudest, what is the cash flow and the job flow to the UK? That’s what determines our prosperity, that’s what determines our security and retirement. That’s what produces the resources in order to make sure that we have a properly funded defence policy. I’m afraid money is the root of all progress in many ways, and you don’t if you throw away the vast amount of money that came out directly in our direction because of the scale of our trading with the European Union, if you push that aside, it’s very difficult to replace in a way that could not have been replaced as a member of the European Union.

    I want our country to succeed. I want our country to be in a position where we are respected for what we are, because there’s no country in the world I’d rather live in than this one, despite its shortcomings sometimes. I want it to be respected, I want it to be wealthy, I want it to be secure. It’s never going to be the great military power. There’s only two superpowers now, China and the United States, below that sits Europe. But Europe isn’t a superpower in terms of politics and isn’t a superpower in terms of defence. So they sit a little below and there are countries like Britain and others that are coming up, like India and more that are coming up, who will sit on the tier below that.

    We will still have an important part to play in the future, because of our language, because of our history, because of our trade, because of some areas of our economy that we’re very good at, technology for example, because of the soft power we have. We have the best theatre in the world, we invented most of the sports the world played. This is a special nation, and it can be, and it should be, and we should play testimony to the things that are right. I wish we had been able to spend the last however many minutes it is we’ve been talking, talking about the things that are going right, or the things that could come right, rather than going over the things that have griped in the craw of vast numbers of people in our country and made it so miserable.

    AMOL RAJAN

    I want to talk to you about democracy. Before we do that, let’s get to the second aspect of the Brexit vote on which I think your position ought to be challenged. A lot of people who voted for Brexit did so because they felt that being part of the single market meant we had freedom of movement, and they didn’t like it. Now, obviously it’s the case that since we had Brexit, immigration has soared. But did it need to happen? That might be the result of policy choices the Government made, but a lot of people listening to you might say, ‘you know what? Immigration was too high, we wanted it lower, and Brexit was our best hope of voting for lower migration’. What do you say to them?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I would simply point to the reality of what has happened. It was said that we were going to control our borders. It was another of those three word slogans, ‘get Brexit done’, ‘control our borders’. There are a whole range of them that were slogans rather than properly thought, our policy and the reality is quite different from what was promised, and that is true about immigration as well. So you can make that argument, but I don’t think it’s a substantive argument, and I wouldn’t agree with it.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Let’s turn to the New World Order. How would you describe Britain’s standing in the world today compared with, say, 20 years ago?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    It’s obviously a little less than it was and that’s not because we have particularly failed. It’s because it’s the way the world has changed. China has been marching into the world in a phenomenal way ever since the Nixon visit in 1972 when Deng Xiaoping took China into the world in a quite remarkable way. Xi is doing something differently and much more nationalist, taking the Communist Party back, once again, the Chinese right back to the centre of Chinese life to a greater extent. But China has grown. America looks as though it may not be the America that would pay any price, bear any burden to protect the success of human rights, but I think America is still crucially important to the world and particularly crucially important to the democratic world. Without America active, on the side of the democratic world, there are very great difficulties to come, so we must make sure that they are.

    The world has changed simply because of the growth of different countries, a lot of medium sized countries in the world are now growing a good deal faster than the western democracies. Once you become richer, you become more influential and more powerful. The world isn’t only about money, and I set out all sorts of things we have in this country that don’t relate to money. But when you become a richer nation, you become a more powerful nation, so the world is changing.

    AMOL RAJAN

    One of those giant nations, the giant power, a great power, which is not a democracy, is China. Do you think we’re getting China right? Do you think our approach to China is a healthy one? Do you think we’re ready for a world in which China is as dominant as it is today?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    It’s a very difficult question and to be absolutely honest, I’m not sure of the right answer to that question of how ready we are. I think a lot of work has been done, particularly to protect us against things like cyber crime and to protect us against China appropriating technology that is legitimately British. But what if you want a safe world in the future must be the primary aim of diplomacy. Primary aim of diplomacy would be to make sure that China and America may be opponents, but they don’t become enemies, and they don’t go to war. That must be the primary aim of diplomacy, and I think we have a role to play in that, and I think we should endeavour to play it.

    One of the things I think we would be wise to build up in the next few years, we’re no longer the great military power that we were, and we can’t afford to be, but we’re not insignificant. But in terms of soft power, I think we can build up our soft power. I think we can build up our diplomacy. I think we can often play a very valuable role in changing policy. Which is best in terms of leadership, winning a war or stopping a war in the first place? Good question, isn’t it? I think if you can stop a war in the first place, that’s fantastic, and we can play a part in all that, but we’re going to have to watch what is happening with democracy and autocracy, because the balance is changing and changing more quickly than most people realise.

    The main point about the autocratic nations, China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Nicaragua, Venezuela and many others, there must be about 40 nations in the world, something approximately who are autocratic or neo-autocratic. That’s one fifth, over a fifth of the nations around the whole world. As they grow, democracy has been shrinking. People don’t I think focus on it, but democracy has shrunk in every one of the last 18 years. We thought, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, that democracy had won the battle of ideas, but we haven’t. Autocracy has come roaring back in the last 15, 16, 17, 18 years, and we have to be aware of that danger, and aware of the dangers that could arise from it, which are many and various.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Is autocracy everywhere wrong?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    It’s difficult to tell. I wouldn’t like it anywhere, because it restrains human liberty and human freedom. I think one thing our country has stood for is liberty and freedom, freedom of action, freedom of thought, freedom of religion. You don’t get that in autocracies. So I think there are bad aspects of autocracy. Whether they’re bad in every respect is a more debatable point, but if you believe in freedom and liberty, then you don’t want autocracies.

    But there’s a real danger here, let me give you a practical illustration. Let us suppose that the American President ceases to be active alongside Ukraine. Let us suppose Germany ceases to be active alongside Ukraine, and the Europeans pull back, and Ukraine loses, and Russia wins. Is that the end of the matter? No, it isn’t. Because for every event, there is a consequence. Now if Russia wins, they may not be immediately in a position to go after Moldova or other nations, because they will have been badly damaged by the war that there’s just been. But let’s assume Russia wins. How does the world see that? They will see that the West has funked and failed to protect a democracy, a big democracy, in Europe of all places, from an autocracy. Now, what does that mean for the perception of America? They haven’t prevailed. China will notice that. Will it encourage China to think, aha, we may be being too timid about whether we go into Taiwan, maybe America will do nothing about that either. And of course, what happens to the allies of the West? What happens in Asia, to Japan, to South Korea, to the Philippines, strong allies of the West, and they will see the West has funked it. What do they do? Do they decide we’re safer to line up behind China rather than the West? Or do they say, then we had better be prepared to protect ourselves better and start moving towards nuclear capability? So you get suddenly a much more dangerous world. For everything that happens, there is a consequence, and we need to think through what the consequences are. Those are two illustrations I gave you. I could give you 20 others.

    AMOL RAJAN

    So if the war in Ukraine is going to end by some sort of political settlement, a lot of people would say Ukraine’s land has been taken by violence, it’s been taken by force. Why should they give up an inch of land to what many people would say is a dictator or an autocrat?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I would agree with that. That’s why I think Russia needs to be defeated, and that’s why I think the West needs to continue its support of Ukraine, so that they have the capacity to defeat them.

    AMOL RAJAN

    But do you think the West has the will to do that based on what you see right now looking around the world?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I hope they have. I’m alarmed at the position of one or two Western nations. I’m alarmed at the possibility that America might decide that Ukraine is not a strategic interest, because she certainly is, to the position of the United States and the world. I think we should argue for the fact that we as a nation, should argue for the fact that she is and we should try and lead people into believing that it is right for us to defend Ukraine, because you are defending freedom against autocracy, and if you begin to weaken and lose on a mega scale, for this would be a massive setback, unlike anything we’ve seen before, then there will be a price to pay for that, and it may be a price we don’t wish to pay. 

    AMOL RAJAN

    Talking really about a new world order in which democracy is, to some extent, receding and autocracy is rising. What’s really striking is where that democratic recession, as some people have called it, comes from. Because around the world today, many young people are losing faith in democracy. If you look at the support for AFD in Germany, if you look at the support for Marine Le Pen in France, if you look at the support for Javier Millais in Argentina, a lot of these people are getting their support from those under 30. Look at what’s happening, as you say to real wages over last 20 years. Can you really blame those young people?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    No, I don’t, but you can’t expect these young people to have a strategic view of what happens if we were to lose the war, for example, and I don’t suppose they’ve even thought of it. This needs to be a matter of public debate. We need to set out for people what is at stake with Ukraine and it’s more than Russia just invading Ukraine. It’s much more important than that, because the implications of it are very wide, very varied and very bad, and so I don’t believe we’ve got a nation of youngsters who are less determined to be free than earlier generations. But I don’t think politics anywhere is widening the debate beyond the rather trivial, narrow lines of party disputes in country after country, and some disputes that hit the headlines.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Beyond Ukraine, there are a lot of people in this country, young adults, who might look at, I mean, you’ve been out of power for 27 years, so I’m not putting this on you, but they might look at your brand of politics, moderate in disposition, supportive of liberal democracy and capitalism, and say we’ve had that for decades in this country. What’s the reality? We’ve had completely stagnant wages. We’ve had education getting more expensive. We can’t buy a house. Why should we support the John Major brand of politics?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Have we, do you think, have we had that brand of politics across the world since 2008?

    AMOL RAJAN

    You think we haven’t had the John Major style of politics?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    The record would suggest not.

    AMOL RAJAN

    But the coalition, which was staffed by many people who once worked for you, I think they would say that they wanted very much to…..

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    The coalition, you’re right. I think the coalition were, but post coalition has been a different consequence, I think.

    AMOL RAJAN

    But you still think liberal democracy and capitalism can deliver for young people who’ve currently felt for a long time……

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    The essential thing is that the economies begin to grow. Absolutely the essential thing is that the economies begin to grow, which is why one or two of the things the new Government are doing, I think, are wrong.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Such as?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I think going for capital gains tax. If you want the economy to grow, don’t start penalising the people who provide the money for it to grow. But we’re already getting reports of extremely rich people taking their money out of the country and indeed moving out of the country themselves. That’s not what we need if we want the economy to grow and we want the living standards to rise. Should the broadest shoulders bear a larger share of the present need? Yes, I don’t have a disagreement about that, but I think at this moment, to go for capital gains tax is  as unwise as providing a drunk with a case of whisky.

    AMOL RAJAN

    The Government says they need the money, need to raise £22 billion.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I’ve heard that dreary tale forever, I spent time as a PPS in the treasury, I was Chief Secretary of the Treasury responsible for public expenditures. I was Chancellor and I was first Lord at the Treasury. I’ve heard that dreary tale again and again and again, and I think there’s a degree of hyperbole about what is happening at the moment, and the Labour Party have got themselves hooked on one or two silly policies before they’re really ready to pursue something more sensible.

    AMOL RAJAN

    We’re talking about democracy, and you’re advocating democracy over, for instance, autocracy. Isn’t one of the other reasons why faith in democracy, perhaps in this country, has suffered because, frankly, standards in public life, ethics in public life, have a lot of people would argue been in the gutter.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I think that has played a role, yes.

    AMOL RAJAN

    You introduced the Nolan principles. You introduced the Committee on Standards in Public Life. You were known as the person who wanted standards to improve. What was going through your mind when you saw the revelations about, for instance, party gate, as it’s now known. That damages trust and democracy, I can tell you.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Yes, I think we have to take standards in public life seriously. I would make some changes, I would make the powers statutory. I would give people outside Number 10 the power to institute inquiries. I would change the way inquiries were dealt with in the House of Commons. I think there’s a lot we can do to provide a much more serious examination of potential poor behaviour and actual poor behaviour.

    AMOL RAJAN

    I don’t think anyone would ever accuse you of being chairman of the Boris Johnson fan club, but do you think he damaged standards in public life?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I’m not going to get into individuals. I mean, I don’t really want to spend my time looking back on what has happened. It has happened generically. I talked about Brexit, that has happened, and although I was encouraged to express why I think it was so wrong, and I still do, I don’t want a political system that continues to look back at the 80s or the 90s or the 10s. It’s yesterday, it’s gone. I want people to actually look at what the position is going to be in the future.

    When did you last hear from any party a senior politician make a lengthy, detailed speech on what we needed to do to protect our place in the world and our values and our wealth 25 years from now. What are the policies we should follow? Shouldn’t we be looking at that more often than just looking back and holding inquiries and all sorts of other things that are all backward looking?

    AMOL RAJAN

    You talked at the beginning of this interview about a new settlement. You said we need a new settlement. What are some of the elements that you would put into that new settlement? Obviously, we need an economy that’s growing, lots of people have different ideas about that.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    That’s the core, once you get an economy that is growing, so much changes. I’m sorry to go back to the question of money, but I’m afraid money is what gives people security. Money is what gives people some enjoyment in life, rather than people who never have any. You mentioned Boris Johnson, one policy he absolutely got right was the question of levelling up. The trouble is it never got much beyond the slogan because of the lack of money, but it was exactly the right policy, and it was the right determination of what we should be doing, and that will be true in the future as well.

    AMOL RAJAN

    So this is a good moment to turn to, I mean, this is looking at the past, but I do it with a view to the future, is to look at the lottery. I imagine the National Lottery is one of those policies that you’re proudest of in your time in power, and the thing that’s striking about it is that the benefits were really felt a long time after you were out of power. I wonder whether or not you think that that’s an important example of how one of the problems with democracy is that you’ve got to let other people take your successes.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Let me tell you how the lottery came about. I was Chief Secretary of the Treasury in the 80s, that is the cabinet minister who is responsible for negotiating public expenditure for each department. I noticed that the two things that the British public most enjoy, which is the arts, culture as one subject and sport as another, got petty cash from the government, absolute petty cash. They couldn’t compete with health or social security or defence, and so they’re always going to get petty cash. That’s what caused the lottery to be set up, because it was money that the Government didn’t have. It was outside the Government, and it went to the arts bodies or the other sports bodies. Do you know how much the lottery has now spent on good causes?

    AMOL RAJAN

    Tens of billions?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    It’s coming up to £48 billion, and there’s hardly a part of the country that hasn’t benefited from it in some way. Providing it is efficiently run by the people in charge of it, there’s no reason and left alone by successive governments – that’s important – Government should keep their noses out of it, it’s a national lottery. It’s not a government piggy bank. Providing that, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t continue. And the difference it’s made in sport and the arts, I think, is significant. So yes, I’m very pleased to have done it, and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest that I’m way out of the way by the time the benefits become clear.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Well, I should be clear that the only reason I ask you about anything to do with your time in power is because of the lessons for the future. I was very struck by something you said to Chris Patten after winning the election in 1992, where I think you had a conversation with him, where you both agreed that the democratic elastic, as you called it, was close to snapping. And you basically, I think, knew after winning in 1992 it was very unlikely you would win again. I just wonder if you can tell us how that conversation went and how it informed your time in Government, because specifically I think there are important lessons for the coming Parliament.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I’ll happily do that. Chris, of course, was chairman of the party when against the expectations of the world, we won the 1992 election, a fourth successive win. But Chris lost his seat in Bath, and he came to have a drink with me in the White Room upstairs in Downing Street the next day. It was at that day that we said we thought, with a fourth successive election in a democracy, we were stretching the elastic as far as it could go, and the probability was that unless the Labour Party imploded, they would probably win the next election. I said to Chris, what would you like to do now? You have lost your seat, I can offer you three options. I will put someone in the House of Lords, and you can fight the by-election. If you’re in the Lords, I can put you in the Cabinet. The third option is you can go and govern Hong Kong. And Chris thought about it, and he said, ‘I can’t fight another by-election, it was too unpleasant in Bath that election, I can’t put my family through that again’. He was too young to go to the House of Lords he said, I will go to Hong Kong, and that is how he did.

    We did think that we were aware from the moment the 1992 Parliament started that the nature of the Conservative Party in Parliament had changed. All the old people who had served in the war, or after the war, had pretty much left then, and they were a glue that kept the party really together. We had lots more young people brought up in the more dramatic policies of the 80s who came in. We thought it was very likely that we would lose, and when things began to get very sticky, I remember a conversation with Sarah Hogg, who was head of my policy unit. Well, she said, ‘the great advantage of it being likely that we will lose’, of course, we wanted to win, and we’ve been doing all we could to win, but we weren’t making any progress really, ‘is that you can do what you think is right without worrying whether it is expedient’. We were in the Cabinet Room, but I’d never forgotten that conversation.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Did that give you some comfort when you had to do some very difficult things economically, which in particular would have hurt the very people you went into politics to help?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Yes, no-one has ever asked me that question before, but I’ll tell you exactly how I felt about it. The thing I hated most in politics was inflation. I had known from my childhood what life is like when the money runs out before the week runs out. I saw it at very close quarters, week after week after week. That is what happens under inflation for all sorts of families at any stage and we’d had huge inflation in the 70s and elsewhere. All my political lifetime, I’d watched governments try and get to grips with inflation and then back off, and then back off when it got too bad, and so it wasn’t killed. That was the reason for going into the Exchange Rate Mechanism, and that was the reason for staying in it when everybody was crying for us to come out of it.

    We thought it would kill inflation and in the end, the way we came out was a political disaster, but it wasn’t an economic disaster. We were actually looking for a way to come out without people thinking we’d gone soft on inflation, when we were overwhelmed by the markets. It was a political disaster that never went away for the rest of the Parliament, but I simply observe in retrospect that we didn’t have inflation for nearly 20 years. It really had. I mean, the international environment changed, so that was certainly a part of it, but it really did get inflation on its knees in the way no Government had done since the Second World War.

    AMOL RAJAN

    We’d had inflation in this country pretty much since the war, I’m going to say the 60s or 70s.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I grew up with it and I hated it, and I actually said that once or twice, but that was why we stuck with the policies that were hard and it was why, frustratingly for me, when I became Prime Minister, all sorts of things I’d like to do, but we were heading for a recession. The economy was in a pretty sick state on the day I became Prime Minister, and so there was no money to do those things. When I left, the money was there, but I wasn’t.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    They spent some of it wisely. They didn’t spend it exactly the way I would, but there were some of his policies that I would have approved of because maybe some were my policies before his. But I think the money was used to a significant extent, wisely, but not quite as I would have used it.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Let me ask you some final, quickish thoughts. What’s your biggest regret with your time and power?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    It wasn’t long enough.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Your greatest achievement as Prime Minister?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I think the way the economy was turned around, the Northern Ireland process, everybody said when we started that you’ll never get anywhere with this. When I went to tell John Smith about it, because in those days, there was a good deal more liaison than I think there is today between the leaders of the parties. I went to tell John Smith exactly what I was going to do with the process, and he smiled and looked quite right, very good. No votes in it, we’ll support you. And I think perhaps the lottery.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Your greatest hero in politics.?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    In politics, Pitt the Younger. In life, in my time, Mother Teresa, what’s hoping

    AMOL RAJAN

    I was hoping you would say Iain Macleod?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    It’s a toss up, I mean, Iain Macleod was the greatest orator I ever heard, a man I was completely captivated by when I was a young man, his speeches were magnificent. They always included values as well as policies, but he could be quite brutal to his opponents. He had a sort of paralysis of the neck, which meant he held his head slightly on one side, and he was very bald, and he had this voice like a great bell, and it was absolutely hypnotic. I think the fact that his head was so unmoving was part of the hypnosis.

    AMOL RAJAN

    What’s your advice to someone willing to go into politics today?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Oh do. I mean, if people believe they can make a contribution to politics, I think they should, particularly young people. It ought not just to be left to people who spend 15 minutes to learn the political landscape and then go into politics. I want people to go into politics who care about the country, who would like to do something for the country. I’d certainly like more young people to do it, because we need young people to become engaged. If they get disengaged from democracy, we are in deep trouble.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Are you concerned about the calibre of people going into politics today? Do you think it’s changed in a bad way?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I’ve not been in the House of Commons, so it’s difficult to say. But I think the range of people going in there has changed on both sides. The Conservative Party had less people from the armed forces who used to have a good knowledge of it, and less people from business, and I think that is a loss for them. You’d be surprised to hear me say this, but with the Labour Party, I think when they moved away from the traditional working class Labour member, who lived in his community, suffered the same hardships as his community and knew it from back to front, and he was replaced by students with degrees and left wing instincts, I think that was a loss to the Labour Party and to the nature of the House of Commons.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Just a few more. When did you last cry?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Watching the Paralympics. The Paralympic swimmers was when I last cried, the bravery that they have had to live through and the work to get there, and the number of people who have had to support them so they could get there. I think it’s immensely moving that they have actually been so brave as to give such dedication to their sports that they actually got to the Olympics. I just am full of admiration.

    AMOL RAJAN

    What’s your guilty pleasure?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Lemon Drops. Lemon Drop martinis, preferably in the plural.

    AMOL RAJAN

    I don’t think I know what a lemon drop martini is.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Then your life needs to be enhanced!

    AMOL RAJAN

    Last couple. How would you like to be remembered?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Fondly.

    AMOL RAJAN

    What would you still like to achieve?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I think I’d like to live long enough to see my country at ease with itself.

    AMOL RAJAN

    I am going to ask you some nostalgic questions. Now, indulge me, we’ve talked about the future, and I want to talk about this. Ken Clarke said of you on Radio Four recently, he said he was very, very fond of you, great friends, but it was always a cause of regret to him that the thing about Sir John is he just never seemed to enjoy being Prime Minister. Ken Clarke said this was because you were very, very concerned, perhaps for understandable reasons, in particular, with what the press said. I want to ask you about those two things. Did you ever enjoy being Prime Minister, and were you too concerned about the press?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    On the latter part, the answer is probably yes. Ken knows me very well, also Douglas Hurd, so I accept that criticism, probably true. All I can say is, today people need be less concerned, because the press is less powerful than it was. They, of course, now have to deal with social media, which is an infinitely worse problem for them. Did I ever enjoy being Prime Minister? Yes, I did. I enjoyed bits of it. I didn’t enjoy all of it, I didn’t enjoy the unpleasant things you have to do, the unpleasant things that come up and hit you and I don’t think any Prime Minister does. So I don’t think I was unique in that.

    AMOL RAJAN

    If you could go back and relive one moment from your time in power, what would that one moment be?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I think the 50th anniversary of the ending of the war. We were in France, with people from countries who had all fought in the coalition. We were at Arromanches, with the Queen, Prince Philip, heads of Governments from all over the place, and we were watching from on high the veterans marching on the sands at Arromanches. We thought they’d march for about an hour, smart blazers and trousers, with rows of medals and berets. They came and they came and they came, and it went on and on and on. There were tens of thousands of them, infinitely more than anyone could possibly have imagined. They marched even as the tide came in and began to come over their boots and up over their ankles, they just came on marching. And they were all very elderly by definition, and it was the most remarkable sight. And you really had a glimpse of what our country is really about. I think if I had one moment to relive that would be it.

    AMOL RAJAN

    When it all became too much, the stresses, the strains, the headlines, the pressure, was there somewhere that you found refuge?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    The Oval. It’s been my spiritual home since the early 1950s and I could always go to the Oval, switch off, watch some cricket. It didn’t have to be high class cricket, it might have been a junior Surrey team or something of that sort. But there’s something for me when I go to the Oval that takes me back to my youth, when I first used to sit there with a score book, a Tizer and sandwiches. It’s just a complete change, so that was my refuge.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Well, Sir John, this is the John Major room at the Oval, and it’s impossible not to wonder what the boy from Brixton would have made of the idea of you having a room at the Oval and a portrait of yourself as Prime Minister here.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Well, I think he’d have been surprised.

    AMOL RAJAN

    He’d been surprised that you’ve got the same tie on after 30 years as well! But what’s the story behind this bat as well?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    This is a Jack Hobbs bat and there’s a story behind that. I had just finished Prime Minister’s Questions and one of the messengers came in to see me and said ’there’s a very elderly lady outside who says she must see you, shall I tell her to go away?’ I said, ‘no, bring her in’. She came in, and she was very elderly and very small, and she was clutching a large brown paper parcel, and she introduced herself, and she said to me, I’d like to give you this, but I would like a promise from you that you will never give it away or sell it. I wasn’t sure what it was, but she didn’t look as though she was deranged, she looked perfectly genuine. So I made that promise, and she gave it to me and I unwrapped it, and it was a Jack Hobbs bat. It’s a bat with which he scored a century in the early part of the 1900s and it had been given to this elderly lady as a little girl, and she had no-one to leave it to, and so she came to the House of Commons to give it to me. I thought, I won’t be here forever, but the bat should go back to its natural home. So it is here in this room, and here it will remain.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Given this room is your room, it’s the John Major room, do you get to choose which of the Surrey icons are along here?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I do, everyone here was personally chosen by me. This is Billy Beldham, or silver Billy Beldham as he was called, and he was a great batsman in the early nineteenth century. His main period was 1800 to 1820, but he played cricket much longer than that. The point about Billy Beldham is not just that he was a good batsman, he was the first batsman not just to swing across the line, but to play down the line on pitted and horrible pitches. People tended to hang back and swing to leg, he didn’t, he learned that it was fruitful to play forward and hit the ball in the V.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Which is a lesson he obviously passed on to his great successor, Jack Hobbs, arguably the greatest opening batsman of them all.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    He would certainly be my choice and the longevity of his career is astonishing.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Hobbs played on it well over the age of 40 didn’t he?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    He scored 197 first class hundreds and he scored 100 of them after the age of 40. Don’t forget, he lost four years to the First World War, so he scored 61,00 ofirst class runs. Nobody else is remotely near it.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Tell you what, I’ve just hit my 40s. Do you think I’m about to enter my peak period?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    I think it’s undoubtedly so.

    AMOL RAJAN

    This is?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    This is Peter May, who when I was a boy was the finest batsman in England.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Did you watch him?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Oh, gosh, yes.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Here?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Indeed. He got me in huge trouble once. I was here watching and I was a huge admirer of Peter, he was my great hero as a boy. My father had only one possession of any value at all, that was a gold stopwatch that he’d been given at some stage during his music hall career, and I asked if I could borrow the stopwatch to time how long it took from Peter May hitting the ball on the on side, which was his great shot at the boundary. He lent it to me, and I was holding it like this to time how long it took and I pressed the button at the top, and it slipped out of my hands and crashed down on the then stone floor underneath the wooden benches, and it was an ex watch.

    AMOL RAJAN

    What did your father make of that?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Well, I was distraught, because I knew how much it mattered to him, and I was only 12 or so, 13, perhaps. I took it home and I showed it to him like this, and he was nearly blind then but he could feel it and see it well enough. And all he said was ‘tell me all you can about this Peter May’, it was the only thing he said, no reproach, he just wanted to know why I cared so much about Peter May, why I wanted to time how long it took the ball to hit the boundary from leaving his bat.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Sounds like a wonderful father. I’ll tell you what, with that follow through, he’d be very happy and at home in the modern game, wouldn’t he?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR

    Certainly would. He was a powerful batsman. He didn’t often hit sixes, but he could and very big sixes.

    AMOL RAJAN

    Let’s go and watch some cricket.

  • Extracts from Sir John Major’s Interview with Peter Hennessy- 13 August 2014

    Extracts from the interview held with Sir John Major on BBC Radio 4’s “Reflections with Peter Hennessy” which was first broadcast on 13th August 2014.

    PETER HENNESSY:

    [Asked Sir John Major when the seeds of ambition were first planted, when he realised he wanted to do something in public life]

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I think probably about the age of thirteen. I think what influenced me most was what Harold Macmillan would have called “events, dear boy, events”. It was what I saw, and what I experienced, that made me realise that I would like to take part in public life to see if I could change some things.

    I always had a fascination for history. The first time I ever went in the House of Commons, at the invitation of a Labour MP, Marcus Lipton, the Member for Brixton. There is a special atmosphere in that building and it reaches out and it grabs you. I thought to myself that this is where I’d like to work.

    PETER HENNESSY:

    [Why choose to join the Conservative Party?]

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    At the time, when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, we lived in Brixton, five members of the family in two rooms and a little landing upon which we cooked and a washroom three floors down. The Labour Party in Lambeth were very big-hearted, their attitude generally was “yes, you are in difficulties and in due course we will help you. But be patient.” The Conservative Party said to me, “we’d like to open up avenues of opportunity for you to change your own circumstances and those of your own family.” So of the two philosophies there was no doubt which one appealed to me. So I was, by instinct, a Conservative. I am not an ideologue in any way, what attracts me is what can pragmatically can be done, not whether it meets some ideological test or not.
    ….

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I saw immigrants at very close quarters in the 1950s, they shared my house, they were my neighbours and I played with them as a boy. I didn’t see people who had come here just to benefit from our social system, I saw people with the guts and the drive to travel half-way across the world in many cases, to better themselves and their families. I feel that was a very Conservative instinct. That’s what I saw, and it was things like that and also the fear I saw amongst many people who had nothing.
    ….

    PETER HENNESSY:

    [Asked Sir John Major about the one nation era in the 1950s and 1960s and whether he was comfortable with this]

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Certainly I felt comfortable with it, I much prefer consensus to disagreement. If you can reach consensus then so much the better and certainly of the politicians of those days it was Ian McCloud who most attracted my attention as a young teenager. Firstly because of what he said, which was uplifting, but secondly, because of the way he said it, which was compelling.
    …

    PETER HENNESSY:

    [Asked if it was a mystery that he didn’t work hard at school]

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Not to me. Circumstances at home weren’t easy, my father was very sick and was plainly in the beginning of dying. My mother was very sick, there were lots of domestic problems and I had to travel from Brixton to Wimbledon each day. There were difficulties that sat in the forefront of my mind far more than studying. So I withdrew from what I should have been doing, which was studying. I knew I was doing it and I knew I was foolish in doing it, but I couldn’t not do it. But the moment I left school I knew that I had to study and I had to make up for that.
    ….

    PETER HENNESSY:

    [Asked Sir John Major if Margaret Thatcher misread him and did he allow her to misread him]

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    No, I didn’t. If she did misread me, I’m puzzled as to how that happened. Both as Chief Secretary and Chancellor, and briefly as Foreign Secretary which was a glorious 94 days in which we went to war with no-one, and I saw a great deal of Margaret Thatcher one to one. We didn’t always agree and we did have a relationship where I could say to her what I thought. I didn’t have to temper what I thought and I didn’t temper what I thought. So I find it difficult to understand how she could have misunderstood what my views were because they were expressed often enough.

    PETER HENNESSY:

    [Ask Sir John Major whether he was ready to be Prime Minister and whether he would have liked more time in another job]

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Yes I would. I think I was missing the fact that the longer you have been in Government, the more experience you have. I would have preferred it if I had become Prime Minister a few years later. I think that would have been easier in terms how I felt about it and easier in terms of the experience which I was able to bring to the job. But if the ball comes your way then you grab it, there’s nothing else you can do.
    …

    PETER HENNESSY:

    [Asked Sir John Major about the problems after the 1992 General Election]

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Of course the party changed in 1992, a large number of the last remnants of the post-war generation who had been in the war, and who thought anything was better than having another European war as they have lived through one and had memories of the first earlier in the century. They were prepared to make accommodations to bring Europe together so that there could never again be another European war. They were succeeded by a new young group of Conservatives who had grown up in a much more ideological age with a much more ideological bent and without the historic memory of the war and its immediate aftermath. So the Parliamentary party that was so difficult after 1992 was a significantly different Parliamentary party that had existed throughout the 70s, 80s and the early part of the 90s.
    What significantly changed it was the collapse of Sterling falling out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. The background to it was forgotten, why did Margaret Thatcher sign up to the Exchange Rate Mechanism? We talked to her and she was persuaded, and she wasn’t as some have said, persuaded with a pistol held to her head.

    I will tell you exactly why Margaret agreed to go into the Exchange Rate Mechanism, because we were entering the end of her Premiership and we were suffering a recession which so often follows a boom and we were now heading into the recession. Inflation on the day I became Prime Minister was very nearly 10%, unemployment was soaring, interest rates were 14% and we were undoubtedly heading towards a deep recession. Margaret cared about inflation, it hurt the people that she knew, she wanted to bring inflation down and that is why she decided that we would enter the Exchange Rate Mechanism.

    Every time in her political life, and mine, we had had an anti-inflationary policy, the Government had given way when it got difficult. The Exchange Rate Mechanism produced a clear external discipline to bring inflation down, and so concerned about that was she, she actually wished to go into the Exchange Rate Mechanism at a more punitive exchange rate than the one we choose. So the argument that Margaret was unwillingly pushed into the Exchange Rate Mechanism is utterly, utterly false.

    When of course we crashed out it was taken by the Euro-sceptics as a classic reason to pile in on Europe on every conceivable front. And that is what happened, it was a great calamity, a political calamity, that we came out. What is frustrating about that is that we had already been discussing privately within Government, including with the Policy Unit and others, how we could come out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism without causing too much disruption and without the market believing we had given up our anti-inflationary credentials. The crisis hit us and we were toppled out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism before we could reach a conclusion on how to come out voluntarily. That of course seasoned everything that followed.
    …..

    I was never sure whether I should have resigned or not. I asked the views of people I respected such as Douglas Hurd and Norman Fowler. And also people who were not politicians about whether I should resign and their view was that unequivocally that I shouldn’t and if that a Prime Minister did resign a few months after winning an election then the Government itself was doomed.

    I was never in any doubt that winning the 1997 General Election would be very difficult. The day after the 1992 General Election Chris Patten and I sat in the White Room in Number 10 and we agreed that in winning a fourth successive term we had stretched the democratic elastic as far as it would go. Unless Labour collapsed we would have little chance of winning the next election. I was reinforced by that view by the impact of Black Wednesday, I thought it over-whelming likely that we had lost.

  • Sir John Major’s Interview on the Andrew Marr Show – 16 September 2012

    The text of Sir John Major’s interview on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, broadcast live on 16th September 2012.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Back here, twenty years ago to the day Black Wednesday blew a hole through the Conservative Government of Sir John Major – a man who had one of the most unusual family backgrounds of any modern Prime Minister. His mother and father – a man born during Queen Victoria’s reign – were music hall artistes, and Sir John grew up on tales of their unconventional life. Well music hall is in many ways a lost world, killed off by the cinema and by television and radio, but perhaps its spirit lives on. Sir John Major’s written a book about it all. We’ll be talking about that, today’s politics, and much more. Sir John, good morning. Thanks for joining us.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Morning, Andrew.

    ANDREW MARR:

    You called this book My Old Man. And that really is where it starts, because your father wasn’t just a music hall artiste; he topped the bill in some of the great music halls of the time. He was a substantial figure in his way.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well he was in music hall for about thirty years, from 1900 to 1930, and he certainly topped the bill at the second tier theatres. I wouldn’t claim at all he was one of the greats of the music hall, he plainly wasn’t, but he and his then wife, Kitty, very dependable, very good, always working, on the bill with most of the greats at some time or another; and then formed their own show and then they topped the bill for a long time. So yes, he passed on many stories about those days.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Now it is a lost world, we’ll never know quite what it was like to hear these people because they weren’t recorded, or most of them weren’t recorded, until very late on. But just give us a sense of the range of performers who you describe in this book.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I learned quite a lot about it at my father’s bedside when he was very old and ill. I was his audience as a small boy, he was in mid-sixties when I was born. He would talk to me about his life on the stage and all the greats both that he had worked with and that perhaps he’d seen and not worked with. But music hall had a huge range. It might be singing comic songs – that’s the staple part of it – comedians, animal acts, monologists, black-face acts. Almost anything you could think of as variety today would have been part of music hall then.

    ANDREW MARR:

    And you argue that quite a lot of what we think of as quintessentially British humour from the age of sort of radio and television – you know The Goons and Monty Python and all the rest of it – has its origins in people like Dan Leno, some of those patter merchants on the musical stage?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. I mean if you actually look how they performed, what they did and what we know of it, a great deal of it has been handed down. Humour is continuous – what amuses the British psyche a hundred years ago tends to tickle it today – and, yes, it has been handed down. And they were astonishing characters, if you look at their background and their life stories, some of them are full of pathos, they came from nowhere. Some never got anywhere and their lives were full of hardship. Others had huge success, earned vast sums of money, perhaps spent it and then ended up dying young and often destitute. These stories are very remarkable stories of pretty remarkable people.

    ANDREW MARR:

    It struck me that they were quite like the stories of so many kind of would-be rock stars touring the country, hoping to make it, a few of them make it and maybe take too many drugs and drink and so on later on. But it’s also a bit like the sort of popular culture you see in so much television even now, the sort of dance shows and so on.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Nothing’s new and a great deal of it is repetitive. What I think is different was in those days music hall was the entertainment. There was very little to compete with it, as there is so much today, and it sunk deep into the British psyche. In the 1840s, for example, when it began, that was a terrible decade when the country might well have come to revolution. It turned revolution, potential revolution in the 1840s, into a patriotic roar of joy twenty years later. And of course it had its great days at the height of empire – hugely proud, hugely patriotic, hugely pro-British – but it fed mainly upon the lives of the people who actually attended those, and the great artists reflected those lives and sang back to them their lives and talked about their lives. It was empathetic across….

    ANDREW MARR:

    So quite hard-edged actually a lot of it, yes?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Very hard-edged. I mean some of the social commentary has the force of a pile driver, particularly artists we don’t remember today like Jenny Hill – very early feminist, talked very much about the lives of people who were downtrodden and why they were downtrodden. Well worth reading about her.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Revisiting her?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Absolutely worth revisiting her.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Okay. Let’s turn to politics rather more recently. I mentioned Black Wednesday.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    The music hall is much more fun.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Much sunnier perhaps than Black Wednesday. Nonetheless, that was a sort of existential crisis really in many ways for this country. Twenty years on, we are still looking at Europe and are particularly concerned about what is happening to the Euro project now. How dangerous do you think things remain because it’s you know the longest, most boring crisis I can remember?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well there are two things that are inextricably linked of course. Firstly there is Europe and the Euro crisis, and then there’s the state of the British economy. You can’t regard those as wholly separate entities, you have to look at the two of them. If you take Europe first, Europe has continually evolved. It’s evolved a good deal further towards centralisation because of economic failure in Europe over recent years than anybody imagined in this timescale; and what you’re now seeing out of failure, not success, is the Euro core looking to integrate further, much more towards a federal structure.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Which this country, in your view, could have nothing to do with really?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well if you recall you mentioned Black Wednesday. You might also have mentioned that at Maastricht, I opted sterling out of the Eurozone because I didn’t think the Eurozone would work without fiscal union as well as economic union, and so we are apart from that, thank goodness, and we will stay apart from it. But if the Eurozone, as I believe, continue to integrate over the next ten years, you’re going in essence within ten years – this isn’t going to happen overnight – within ten years you’re going to have a Euro core that is to all intents and purposes federal. Now if that happens to a portion, a core of the European Union, it changes that core’s relationship with the rest of the European Union. And if they do that, the rest of the European Union may feel that it is appropriate to change their relationship with the core and with the European Union as a whole. I think that offers an opportunity for us to clean up one of the long running sores of British politics, which is the nature of our relationship with Europe.

    ANDREW MARR:

    And that would have to be a referendum and so on if it was a treaty and all the rest of it?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well if it was a treaty, of course it would.

    ANDREW MARR:

    It would have to be, right.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    And it would be a treaty in due course.

    ANDREW MARR:

    So therefore. Let me ask about the British economy directly at the moment because these are grim times. I mean this is the third quarter of technical recession, the Chancellor incredibly unpopular. You’ve been through a period where you know you are just buffeting through a hard time. What’s your analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the economy; and what’s your advice?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well, firstly, it would be very surprising if the Chancellor wasn’t unpopular. The Chancellor has to do unpopular things. But I think it’s worth making the point that David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg aren’t imposing these cuts out of some malign wish to hurt people. They’re imposing these cuts because the last Government left the cupboard bare. The money was gone, the gold was gone. They had no choice but to take tough medicine, and I think people need to understand that is why they are doing it. That said, of course it’s unpopular and you must expect the Chancellor to be unpopular. Nothing surprising at all about that.

    But since I’m no longer in politics, I can say something that perhaps as a politician I wouldn’t. You mentioned Black Wednesday. Around about that time, Norman Lamont was taken to pieces by commentators for suggesting there were green shoots, but in retrospect, we can see that Norman was right. Recovery begins from the darkest moment. I’m not certain but I think we have passed the darkest moment and I will tell you why. There are some oddities in the figures at the moment. Why in the depths of this recession is employment growing, why is industrial production going up, why has the stock market risen? I could list a number of other things.

    There are things happening out there that will become apparent and we don’t quite know why or how. My guess – and this is something a minister can’t say but I can – my guess is in due course we will find that we pass the bottom, that that last revision of GDP when we had a 0.5 per cent reduction is less bad than we thought it was, and that we are starting on what will be a slow road to recovery. I think that is beginning to happen and I hope that is the case, but I believe it is going to turn out to be so for a vast range of reasons.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Meanwhile, party conference season, you don’t have to be involved in it anymore, but there is another Conservative Prime Minister, there are more kind of whisperings and challenges and so on. Of course he’s got Boris Johnson bouncing around, which you never had. Do you think the Conservative Party needs to calm down and settle down or do you think this is an inevitable part of you know the bad year?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well, there’s nothing surprising about people being critical when times are tough. That is true in the Conservative Party, is true in the Liberal Democrat Party, it’s been true in the past. You saw those divisions in the 80s in the Conservative Party with wets and dries. You saw it in the 90s between, well, on the general issue of Europe. You’re seeing it again, it is an inevitability of politics. But I would have thought if the Conservative Party has learned anything in the last twenty years, it’s learned that regicide is not a good idea.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Well has it? That’s the question.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I think it has and I think the concept of people challenging David Cameron is an extremely good newspaper story, fills huge numbers of columns. And Boris is a very attractive and able and intelligent politician doing a supremely good job I think in London, but Boris isn’t in Parliament. Boris hasn’t said he wishes to become Prime Minister, quite the reverse.

    The belief that suddenly everything is going to change – you’re going to have a leadership challenge and you’re going to have a replacement of Prime Minister – I just think that isn’t in the real world. We aren’t. David Cameron is Prime Minister, he’s going to remain Prime Minister and he’s going to contest the next election and I very much hope he’s going to win it.

    ANDREW MARR:

    And so your message to all of those backbenchers who are constantly contacting newspapers and saying they want to kill the Prime Minister, they’re getting names on bits of paper, all the familiar stuff – your message to them?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    My message to them is look at history. Disunity costs votes. Unity helps a Government achieve the changes in our economy that we wish to see. There’s good for the nation, good for the economy, good for them and good for the next election.

    ANDREW MARR:

    And they should belt up?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Your words, not mine.

    ANDREW MARR:

    All right. After the death of Princess Diana, you were guardian for the Princes. Now they’re both back on the front pages again. These pictures have caused an absolute furore in this country and it seems that St. James’s Palace, the Prince is actually going to go to court in France to take action against the publishers and, who knows, also the photographers concerned. Do you think that’s an overreaction or do you think that’s fair enough?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I think it’s absolutely right. I think it’s absolutely right, so that people in future know where the boundaries should be. I mean the boundaries have plainly been crossed. I mean I don’t think we need mince words about these photographs. The way they’ve been obtained is tasteless. It is the action of a Peeping Tom. In our country, we prosecute Peeping Toms. That’s exactly what they’ve done and they’ve been peeping with long lenses from a long way away. They’re very distasteful and I’m absolutely delighted. I have often in the past been critical of the British media. I thoroughly applaud the fact that they won’t touch these pictures with a barge-pole. I think they deserve credit for not doing so and it’s a pity that other people overseas have lower standards.

    ANDREW MARR:

    And if you bumped into Mr Berlusconi this morning, you’d presumably have a few words for him too?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    It’s very unlikely and it might not be a very good conversation.

    ANDREW MARR:

    It might not be a very good conversation. The more general media climate of course, the British papers are waiting for the outcome of the Leveson Inquiry and so on. What would you like to see?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well I gave my evidence to Leveson, I considered it carefully, I prepared it carefully, I gave lengthy evidence. I’ve no intention of either adding or subtracting to it.

    ANDREW MARR:

    All right.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Leveson heard evidence from every conceivable point of view. I didn’t hear it all. I’m content to wait and see what he recommends.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Prince Harry is obviously in a place of danger, Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. The Taliban claimed that they are attacking that camp and they have killed considerable numbers of people to try and get at him. Do you think it’s right that he is out there? The danger is always that he’s putting other people’s lives at risk. You know we understand that he wants to get out there and fight and do his duty, but is there a danger that by putting him into such a place we’re unnecessarily endangering others?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I think there are several points to consider. The first is that Prince Harry trained with his colleagues, he will wish to serve with his colleagues. He most emphatically would not wish to move. The second point, I think it would be a huge propaganda triumph for the Taliban if Prince Harry were to be moved. And, thirdly, I think there’s a great deal of an attempt to create public relations in the posturing of the Taliban at the present time. The army knows what it’s doing. It will determine whether there is a risk to those serving with Prince Harry, as well as Prince Harry, and it will make its judgements based on that. I don’t think advice from external quarters on that will either be well informed or valuable.

    ANDREW MARR:

    And there’s been some talk about pulling out troops early from Afghanistan. Would that help the situation in any way?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well I don’t think it’s related. I don’t think you can relate that point …

    ANDREW MARR:

    Sure, to the Harry one. Sure.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    … to the question of Prince Harry. I think there is a credible case for looking at when we actually withdraw troops. The moment that President Obama said he was going to withdraw troops in 2014, the Taliban were on notice as to when the NATO troops would leave and a large part of the Taliban, if they have any sense, probably moved into North West Pakistan and are sitting there in that lawless wild west part of Pakistan waiting to come back after the troops have left. Having given notice of a date upon which we leave.

    ANDREW MARR:

    That’s difficult.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I think you have changed the game and changed it totally.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Sir John Major, for now thank you very much indeed.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    My pleasure.

    [Break for news. Andrew Marr asked if the spirit from the Paralympics could be bottled].

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I think it would be marvellous if we could. I mean, we saw some things at the Olympics that I think we thought we’d lost from the British character, the extent of the volunteers. The sheer, and I know it’s an old-fashioned word, the sheer patriotism of the British nation for the British athletes.

    I was fortunate enough to see a lot of the Olympics, and I think the moment I remember most was when the Paralympians came on in the opening ceremony, there had been an hour and a half of athletes parading. Suddenly the British team appeared, and as soon as the first British athlete appeared the whole of that 80,000 stadium were on their feet cheering. I freely confess that I had tears in my eyes and I don’t think I was the only one.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Were you surprised, because the Paralympics has always been, in the past, a slight downbeat after the main Olympics. This time the enthusiasm continued at the same level.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Absolutely. You will have forgotten this, but 27 years I was Minister for Disabled People.

    ANDREW MARR:

    I had forgotten it, you’re quite right.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    And I was absolutely thrilled to see it and there was a little vignette. I was talking to a foreign Paralympian athlete and he said “we have never seen anything like this. Who asked all these people to come?” and I said, “nobody asked, they came and they paid”. And they were thrilled with the size of the audience.

  • Sir John Major’s Speech at Churchill College – The Churchill Lecture – 26 November 2010

    The text of Sir John Major’s speech, “The Churchill Lecture”, held at Churchill College in Cambridge on Friday 26th November 2010.

    THE LIMITS OF POWER : CONSERVATIVE EXPERIENCE AND OPPORTUNITY

    This year is the 50th Anniversary of Churchill College, which was founded as a Memorial to arguably the greatest man in the history of our Islands.

    Sir Winston would be proud of this College. Proud that it focuses on science and technology. Proud that it houses the Archives of men and women who have influenced public policy. And proud that his daughter, Lady Soames – my friend, Mary – is not only with us this evening but is an Honorary Fellow of the College.

    I, too, am proud – that Churchill College has offered a permanent home to my political papers.

    Most are already here, and those that I’ve held back – personal notes, contemporary thoughts, partial diaries, even poems – will follow in due course. I hope that, taken together, these will add to knowledge, and be of use to historians. Tonight, I want to draw lessons from my own experience, and look to the future.

    I speak as a politician. Not an ideologue and not a theorist. I became a Conservative over fifty years ago, when I was barely in my teens and living in a multi-occupied, multi-racial house in Brixton. I have never regretted my choice.

    I don’t claim that every aspect of Conservatism was – or is – to my taste but, taken as a whole, I believe the philosophy offers more choice, more individual liberty, more opportunity and more hope than any other.

    Some have wondered why a boy with no money, no influence and no family background in politics should become a Conservative.

    The answer is simple. Socialism told me a benevolent State would help me – eventually. Conservatism offered a way up and out of modest circumstances. It told me there were no boundaries.

    Not everything turned out as I hoped: in politics, as in life, it rarely does. I had hoped my background would enable me to make

    Conservatism the natural choice for future generations from communities like Brixton. But events took over. When I became Prime Minister, the economy was broken and needed mending. And when it was back to full health – and the way clear to tackle the problems of under-privilege – we lost the election.

    But, even in failure, there are lessons and I shall try to set them out. Some of what I say may re-write perceived history, but the truth deserves an airing even if it up-ends myth. I shall then turn to the future.

    Let me set some context.

    Over the last 60 years, the world has changed at a pace without precedent in human history. Nothing is as it was, nor will be as it is.

    Instant, accessible and cheap electronic communication has changed the very nature of politics. Direct face-to-face contact with electors is diminishing. Public meetings are out of fashion. Mass membership of political parties is over. Door to door canvassing is falling away. More than ever before, the political message is filtered through the media or, increasingly, the internet. Even soap boxes are out of date.

    The once hallowed distinction between “news” and “views” has gone. “News” is now part of a sharply competitive entertainment industry: one might call it – “infotainment”. Editors select what is “news” and determine its prominence. They can “run” with a story, or close it down. They may – or may not – be dispassionate. None of this is new. But the scale of it is.

    Satellite coverage has multiplied the number of channels. Competition has made the media more demanding, more intrusive. Media outlets thrive on drama and sensation and – in its absence – are likely to create it.

    There’s no point in complaining about this: it’s the world in which we live. And politicians cannot simply blame others for public intolerance towards them. To be elected, they set out promises but – all too often – reality intervenes and the promise falls. Initially, the voter is merely annoyed but, where this re-occurs, they assume the promises were at best foolish, or at worst, fake. Sometimes they were. But, more often than not, it is the unforeseen event that turns an honest intention into a broken promise.

    Today, every Government is at the mercy of the global market. François Mitterrand – always more of an historian than politician – used to express alarm that the volume and velocity of financial flows were beyond the control of any Government. He was right. Sterling’s exit from the ERM taught us that seventeen years ago. Today, the Market is even more powerful.

    As the Global Market has grown, the influence of Governments has shrunk: even basic policies such as tax must conform to international norms, or investment moves away.

    The same internationalism is evident in foreign policy.

    More than ever before governments only share in the solution of common problems after negotiation in a plethora of international bodies.

    This is frustrating: and one reason why successive British Prime Ministers are less pro-European when they leave Office, than when they enter it.

    The uncomfortable truth is that the limits of power for politicians are narrower than many suppose. The modern Head of Government may wish to bestride the political stage like a colossus, but events can reduce him (or her) to no more than a cork bobbing on the waves.

    But not always. Consider: if Labour hadn’t imploded during the “Winter of Discontent”, would Margaret Thatcher have been able to enact such wide-ranging reforms in the 1980s? I doubt it. But the Trades Unions had exhausted public patience. And a lurch to the left made Labour unelectable.

    Out of this chaos, came opportunity. Margaret Thatcher saw her chance and seized it.

    Even so, she was fortunate. She had a clear cut majority in Parliament. It is far easier to be bold with troops united at your back, than dis-united at your throat. In the 1990s, the number of euro-sceptic MPs exceeded our majority, and made European policy an exhausting daily battle: this battle spilled over beyond matters European.

    That is why David Cameron was wise to agree a five-year coalition with the Liberal Democrats. It secures a Parliamentary majority, without which the unpopular policies that are now necessary could too easily be blocked.

    But, even with a working majority, Prime Ministers must bend to reality. Again, let me draw from my own experience.

    In 1989, Margaret Thatcher and I took Sterling into the Exchange Rate Mechanism. We did so to general acclaim.

    For 50 years, inflation had bedevilled the UK economy. Two Chancellors, Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson, both believers in the free market – had wished to enter the ERM. Margaret said no. As Chancellor I, too, then advocated entry. Margaret said yes.

    She did so with her eyes open. She was persuaded by reality. There was no alternative. Prices and mortgages were soaring and we had to bring them down. We entered the Mechanism to do so. This mattered to Margaret. Those for whom she most cared – the strivers and hard workers – were among those most hurt by rising prices. And because of my own life experience, it was crucial to me: I knew what life was like when the week lasted longer than the money. That is the evil of inflation.

    The ERM medicine was acutely painful, but it did drive prices down, and set us on a path to economic well-being that lasted over fifteen years. Let us not forget that Britain began many years of non-inflationary growth in April 1992 – not in May 1997.

    As we returned to growth, I wished to exit the Mechanism. It had done its work and I’d never thought of it as a stepping stone to economic and monetary union. It was time to leave. But the dilemma was how to do so without ending up with a lower exchange rate and higher inflation. This dilemma was still unresolved when the Market swept Sterling out of the ERM: an economic liberation, but a political disaster that grew to dominate the perception of all we did in Office.

    After our ejection, the myths began. We had entered at the “wrong rate” said free-market critics, forgetting we entered at the Market rate.

    Then, early Tory tea-partiers suggested that Douglas Hurd and I had “bullied” Margaret into submission. If they believed that they must have been drinking more than tea.

    It was widely asserted that this episode had “wrecked our reputation for economic competence”. At the time, such a sentiment had resonance. But critics should pause. The decision I had taken at Maastricht – to opt Sterling out of the Euro – has served Britain well. It was an economic decision based – not on sentiment for Sterling – but on the judgement that diverse economies would not converge and a crisis, one day, would follow. There can surely be no doubt now that my decision has proved to be right – politically and economically.

    As ever, facts are more potent than the words of critics or supporters. On the day I became Prime Minister, interest rates were 14%, unemployment was soaring, the economy was collapsing, inflation was 9.7% and the tax burden 36.3%. When I left Office, interest rates were 6%, unemployment was falling, the economy was growing healthily, inflation was 2.6% and the tax burden 36.6%.

    No other Government had passed on such a sound legacy. Yet few acknowledged the turnaround, or credited the Government with it.

    We Conservatives are to blame. In Government, we should have explained more and assumed less. In Opposition, after 1997, we shouldn’t have let myths take root: but we were demoralised by defeat – and did. This enabled Labour to take credit for the economy we had created, and helped keep us out of Office for thirteen years. This is a lesson that should not be forgotten.

    New Labour offers lessons, too. In 1997, they gained a huge majority from a supportive public. They could have done anything. But, after eighteen years out of Office, they were determined not to return to Opposition. The public were told what focus groups said they wished to hear. Good news was announced and re-announced. Bad news was buried. And the electorate was bribed with its own money. Emerging problems were ignored and are still with us.

    The general effect was a giant Ponzi Scheme, in which everyone was made to feel better whilst being fleeced. In its own way, it was genius.

    But it was not serious Government – and those emerging problems are now worse.

    Yet Labour’s neglect of these has left David Cameron an opportunity similar to the one Margaret Thatcher seized: once again, there is a mood of public tolerance to change.

    So let me turn to the future. Our national well-being is the work of generations: the Coalition can make progress, but the challenges are so deep they can’t be overcome in five years. Governments often over-estimate what they can do in five years, but under-estimate what can be achieved in twenty years. We need to think – and plan – long-term.

    This brings me directly to the Coalition Government.

    Many Tories and Liberals are hostile – or, at least, agnostic – to the Coalition. I approve of it. In present circumstances, it has many attractions: not least that two Parties are more likely to enjoy a tolerant electorate for policies that are painful.

    Can a Coalition Government succeed? I think so.

    Coalition, per se, is not a problem. The Conservative Party is, itself, a coalition: a broad Church that is more a way of life than an ideology. To win elections it must attract support from the Centre and, where it can, from the Centre-Left.

    If it falls into schism, it repels electors. Such internecine warfare scarred my own Premiership, and the leadership in Opposition of my three immediate successors. When the Conservative Party shrinks into itself, it shrivels into un-electability, as it did for some years after 1997.

    Can the Coalition achieve its purpose in five years? It will be hard pounding but its programme is essential to national well-being and so, if uncompleted, I hope some way can be found to prolong co-operation beyond this Parliament. It may be that a temporary alliance will turn into a mini realignment of politics: after all, in a world that is changing so comprehensively, why should politics not change, too?

    Neither Party will admit that possibility at present, not least because it would upset their core vote but – if events turn out well for the Coalition – I, for one, would not be surprised at that outcome.

    I seem to recall the Liberal Party was saved as a Parliamentary force in 1951, by the Conservatives not opposing five of its MPs: progressive co-operation is nothing new. It can be done. I am Conservative to the bone but, if it is in the interests of the Country, it may need to be done again.

    The Coalition has a daunting agenda. They must repair our national finances. Restore economic efficiency. Reconfigure foreign and European policy. Help an under-class which few wish to admit is there. Recognise that, while much of our education system is excellent, all of it is not. Reform an out-of-date welfare system, and face the myriad problems of an ageing population.

    Nor is that all. Climate change, population growth and the alleviation of poverty will demand attention. So will trouble spots in the arc of uncertainty from Syria to Pakistan. Do not be surprised if politics is in a hyperactive phase for years to come.

    Some priorities won’t wait. National well-being depends on putting the economy right. So does international influence. And the world won’t stand still while we recover.

    Governments can’t create wealth. The private sector can. To help them, the Coalition need, within this Parliament, to offer certainty in the tax and regulatory regime. Revisit employment law to create jobs. Lower taxes, and remove obstacles to growth. Tone of voice matters, too: the Government must promote success, and condemn the sour envy and resentment that so often derides it.

    There is one old truth that should not be forgotten.

    If the State is too big, the Private Sector will be too small. A smaller State – focused on what it must do and what only it can do – together with a larger private sector is the best way to national prosperity.

    Some may reject this. They like big Government. Labour policy is to regard any “cuts” as a plot to shrink the State, thus ignoring the inconvenient truth that, had they won the election, they would have been forced to a similar policy.

    A smaller State is not a devil-take-the-hindmost policy of pandering to the successful and ignoring the fragile. It is, in fact, quite the reverse.

    We are lost if the private sector doesn’t create jobs and yield tax revenue. We need tax revenue to fund good public services and pay for welfare. If the Government spends taxpayers’ money on what it need not do, it cannot spend money on what does need doing. Anyone who argues against that logic opens up a big gap between themselves and commonsense. Conservatives should not shrink from that debate.

    Nor should they shrink from any debate about how to maximise our national self-interest.

    In the recent Defence Review it was decided to extend the present life of Trident, but not yet to replace it. Few subjects so exercise Conservatives as national security but I believe this was the right decision. A bigger decision on replacement lies ahead with some unavoidable questions: what is the opportunity cost of Trident in the loss of conventional capability? In what circumstances, and upon whom, is Trident likely to be used? These are uncomfortable questions, but they must be answered before billions are committed.

    As our military power is reduced, our “soft” power – that is, diplomacy and the ability to achieve our purpose by persuasion – should be increased. David Cameron and William Hague have seized on this point and it is important they pursue it.

    As a middle-ranking nation, we must make the most of our assets. This means promoting diplomacy, and focusing it rigorously on British priorities. David Cameron’s policy of increasing trade with future economic giants is very much in our national interest. When we export more to Ireland than to China and India, something is wrong.

    Sustaining overseas aid, as the Government is doing, is a legitimate part of this policy. So is boosting education links and improving overseas broadcasting. We are lucky. We have the enviable gift of our language and culture to build on. Soft power must become an indivisible part of long-term policy, not an occasional add-on. This isn’t altruism: it is vital to our own long-term interests.

    Our diplomacy is a priceless asset. In the United Kingdom, our most important alliance is, and will remain, with the United States. We are – to echo David Cameron’s phrase – the junior partner. But our diplomatic skills are certainly no less than America’s and – with our historic experience of troubled regions – we should not hesitate to raise our profile.

    We have often led policy before. In Europe, the Single Market and enlargement were British-led initiatives. The “Safe Havens” for the Kurds policy, which saved hundreds of thousands of Kurdish lives after the first Gulf War, was born in London, created in Europe, promoted through the Commonwealth and imposed in partnership with the United States.

    We should lead more often. If we do, others may follow. We should not under-estimate our influence. And where we have reservations, we should be less ready to follow unquestioningly the lead of the United States. The good partner is not always the pliant partner: sometimes, candid criticism is the best form of friendship. Such a stance is not only more appropriate for a Sovereign and Independent nation like Britain, but we delude ourselves if we don’t recognise the inevitability of America looking more and more to the Pacific. They are realists and we must be so too. Robust British diplomacy will help and not harm the Alliance.

    There is an issue David Cameron and his successors cannot avoid: the character and reputation of Government. Parliament has had some serious setbacks in the last thirty years that have damaged its reputation.

    There are many reasons for this. One is political funding. The present system is not sustainable. When wealthy individuals make large donations – as they do to every mainstream Party – the suspicion lingers, even where it is wholly unjustified, that some of them seek undue influence over policy, or recognition in some other form. This is unhealthy for politics, and a constant headache for Party Leaders. A cap on donations will one day need to be introduced.

    Similar reservations apply to funding from special interest groups, notably Trades Unions and business corporations. Limits must be placed on these contributions and – much though I dislike the thought – if that leaves a funding gap, I would rather Parties trimmed their expenditure, or the taxpayer met it, than our political system was perceived, however unfairly, as shady.

    Greater scrutiny leads to a public awareness of shortcomings among Parliamentarians that may have gone unnoticed in earlier years.
    There have been too many instances of personal frailty in all political Parties: the most damaging are those that involve financial mis-behaviour. Cash for Questions – which occurred in the 1980s but only emerged to cripple the Government of the 1990s: and Cash for Peerages – which erupted in the last decade – were both pivotal to public alienation, as were the spicy revelations about the expenses claims of Parliamentarians in the Lords and Commons.

    Of course, the publicity in some cases was unfair, but the reality of criminal prosecutions shows that much was wrong. This dovetails into a bigger problem: alienation of the electorate. The growth of the far right, the fall in voting levels, the declining involvement in politics, and public estrangement from it, all add to the widespread feeling that Parliament is “out of touch” and politicians and public are too far apart.

    It is easy to see why. People work hard. Pay too much tax. Earn – sometimes a fraction – too much to qualify for social benefits. They fear that if immigration is too high it will cost them their jobs. Better homes seem beyond their means. They worry their children will rack up debt at University.

    These people are not selfish. Or racist. They are worried, some even frightened, by their own circumstances. Often they are economically immobile. They feel trapped. They believe no-one understands. Or cares. The Coalition can offer hope by speaking up and acting for them.

    It won’t be easy. Dis-enchantment is always greatest in difficult policy areas: immigration levels, sink estates, poor schools, taxation, the division of the welfare cake. The Coalition are addressing some of these problems: in all of them, a frankness and candour about the difficulties – and the time required to cure them – would reassure many who feel alienated from the political elite. It is never a mistake to set out long-term objectives if they give hope.

    Other objectives should be to tackle the fearsome bureaucracies that bear down on them. The Man in Whitehall or Town Hall does not know best. They are, too often, arrogant in their treatment of the citizen. We should be wary of the individual liberties they crush.

    Tackle these issues, and the Coalition may hit the political mother-lode. Far more important, they will restore faith in Parliament.

    In so many areas I welcome the ambitions of the Government. It is fashionable to be pessimistic and to sneer that Britain does not count any more.

    I profoundly disagree with such cynicism. It is not only cheap – it is wrong. In the last decade I have travelled the world and seen my own

    Country from afar. I have heard the world’s view of it. And – to that wider world – we do matter.

    We matter because of our history. Our language. Our law.

    And we matter because of what we can do – in commerce and industry, in science, in the City.

    And we matter because of what we are. Our quality as a Partner. Our reputation as an honest broker. Our generous impulse to crisis. Our culture. Our theatre. Our literature. Our tolerant instincts as a Nation.

    Sometimes, in politics, it is necessary to stand back and take stock. Now is such a moment. Our world has many complexities, but far more opportunities. If we arrange our affairs to take advantage of them, our future can be so much more promising than even the most optimistic can believe.

    For nearly seven years I was Prime Minister of this Country. I am proud of much of what we did. There are things I regret we did not do.

    But I was always proud of my Country. Of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Its history. Its institutions. Its great figures like Winston Churchill, the Founder of this College. I still am: for all its shortcomings, I know of no place in which I would rather have served. And no place I would rather be.

  • Article on the Economy under a Labour Government – 4 April 2010

    The text of Sir John Major’s article on the economy under Labour, published by The Sunday Mail on 4th April 2010.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    On 7th May 1999, Gordon Brown announced that he was planning to sell off 400 tonnes of our natural stock of gold. The British economy was still in good health and required no cash injection, yet he threw away over a half a century’s worth of the country’s inheritance – at the very bottom of the market.

    This catastrophic decision – unilaterally made by Gordon Brown – has lost Britain £6.6 billion – double the cost of Black Wednesday. In fact, to put Black Wednesday in context – the Exchequer now borrows almost £3.3 billion every week, simply to cover Labour’s debts.

    Gordon Brown was warned about the gold sales. Senior Treasury officials cautioned him against it. Investment banks told him the price was too low and would rise. Yet he chose to ignore them all, and claimed he was acting “on the technical advice of the Bank of England”. We now see from documents released under FOI that the Bank of England was, in fact, reluctant to back his proposal, but a key passage still remains blacked out. What is it that the Prime Minister wishes to hide?

    The sale of gold is just one of many decisions that illustrates how the Blair/Brown years have wrecked the golden economic inheritance that the last Conservative Government bequeathed them. Alas, there are plenty more.

    In 1997, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown abolished the Dividend Tax Credit paid to pension funds and companies. It has been estimated that this reckless action may have cost pension funds up to £150 billion.

    Indeed, Tony Blair’s own former pensions advisor stated that Gordon Brown “knowingly destroyed what was once one of the great pension systems in the world and he did it deliberately”. It was economic and social vandalism on a seismic scale.

    The Prime Minister consistently argues that Britain’s deficit has been the result of a global financial storm that started in America, and that spending grew because he did not want to “do nothing” during the recession. This is sophistry beyond the point of deception.

    A huge structural deficit – or government overspending that is with us year on year – has been built up by Gordon Brown since he stopped following the Conservative Government’s spending plans in 2001. As soon as he began to take his own decisions, the decline towards today’s economic train wreck began. Gordon Brown alone built this deficit. He alone is responsible for it. The British people will pay for it.

    And what of “boom and bust”? For years we had to endure the Blair/Brown mantra that they would abolish what they called “Tory boom and bust”. The British people have now discovered the reality. Labour has certainly abolished the boom, and has created an almighty bust. The Blair/Brown “boom” was a fake, built on a mountain of consumer and corporate debt, and the bust has been the longest and deepest – as Alistair Darling himself has admitted – for 60 years.

    Labour’s wild exaggeration about the cost of Black Wednesday was the beginning of a long history of bending statistics to distort truth and rational argument.

    Much of what the Prime Minister himself says is worthy of satire. Last summer, he tried to carry on the pretence that public spending would be increased over the next few years. He claimed repeatedly that expenditure would grow. This was patently absurd. Thankfully, David Cameron managed to change the terms of debate and won the argument that cuts are needed to get our record borrowing under control.
    But some of what the Prime Minister tries to claim is downright deception.

    When his sleight of hand was discovered over the abolition of the 10p tax band in 2007, he dismissed claims that this would hurt the poorest in society, saying “no one would lose out”. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies disagreed. Their own estimate was that 5.3 million families would suffer as a result of this policy.

    Most shamefully, the Prime Minister has deployed the same statistical chicanery on our Armed Forces. In October 2007 – in a cynically-timed visit – he flew to Iraq and told our troops that 1,000 of them would “home by Christmas”. In fact, the troops were just moved around the Gulf region, with an increase of over 500 personnel at sea, and an overall increase of 380 supporting operations in Iraq. Between September and December 2007, there was a reduction of only 430 troops in Iraq.

    Errors of fact in party political dispute can be excused, and even forgiven. But errors of fact affecting our Armed Forces in the field – and their families here at home who live in daily fear for the safety of their loved ones – can neither be excused nor forgiven. If any Prime Minister gives his word to service men and women – especially when they are engaged in active combat – this must be honoured to the letter. They deserve, and should expect, nothing less.

    And yet the deceptions continue: in the past few weeks alone, the Prime Minister has misled the public not once, not twice, but three times. First, he misled the Chilcot Inquiry, then the House of Commons, over defence spending, stating that spending had risen every year, when in fact it fell. Even his apology was disingenuous. He asserted that spending fell in “one or two” years, yet in fact it fell in four years since 1997.
    The Prime Minister then claimed 300,000 businesses had received “cash flow help” from the Government in the recession. Yet he must have known that the actual Government figure is only 160,000.

    Finally, by mingling two entirely separate sets of statistics, the Prime Minister claimed immigration is falling when, in fact, it is rising.
    Such a catalogue of errors is either incompetence or deception. Neither is acceptable nor worthy of the Office of Prime Minister.
    Gordon Brown’s personal decision to sell our gold at rock bottom prices – and for no good reason – cost Britain the equivalent of two Black Wednesdays. He has destroyed pensions. He has wrecked the economy. He has doubled the national debt and will do so again. Most regrettably of all, after thirteen years of this Labour Government, the word of the Prime Minister can no longer be trusted.

    When New Labour came to power it was hailed as a new dawn. But the sun is now setting. In May 1997, they inherited what Tony Blair’s own economic adviser termed a “better [economy] than that of any [incoming Government] in living memory”. They had the trust and goodwill of the British people. They have squandered it all.

    “A future fair for all” is Labour’s slogan in this election year. But having been let down so badly by this Labour Government in the past, how on earth can the British people believe they will be any better off with them in the future?

    Labour has had long enough to prove it is a Party fit to govern and has comprehensively failed that test. Time has finally run out for them and I hope that, on Tuesday, the Prime Minister will call the Election for which the country has been crying out for so long, and which he can no longer avoid.

  • Sir John Major’s Interview on the Andrew Marr Show – 13 July 2008

    Below is the text of Sir John Major’s interview on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, broadcast live on 13th July 2008.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Welcome Sir John.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Good morning Andrew.

    ANDREW MARR:

    How bad is it going to get in your judgment?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I don’t think it’s quite clear how bad it will get. I think we’re going to be very close to recession, if not technically in recession, two quarters of negative growth. I think that’s entirely possible. But the problem we face at the moment is rather different from the one we faced in the early nineties or indeed in the early eighties.

    ANDREW MARR:

    In the early nineties we had that terrible problem of negative equity in particular and unemployment shooting up. A lot of people will say well it can’t be that bad this time round.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well I said just now the problem was rather different. If you recall, on the day I became Prime Minister we had interest rates at fourteen percent. We had inflation at nine and a half percent. We had unemployment beginning to rise. All that was happening. We were heading for a recession as a result of the nineteen eighties boom.

    Now it was necessary then to deal specifically with one primary problem. And that primary problem was endemic inflation which had damaged the economy time and time again in the last forty years. And it’s precisely for that reason of course that Margaret Thatcher and I entered the exchange rate mechanism to bear down on inflation which was our predominant problem. And we did so.

    And the result of that of course, the figures when I became Prime Minister in nineteen ninety were awful. When we left I think by common consent we left the best economy people had seen for a very long time. But in the interim some very painful things were done and you mentioned some of the results of those painful things. But they were done to get inflation down, to put the economy on an even keel. And as a result of doing that we’ve had an extremely good economic run for a very long time.

    So the circumstances are different from the nineteen nineties.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Are we going to have to see similarly painful things in order to get inflation down now? And by the way what do you think inflation really is now?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well on the second point it certainly isn’t the figures produced either by the Cost And Prices Index or indeed the Retail Prices Index. If you recall the government changed the mechanism for calculating the CPI. They took out housing costs and they took out Council Tax. Now that for many people’s expenditure is probably forty five percent of their expenditure. So the CPI is the government’s preferred measure. But it’s an extremely misleading measure in terms of people’s spending patterns.

    ANDREW MARR:

    So do you think inflation’s what double, double the CPI figure?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Oh I think more than that.

    ANDREW MARR:

    More than double? Where would you put it?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well I think it depends precisely where your income group is.,

    ANDREW MARR:

    But roughly?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I would think for most people on average incomes if you look at what’s happening to food, you look at what’s happened to heating, you look at what’s happening to the expenditures that most people cannot avoid, I would say inflation is probably double the RPI figure so we’re between eight and ten percent.

    ANDREW MARR:

    The government says that most of this, if not all of it, is imported. It’s what’s happened to oil prices, it’s what happened to food prices, it’s, it’s a global problem, a banking problem and, and Britain is relatively well placed to deal with this.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well to the extent it’s well placed it’s because of the structural reforms of the eighties and the destruction of inflation in the nineties. It’s got very little to do frankly with what the present government have done. But as far as the cause of the problem is concerned the government’s mantra certainly is that this is an imported problem and that is partly true.

    It is certainly true that there is an element of imported inflation with oil prices. That is undoubtedly true. What is equally true I’m afraid is that because of the actions the government themselves have taken over the last ten years or so we are not in a very good position to deal with that problem.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Actions and spending too much?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    They certainly can’t cut taxes because they, in terms of increasing consumer choice because they have such a big fiscal deficit. They can’t increase public spending because they’ve already spent the, the money that we would normally use. So they have cut off the solution to this problem just as the problem has arisen.

    And it’s quite extraordinary that over ten years in which the world has had the most benign economic circumstances for a very long time, that we have run up such a huge fiscal deficit. We have increased taxes to the extent that we’ve increased taxes. And we have a trade deficit that’s about between fifty and sixty times higher than it was in nineteen ninety seven. So the problem is although there is a problem the traditional solutions to that problem are not practical at the moment.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Are not available. So what can they do do you think?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well I think to a certain extent they’re going to have to sit this through. It’s going to take a couple of years to work its way through. Nobody’s quite certain how serious it’s going to be. I think it is a very serious problem. Some of the talk of Armageddon I think is overdone. I don’t believe that.

    ANDREW MARR:

    You travel around the world. You’re in the States a lot. These two big mortgage companies which are deeply in trouble in America, is that kind of thing going to be, be felt here? Is that, is that part of the crisis?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well I think that must be one of the great worries that you’re going to have the collapse of a large institution, a large financial institution, and that would present very real difficulties for the Bank of England. But here again I’m afraid the regulatory changes made in nineteen ninety seven, certainly, if one puts it as its kindest, muddied the regulatory system.

    And the result of that may well have been Northern Rock. So I think we do have to look very carefully at precisely where the responsibility is for regulation. Some people I think are pretty unclear about that. We need to be absolutely clear about that.

    And the other thing that is essential, not something I can see that can be done over night, but at the moment the government, the state, are consuming between – depends on whose figures you use, the government’s or the OECD’s – between forty two and forty five percent of the national income. Well you and I are old enough to remember Roy Jenkins saying once you came above forty percent you were damaging a plural society.

    Now on the government’s own figures it’s around forty two to forty three percent. On the OECD’s forty five. So undoubtedly for the medium term health of the economy the proportion of public expenditure to national income has to fall. Now that plainly can’t be done over night, but it must be an objective for this chancellor and future chancellors.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Yes. Should be said you weren’t in parliament but your party wasn’t vociferously opposing any of those increases in public spending as they happened.

    When we look at what’s going to happen now, however, house prices are bound to fall quite sharply. Everybody accepts that.

    Unemployment’s about to go up again. And we’re going to see inevitably increasing numbers of bankruptcies aren’t we?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I think you are. Quite how bad that will be I’m not sure. Once again the unemployment figures are quite difficult to disentangle because the method of calculation now is different from the past. And a huge number of people who perhaps traditionally would have appeared in the unemployment figures now receive Invalidity Benefit and are excluded from the unemployment figures. So unemployment, if you’re seeking the comparison you made at the outset with the early nineties is certainly a good deal higher than the government say. There are going to be more bankruptcies.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Again, have you any sense of where it is really?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I think there have been so many technical changes.

    ANDREW MARR:

    It’s impossible?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I mean well I think if one wished to be fair to the government I think it’s impossible to make a guess. But substantially higher than the

    figures they produce. I think that is true.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Right.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    There are going to be some more redundancies. I think that is clear. There are going to be some bankruptcies.

    Depending upon how liquid the banking system is and how available loans are will be absolutely crucial to determining how bad the situation is. So the underlying sub prime mortgage problem which has damaged inter-bank lending for example is very important.

    Fear is toxic and…

    ANDREW MARR:

    And it’s spreading?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    And it is spreading. And that is a real, quite apart from the realities of the situation that, that toxic element, that fear element is very serious. And I think the government and the bank will need to look and see how they can give some hope, some circumstance where one can see things beginning to get better. And the sooner we can identify some of that and put that in place I think the better it will be for everyone.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Can I ask you about the Conservative Party because in many ways they are playing tunes that you will find familiar, what David Cameron said about responsibility and so on. You, I think you talked about we should understand a little less and condemn a little more and got into some trouble of that but there’s certainly echoes.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well it was, that’s because it was totally distorted. I mean…

    ANDREW MARR:

    Inevitably. It always is.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    When I, well I dare say. I mean it’s a dangerous territory, but I mean there were two things. I said “back to basics” which was actually about traditional education and nothing to do with the matters that subsequently earned huge headlines. And when I said we condemn a little, should condemn a little more and understand a little less I was talking specifically about making sure very young children under the age of two or three actually understood there were boundaries and one didn’t instinctively say oh well, isn’t he lovely, forget the fact that he’s breaking all the crockery.

    ANDREW MARR:

    But, but with knife crime and stuff people are talking about this again.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    But of course it was wholly misunderstood.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Yes but I mean, but in a sense what David Cameron is saying now?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Yes.

    ANDREW MARR:

    It’s quite similar to what you were saying.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    It’s very similar. And indeed I think the underlying prescription needs to be similar as well. If you look at knife crime in the cities, if you go back to the time when I was a boy I, I lived in the middle of Brixton at a time of quite a lot of social turmoil, when there was relatively little to do. But there were gymnasiums, there were places where you could go and you could box, you could play indoor soccer, you could do things of that sort.

    Now one of the reasons I set up the Lottery which the government have ransacked and taken a large part of the money sadly, was to set up things like that right the way through the big cities. We need to find things for our young people to do. In the early part of the century, the previous century when there was a lot of trouble with youngsters, er, youth clubs, the Scouts, things like that were established and became set up.

    Maybe not the same prescription. But we certainly need the opportunity for sporting facilities and arts facilities inside the inner cities so that youngsters have something to do when they go out rather than stand on the street corner. Give them something to do. Give them the opportunity to do it. I think that would be expenditure well spent. It was the purpose of the Lottery. I very much hope and believe that a Conservative government will return the Lottery to its original intention.

    And I think we should work with the voluntary agencies and bodies like Chance To Shine, for example, who do so much to spread particularly cricket, to bring those leisure opportunities to young people in the cities. We need to help them. Of course we condemn people who use knives. That is unacceptable by any measure. But let us give them something to do that will attract their interest. And if that isn’t worthwhile expenditure I cannot myself imagine what is.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Could you imagine yourself coming back into public life? Just listening to you talk now.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    No, I don’t think so. No, no. I was in public life for a long time. I enjoyed most of it but I don’t think I’m coming back, no.

    ANDREW MARR:

    If, if those are areas where you and David Cameron would feel comfortable it seems to me in one other area the Party has changed radically from the Party that you were leading. In those days Euro-sceptics were a very, very difficult minority that you were struggling with. Now they’re in charge.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well they were certainly extremely difficult at the time. That is absolutely true. But I think public opinion generally has changed. There were some issues particularly on Europe magnified of course by our exit from the exchange rate mechanism.

    I mean because that was the European exchange rate mechanism, it was magnified out of all proportion. Had it for example been an American exchange rate mechanism we wouldn’t have had so much trouble with it. But there was a lot of Euro-scepticism. I think there is more unity in the Party. I, I hope it is not a unity that is wholly Euro sceptic. Europe is still our largest trading partner. It is our, it is our nearest partner. It is an enormous market. But I think a too prescriptive Europe wasn’t amenable to me in the nineties, let alone the Euro sceptics.

    And I don’t think it’s amenable to most people in this country. And I think the prospects now of Britain as a nation having more allies amongst the members of the European Union is greater now than it has ever been. When Margaret was there and when I was there we were often isolated in Europe. That is no longer the case.

    ANDREW MARR:

    One other thing which has come back again I’m afraid is sleaze. I mean the Conservative Party’s got yet more problems over who’s paying what to whom. So has the Labour Party. It’s not one party or the other.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well indeed it isn’t.

    ANDREW MARR:

    But this must make you kind of despair because you know it was, it was supposed to be something that was around in the eighties and then disappeared again, whiter and white, purer than pure. It’s back. Both parties.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well I was concerned in the mid nineties which was why I set up the Nolan Body in the first place and that was widely criticised by many people.

    But I felt, frankly I didn’t know how widespread it might have been. My inclination was to think that it wasn’t very widespread and Nolan would show that. Well in fact over the years it seems to have been rather more widespread than I had thought.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Is there anything can be done about this?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well I strongly believe that it is desirable to audit which Parliament rejected last week. I think it is desirable to audit the money received by members of Parliament, the public funds received and the expenditure. I’m less certain about the publication of individual figures. They can be distorted and they can be utilised in a way that is often rather unfair.

    But I do not see any case whatsoever for there not being a private auditor set up by the Speaker or, or whomsoever who has access and audits the expenditure made available to MPs and the way they use the money made available to them and effectively producing an audit certificate saying this is within the rules. I see no credible case against that and I am absolutely baffled why the government opposed it.

    ANDREW MARR:

    When you look at Gordon Brown today human sympathy or Schadenfreude?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    No, no, no, no. No. Well I hope it’s human sympathy. I have very strong disagreements with many of the things politically that Gordon Brown has done. But he’s doing an extremely difficult job. He’s doing it in extremely difficult circumstances.

    They may be partially of his making. But nonetheless it’s not helpful to the country or anybody else to have some of the comment about him that there has been and I, I regret that.

    ANDREW MARR:

    All right. John Major for now thank you very much indeed.

  • Sir John Major’s Interview on the Andrew Marr Show – 16 December 2007

    The text of Sir John Major’s interview on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, broadcast live on 16th December 2007.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Now of course one of the big events from the past year was Tony Blair’s exit from office.

    Already the histories and political obituaries have been written, but so far his predecessor in No. 10 has been virtually silent on the New Labour years. John Major joins us now to look back over the last year. Welcome, thank you very much for coming in.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    My pleasure.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Let’s start with the economy, because some people might say it’s a sense of déjà vu, house prices under pressure, coming down again, the kind of outlook that we haven’t maybe had since the immediate days around Black Wednesday?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well that of course was exactly what I inherited when I became Prime Minister, there were some similarities with now, we were going into a recession, it was clearly going to be very deep. And it took a long time to get out of it.

    But if you recall, when we left office in 1997 I think we probably left the best economy any government has left for the last 50 years. We had had five years of consistent growth every quarter, falling interest rates, falling unemployment, increasing growth, for a long period.

    It wasn’t created by the present Labour government it was there in place when they took office. But of course they have always used Black Wednesday to mask that.

    ANDREW MARR:

    I mean it has to be said that they then picked up that ball, as it were, and ran with it for a long time?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Yes they did, to a certain extent and the fact that they haven’t wrecked the economy is something one can give them credit for. But I think it’s now beginning to unravel in quite a serious way.

    If you look at what has happened over the last ten years, there were going to be no tax increases, specifically there were going to be no tax increases on pensions. In fact a specific tax increase on pensions has wrecked final salary pension schemes and wrecked the security of many pensioners.

    But you now see over the full ten years we have dropped significantly in competitiveness, productivity is down over those ten years. We have had a tax increase almost every month for the last ten years, on average. We’ve had 111 tax increases over that period.

    The economy is now clearly running into some significant difficulties, and there are two events, two events that are specifically related to the government policy that have caused huge problems. One of them you’ve referred to them already this morning, Northern Rock, and I’ll come back to that in a moment.

    The other of course was the then Chancellor’s decision to sell gold. He sold gold quite gratuitously, something like 395-400 tonnes of gold at an average price of, I think, about $275. The loss to the exchanges from that decision is now in excess of the loss to the exchanges on Black Wednesday, in excess of the Black Wednesday costs.

    ANDREW MARR:

    From your point of view, Golden Tuesday or whatever it was, is worse than Black Wednesday?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well in terms of the loss to the exchanges most certainly it’s a different political damage. But in terms of the loss to the exchanges it most certainly is. And I hope it will stop the Prime Minister talking about ten successful years because they haven’t been entirely successful. And that absurdity that he sometimes turns to, that he appears to blame David Cameron who was a bag carrier for Norman Lamont on Black Wednesday, as though David was at all responsible, for he wasn’t.

    The second point of course is Northern Rock. We don’t yet know what the cost of Northern Rock to the Economy will be. But it is quite likely, not certain, but quite likely that it will exceed the cost for the taxpayer of either Black Wednesday or of the sale of gold. And that runs specifically from changes to the system introduced by the then Chancellor in 1997.

    ANDREW MARR:

    The regulatory system?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    The regulatory system.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Right. I wondered in the final film that Tony Blair made about looking back over, looking back in part, over his ten years, what you felt when he said maybe he’d been a little bit rough in going for you over sleaze?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well I didn’t watch it, I didn’t watch the film, but I read about it. But I think there is a clear-cut distinction between what was called sleaze in the 1990s and what has happened since 1997. Lots of people misbehaved in the ’80s and in the ’90s, but they were all individuals, it was never institutional, it was never related specifically to the Conservative Party or to the Conservative Government.

    ANDREW MARR:

    You don’t think there was a culture of overseas business people putting money in, sort of behind the back of the political system?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I don’t think there was a culture. I mean I devolved responsibility for party fundraising when I became Prime Minister, so I had no direct hand in it. But, no I don’t think so. But what happened in the 1990s, there was a deliberate attempt to portray the Conservative Party as an institution, it was almost McCarthyite frankly, as though it were sleazy, and it wasn’t.

    The distinction is that sleaze has seemed to be systemic since 1997. I mean, I can see a clear pattern, you probably remember the Ecclestone affair in, I think, November 1997. We have Abrahams in November 2007, and serial offences in between those two dates. 2002, when I think they were taking money from Mr. Desmond, the Labour Party set up a committee and decided they would vet every future donor. Well it clearly wasn’t very successful vetting, from what we’ve seen subsequently.

    So I do think that they have every reason to regret what they did in the 1990s, but I must say I was sorry when the Prime Minister apologised for the fact that it had bounced back on the Labour Party. I think he should have apologised for the fact that it wasn’t true what he was saying in the 1990s. And to accuse people in the Cabinet, a Cabinet that had people like Douglas Hurd, Michael Heseltine, Malcolm Rifkind, Ken Clarke, Gill Shepherd, Virginia Bottomley, John Gummer, Peter Brooke – to accuse them of being part of a sleazy government is just unscrupulous.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Do you think that Tony Blair has presided over a corrupt government?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I don’t think it’s corrupt, no I don’t use the word corrupt, I think they have been careless. I think they have had a huge majority and they have been careless, I think that’s what it is. I don’t accuse them of corruption and I wouldn’t accuse them of corruption. I don’t think most politicians, occasionally there’s a bad apple in the barrel. We are in parliament a microcosm of the nation, there are bad applies. But I don’t think that. But I do think it was institutionally careless in the grand manner.

    ANDREW MARR:

    And why do you think that happened, simply because they thought when Tony Blair said I’m a pretty straight kind of guy, he sort of believed it therefore?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well I think if they were to say today, whiter than white or purer than pure, I think people would just laugh. And I think that is sad for the sake of the whole system. But there were of course a whole series of slogans then that look pretty stupid now – Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime – well we now have prisoners being let out early, gun crime up, violent crime up, total crimes up.

    It really hasn’t lived up to the billing and you could say that in the National Health Service, 24 hours to save it, well it’s a lot longer than 24 hours. And you don’t have to take my word, take Derek Wanless’s word, we are not on our way yet, to a world class health service despite huge extra taxation going into it.

    ANDREW MARR:

    I imagine that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair would say we’ve all had the same problem with party funding, it’s something that’s bedevilled British politics in Margaret Thatcher’s time, in John Major’s time, and now in our time too. And there does need to be a better way of dealing with this?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I don’t think a better way is more money from the taxpayer, I know there seems to be a communal view that it is a good idea from all the parties, I don’t personally agree with it. And I don’t agree with it specifically for this reason – I think, apart from the fact I don’t think it’s right for the taxpayer to pay, but let us even put that to one side, there’s another practical reason. If too much of party funding comes directly from the taxpayer a great deal of the activity at the grass roots that brings a party together, that makes a party, that keeps the politicians in touch with the grass roots, gets swept away.

    And I think politicians are remote enough already from the electorate as a whole, I wouldn’t wish to see them made even more remote, and my fear apart from the undoubted desirability of the principle, my fear would be that if party funding too much came from the centre that it would diminish grass roots activity even more, that would be a thoroughly bad development.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Yes. I mean you were swept out of power by Tony Blair and the Labour Party saying that you were sleazy, that your government was riddled, if not with corruption but certainly with sleaze which was the slightly politer way of saying corruption, as I recall. The old Chinese saying about if you wait long enough the bodies of your enemies float past, does it occur to you?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well, just a touch. But I mean, what they did at the time was absolutely unscrupulous. I don’t think that’s what cost us the election, frankly we’d been there so long if the leader of the Conservative Party had been the Archangel Gabriel and the Cabinet had been a choir of angels, I think after 18 years we would have lost.

    I think what their pretty unscrupulous use of facts did, was to magnify the defeat, to turn a defeat that was always likely into a much bigger defeat. And I think that they did do very successfully but I think in a manner that scarred politics in the long term.

    ANDREW MARR:

    And turning to your party now, it strikes me that what we said about New Labour back in the mid-1990s could apply to the Conservatives now, which is terribly inexperienced. Very, very successful in the polls at the moment, beginning to look like a party that could win an overall majority at the next election, long way away and all the rest of it. But nonetheless, is that a worry, the inexperience?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well I think the government are pretty inexperienced, in this sense. I mean half the Cabinet were special advisors two or three years ago.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Everybody’s only been a special advisor in politics these days.

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    I know, it’s a great mistake to get to the top of politics that way in my judgement. But if you look back in Margaret’s time there were always three people who could have been Prime Minister. When I became Prime Minister, if I had been run over by a bus and some people rather wished for that, there were several…

    ANDREW MARR:

    Depends who was driving the bus?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    There were several people who could have taken over – Douglas Hurd, Michael Heseltine, Ken Clarke, Malcolm Rifkind – who may well have done a better job, maybe people thought they would have done. If Gordon Brown were run over who would be Prime Minister?

    There was one very senior member, Jack Straw, beyond that nobody with any experience whatsoever. It is the most inexperienced Cabinet that I can remember. So I don’t think the relative inexperience of the opposition is a problem. Particularly, if I may say so, because of the way David Cameron is now going abroad regularly.

    I’ve just returned from China, I was in China last week and I met some senior Chinese there and David Cameron is going there next week, and we were talking about his visit and they’re very much looking forward to seeing him. And I think these overseas trips are very important for him to do and I’m delighted he’s doing them.

    ANDREW MARR:

    One of the younger members of the Cabinet, David Miliband, I was just talking to in Basra. It is all’s well that ends well, is it finally over down there, how do you read that?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    Well, I’m uncertain. I mean, if you take an audit, we went into Iraq on what turned out to be a false premise. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein I think undoubtedly is a bonus.

    Everything else looks pretty bleak to me. If you look at life within Iraq at the moment, most of the major decisions that needs to be taken haven’t yet been taken by the Iraqi government. If you look at life in Iraq, inflation is 70%, unemployment is 50%, about 3,000-3,500 Iraqis over recent months have been killed every single month.

    ANDREW MARR:

    Was it worth it?

    SIR JOHN MAJOR:

    That doesn’t look to me like a stable situation as a result of policy over the last few years. I don’t think this is going to be looked back on with any pride by the policymakers. I think the Army were given an impossible job which they did as well as it could have been done, but it was almost impossible and the outcome is bleak.

    ANDREW MARR:

    For now, John Major, thank you very much indeed.

  • Mr Major’s Statement on ERM Paper Release – 4 February 2005

    The text of Mr Major’s statement to the Press Association on the release of papers relating to the ERM, issued on 4th February 2005.

    JOHN MAJOR:

    The Release of Papers related to the exit of Sterling from the ERM

    I have seen Lord Lamont’s Press Release this afternoon with which I entirely concur.

    In view of some wholly misleading Press Reports this morning I wish to make clear:

    – I knew nothing of any request for Papers until late Wednesday evening (UK time) when I was in the US.
    – I have asked for no delay of any kind: merely an opportunity to read the documents so that I might respond to questions post publication.
    – At no point have I raised any objection to release of the content of the documents.
    – At no point have I asked for publication to be blocked.
    – When I am able to study the documents this weekend, I do not expect to request any deletions. In any event, deletions can only relate to areas set out in the FOI Act. Decisions upon this are for officials only – not former Ministers.

    4th February 2005

  • Mr Major’s Commons Speech on the 2001 Budget Resolutions Debate – 12 March 2001

    The text of Mr Major’s Commons speech on the 2001 Budget Resolutions Debate, made on the 12th March 2001. This was Mr Major’s last speech in the House of Commons.

    MR JOHN MAJOR:

    Mr Major: “Education, education, education” was originally a cry from Lenin, who did not mean it. I suspect that the Secretary of State, who has just left, does mean it. He is sincere and, in his unavoidable absence, I should like to congratulate him on graciously adopting some of the: proposals of my hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), who is shadow Secretary of State. That behaviour is as welcome as it is unusual, and I hope that future Governments of both complexions will be inclined to follow that particularly good example.

    Turning to the Budget as a whole, I am pleased that the Chancellor has cut taxes and given back to taxpayers a small proportion of the money that he has extracted from them in the past four years. His generosity is not surprising: notwithstanding the problems of foot and mouth, a general election is pending and the public accounts show ample scope for tax reductions and, perhaps, modest expenditure increases. Yet, only a few weeks ago, when the Opposition said that, they were condemned as “irresponsible” by spokesmen from the Treasury and elsewhere. We now see how shallow those attacks were, for if the Opposition were irresponsible, why has the most prudent of Chancellors done what they recommended? In truth, my right hon. and hon. Friends were right to identify the scope for tax reduction. Not only were they right but, if the economy stays on course, there may be scope for even more tax cuts in future.

    A principal reason for that remarkable leeway is the sheer size of tax increases over the past four years. We must disentangle fact from fiction. Prior to the Budget, there had been 26 increases in personal taxation and 19 increases in taxes on business in this Parliament. That number has risen slightly although, given the Chancellor’s remarkable gift for sleight of hand, one must study the small print carefully to find out precisely how many tax increases there are. However, their sum total is enormous. The abolition of tax credits on dividends alone will cost shareholders about £6 billion in the current tax year. The reorganisation of advance corporation tax at the beginning of this Parliament has affected the quality of pension funds for millions of elderly people and cost those funds more than £5 billion during the course of this Parliament; it will do continuing damage until it is changed.

    Even after offsetting tax reductions – of which there have been some, mostly minor, examples – the Inland Revenue’s overall tax yield has risen by an astonishing one third during this Parliament. No wonder the savings ratio has fallen so badly. That is not a wicked Tory calculation; an independent survey shows the average family to be worse off than it was in 1996. The old tax-until-the pips-squeak bruiser Lord Healey must be salivating enviously at the extent of the tax rises forced through by the Chancellor.

    More people have been dragged into tax. An extra 2 million now pay tax; 28 million pay it, compared with 26 million three years ago.

    Mr. Mackinlay That is just nonsense. What about unemployment?

    Mr. Major If it is nonsense, it is Red Book nonsense. Those figures come from the Red Book. Before the hon. Gentleman mutters into his non-existent beard, he should read the Red Book and check. It is possible that the Chancellor has given us more duff facts; we are used to that. However, if they are duff, that is his responsibility, not mine.

    There are 2 million more taxpayers and 700,000 more higher-rate taxpayers than there were four years ago. In addition, mortgage interest relief at source has been scrapped, although I do not object to that particularly. However, not only has MIRAS been scrapped, but stamp duty on home purchase has been increased and national insurance contributions for middle-income earners have risen sharply. So much – on the eve of the next general election – for the promises that the Labour party made to middle England and middle-income groups throughout the United Kingdom on the eve of the last one. Those groups may also care to note that the yield from inheritance tax has soared 50 per cent. during this Parliament. The Chancellor still has no concept – I genuinely believe that he does not understand its value–of letting more of the fruits of a lifetime of work filter down to the people whom the earner most cares about: his own family and the next generation.

    It is no wonder, with such tax increases, that the ratio of tax to gross domestic product has risen 2.5 per cent. to 37.7 per cent. The Chancellor, despite all his promises, has not so much wooed middle England as assaulted it.

    Mr. Geraint Davies Does the right hon. Gentleman know that, taking tax and borrowing together as a share of GDP – given that borrowing is deferred taxation – the figure went down two points from 38.2 per cent. in 1996–97 to 36.2 per cent. in 1999–2000, and down to 34.1 per cent. in the current year? The current figure is due to the spectrum auction of mobile phone wavelengths, but for the previous period, those two points represent the equivalent of an increase of 7.3p in income tax. In other words, the right hon. Gentleman simply borrowed instead of taxing, and tried to fiddle the figures.

    Mr. Major The hon. Gentleman ought to know that his Chancellor changed the way in which the figures are quoted in the Red Book, and the actual equivalent of what he has done is an extra 10p on tax The hon. Gentleman may care to examine that matter. [Interruption.] If it is nonsense, it is the Government’s nonsense in the Government’s own figures. Those are the figures that I am using. I am glad to hear from Labour Members that they do not believe them.

    It is ironic that the Government and the Chancellor have increased taxes so much. During the last Parliament, I remember vividly the present Chancellor and his colleagues, ever ready to find a catchy slogan, repeating the slander of 22 Tory tax rises, with no acknowledgement whatever of any offsetting tax reductions. To call their attacks disingenuous would be kind. They were patently untrue, and a forerunner of the manipulation of facts that has characterised so much – not all, but so much – of what the Government have said and done in the past four years.

    The Government cannot deny that, because the figures for tax increases are now clear. The statistics cast light where the slogans cast deception. Before this Budget, the real increase in taxes over this Parliament was about 4.5 per cent. a year. Obviously, that figure is now a tiny bit lower, but not all that much. That compares with 1.8 per cent. between 1979 and 1997. I am indebted to the Institute for Fiscal Studies for pointing out that there were tax rises of 2 per cent. a year between 1979 and 1990, and of 1.3 per cent. between 1990 and 1997.

    So much for the 22 Tory tax rises, or, indeed, the unsustainable proposition – unsustainable except by malice – that the previous Government wrecked the Tory tradition of low taxation. Some of my right hon. and hon. Friends who rather timidly accepted that fiction in the early part of this Parliament can now feel comforted that it was not true and refute it. They need not concede, but may safely move on and reassert our traditional tax credentials. Taxes were not unduly increased, despite the pressures of a recession that began in the 1980s and cast its shadow into the 1990s – although not, from the point of view of the health of the economy, much beyond 1992.

    The Chancellor is ever ready to gloss over the excellent parts of his inheritance. He cherry-picks the bits on which he can make party political capital, and I do not blame him for that: most politicians do. However, he misses other bits. He is, after all, a very political Chancellor who wishes to be Prime Minister, and he is doing a bit of image building.

    We need more facts and less of the fiction that we so often hear. The economy has been growing steadily since 1992, before – some hon. Members may not wish to hear this next point – sterling left the exchange rate mechanism. Unemployment has also been falling since that economic recovery began, and the very welcome job growth across the country – in both the number and the variety of jobs – has been consistent throughout the previous Parliament and this one. Inflation, too, began to decline in the early 1990s and has remained low. It looks set to fluctuate only within historically narrow parameters.

    Mr. Mackinlay The Chancellor has been skilled, but I put that in perspective. Other factors have contributed, such as the ebb and flow of the economy, and I accept, to an extent, that employment growth was under way during the right hon. Gentleman’s stewardship. I have intervened only because of his breathtaking assertion that people are somehow worse off than in 1996, which defies both belief and the litmus test of what one sees and feels. There was extensive unemployment, particularly among poor and unskilled people, during the period to which he refers, and although I do not apportion credit or blame in respect of employment, people are now in jobs. Demonstrably, they are better off.

    Mr. Major Demonstrably, the people in jobs are better off. That is undeniably so, but I was referring to the scale of tax increases. If the hon. Gentleman reads some of the independent research, he will see precisely why I made that comment.

    As it happens, I was about to give credit to the Chancellor. The economy is in good shape and he can take a great deal of satisfaction from that. I shall not be mealy-mouthed: he can take a good bit of credit for it as well. Were he to be similarly candid, he too would offer credit to his predecessors, because he has built on what they did and on a trend that was established five years before he went to the Exchequer.

    For example, some hon. Members, but perhaps not all, believe that an economic miracle began on 2 May 1997. Let us take a date at random – 1 May 1997. Growth was set to be 3.5 per cent. for the next year. Inflation was 2.6 per cent. and stable. Unemployment was falling rapidly and, although still high, was down to just over 1.5 million. The fiscal deficit was falling sharply – a point that the Chancellor invariably overlooks because it embarrasses his campaign to discredit his predecessors. The trend of a falling fiscal deficit was clear, and it was falling sharply. The right hon. Gentleman can take credit for not wrecking the trend, but he cannot take credit for beginning it, for it preceded him by four years.

    I thoroughly welcome the fact that economic management has reached a maturity whereby the two major parties do not feel it necessary to reverse all the actions of their predecessor. That is beneficial to the British economy, and it will remain so for as long as that is the case. I may be wrong, but I think that the Chancellor took that too far in his first two years by adopting the previous Government’s expenditure plans in toto. I can tell the House, and I hope that it is not a great shock, that we certainly would not have done that. We would have increased them in the two public expenditure rounds that followed, as we had in every public expenditure round since 1979.

    Stakhanovite is one word; masochistic is another, which might perhaps describe more plainly the Chancellor’s disposition. He has been an economic masochist over public spending. We hear a huge amount about public spending, and the Secretary of State for Education and Employment was at it as well this afternoon, but despite the hype about the unprecedented sums for health and education, the fact is that the Chancellor has raised taxes by far more than he has increased expenditure. The public have not noticed because one skill that the right hon. Gentleman has perfected is that of counting, and that includes the capacity to double count, overcount and miscount, which he has done repeatedly.

    Again, I am indebted to the Institute for Fiscal Studies: total Government spending in this Parliament has risen at 1.2 per cent. a year in real terms. That is not only less than tax increases, but less than economic growth. It compares with public spending of 2.6 per cent. in the previous Parliament, which is a point that Liberal spokesmen have often made, although they are not often nice about the Conservative party. I am glad to see a nod of agreement, rather than a shake of the head, from the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan), because that is undoubtedly the case.

    I concede that much of that expenditure was not discretionary: it resulted from the unavoidable impact of the recession. However, it puts in a better context that hoary old myth about Tory cuts, which the Prime Minister is trying to recycle with his current spate of posters about potential future Tory cuts. Either he is ill-informed or scaremongering – probably the latter.

    The Government’s publicity on cuts is familiar: it is an echo from the past. It was an odd experience in the last Parliament to be taunted by the Labour party over so-called cuts while hostile monetarists attacked us for spending far too much money.

    Mr. Willis Nothing has changed.

    Mr. Major The Rt Hon. Gentleman may be right. The health of the economy in 1997 and subsequently suggests that we may have got that balance about right.

    During this Parliament, the Chancellor has benefited from the supply side reforms of the 1980s and the disinflation brought about by the policies of the 1990s. When he chants his mantra of boom and bust – I lost count of the number of times that he and the Prime Minister uttered such drivel last week – he should remember that the last unsustainable boom was well over a decade ago. That has not stopped the Prime Minister depicting my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition and my right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor as Mr. Boom and Mr. Bust. [Interruption.] The Financial Secretary to the Treasury sniggers, but that is the politics of sneer and jeer. Neither of my right hon. Friends were policy makers at the time of the last boom, and one of them had barely been in the House of Commons.

    There is a boom and bust today: a boom in tax raising and a bust in the competitiveness of manufacturing industry. Perhaps the Chancellor and the Prime Minister should concentrate on that boom and bust.

    Mr. Geraint Davies Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

    Mr. Major I shall make a little progress, if the hon. Gentleman does not mind.

    The Chancellor of the Exchequer is a redistributive Chancellor. He tries to hide that fact, but it is evident, and from his perspective he should not hide it. He aims to redistribute to the less well-off, but in general he redistributes to the Inland Revenue. Even his well-intentioned schemes are not wholly successful. I do not disagree with all of them. Bits of what the Chancellor has done have been good social justice, and if I had been in government with the economy that he now has, I would certainly have taken some of the measures that he has taken, and I am not remotely shy about saying so. However, some of those schemes have not been successful.

    The Chancellor abolished the married couples allowance last year, and this year – after a helpful 12-month gap for the Treasury and the Inland Revenue – he has introduced a children’s tax credit to replace it. However, many people will not receive that credit, because it is means-tested and millions will lose either some or all of it on the means-tested taper.

    The organisation of that tax credit is a shambles. As it is based on the highest-earning member of the household, it throws up huge and unacceptable anomalies. If one parent works and earns £42,000 a year, no payment of the child tax credit is made, whereas if both parents are at work, with no one at home with the child, and earn £35,000 each, the full credit is payable. As a means of social justice, attacking poverty and helping low-income families with children, this scheme is nonsense on stilts. If the Chancellor were serious, he would have examined those problems and sought to correct them before introducing the tax credit in its present form.

    The minimum income guarantee is the Chancellor’s safety net against poverty, but it is so complex that more than one third of eligible pensioners do not claim it. The form is so complex and absurd that a large percentage of graduates might not claim it.

    The 10p band extension is right in principle. I do not disapprove of minimising tax on lower income groups. However, the proposal is so niggardly and mean as to be almost pointless. The maximum gain from the Chancellor’s measures in the Budget is 75p a week – that figure should strike a chord with Labour Members. Given pensioners’ response to that amount previously, surely he should have done it differently.

    Many of the main effects of all economic management, by every Chancellor of the Exchequer, become apparent some years after the announcement of the original tax and spending decisions. This Chancellor was lucky. He was lucky in his predecessors – lucky, notably, that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) and my right hon. and noble Friend Lord Lamont made the painful and unpopular decisions that contributed so much to the subsequent benign situation of which the present Chancellor has made such use in this Parliament. And – unless my memory is failing – I seem to recall that they made those decisions in the teeth of unrelenting opposition, not least from the present Chancellor and the Prime Minister.

    I will not be in the House to see the Chancellor’s legacy at first hand, but much of it is now predetermined. He inherited an economy of falling unemployment and low inflation, and he has maintained it. That was well done; but under his stewardship also, taxes have risen too much. The tax system has become far more complex. Manufacturing industry has declined further. Regulations have soared. Increases in business taxes are undermining competitiveness, and so in due course will the social charter, whose economic folly is not yet fully apparent but will become so. It is, in truth, a mixed record – some good, some bad – for this luckiest and most fortunate of modern Chancellors of the Exchequer.

    I cannot be certain, but this may well be the last occasion on which I shall speak in the House. Let me say that it has been a privilege beyond measure to be here, in this mother of Parliaments. I hope that the next generation of hon. Members, whichever of our great parties they may represent, will feel as I did when I first came to the House; I hope that they will feel that way in future, and I hope that we shall be able to end the miserable political climate of spin and counterspin that has grown up in recent years.

    We need to separate fact from fiction, substance from soundbite, information from innuendo. The public – the electorate – the people who sent us here – deserve more than to be spoon-fed a cocktail of headline-grabbing feel-good stories. They deserve the truth, unvarnished sometimes, but the truth, and every Member of this House, whether Minister or Back Bencher, has the obligation – the duty – to provide it.

    Mr. Jim Cunningham (Coventry, South) I hope that that was not the last speech that the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major) will make in the Chamber. We can agree with some of what he says from time to time and disagree with other things he says, but we must all recognise that he has made interesting contributions to the House over the years – and, indeed, ended up being Prime Minister as a result. I hope that we shall hear from him one last time: he may say things that Labour Members do not like sometimes, but that is the nature of politics and the nature of debate.

  • John Major’s Commons Statement on the 1996 European Council in Florence – 24 June 1996

    Below is the text of Mr Major’s Commons Statement on the 1996 European Council held in Florence, made on 24th June 1996.

    PRIME MINISTER:

    The Prime Minister (Mr. John Major): With permission, Madam Speaker, I shall make a statement on the meeting of the European Council in Florence on 21 and 22 June, which I attended with my right hon. and learned Friends the Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Boothferry (Mr. Davis). I have placed the conclusions of the Council in the Library. I shall deal first with beef, then with the other issues discussed.

    In my statement on 21 May, I shared with the House the Government’s frustration that, two months after an unjustified ban on our beef exports had been imposed, some member states were still unwilling to address on a rational, scientific basis a clear path to lift the ban. I accordingly announced a policy of non-co-operation until two specific objectives had been achieved: the lifting of the ban on beef derivatives and agreement on a clear framework leading to lifting of the wider ban. In accordance with that policy, we subsequently blocked 74 decisions that required the unanimous approval of member states.

    The first objective was achieved on 10 June, when the ban on beef derivatives was lifted. That was followed on 19 June by unanimous approval of our bovine spongiform encephalopathy eradication plan by the Standing Veterinary Committee. In Florence on 21 June, the second objective was achieved when the European Council unanimously accepted the framework and procedures put forward by the Commission for lifting of the wider ban, which were based closely on our proposals. Both objectives were secured in precisely one month. I have no doubt that the policy that we reluctantly adopted was the decisive factor in ensuring that result in such a short space of time.

    The framework sets out steps for lifting the ban in stages. The Florence conclusions make it clear that decisions on each stage will be taken

    “only and exclusively on the basis of public health and objective scientific criteria and of the judgement of the Commission”.

    That is what we insisted upon above all. I was therefore able to lift our non-co-operation policy once the framework had been agreed. It is now up to us to meet the conditions for lifting the ban set out in the framework. There are five stages for that.

    We aim to be in a position to tell the Commission by October that we have met the necessary conditions for decisions to lift the ban on two of the five stages–that is, certified herds and animals born after a specified date and their meat. That is subject in particular to clearance of the backlog of animals awaiting slaughter in the 30-month-plus scheme, and a start to the accelerated slaughter of cattle particularly at risk of developing BSE.

    Removal of the ban in those two areas would reopen to our industry an export market worth initially about £100 million a year, increasing rapidly thereafter as the certified herds scheme gains momentum. Also by October, I expect a Commission proposal on a third stage–embryos–subject to the scientists giving them a clean bill of health. I believe that we should have met the conditions necessary for a decision to lift the ban on the fourth stage–meat from all animals under 30 months–by November.

    Securing agreement on those steps would restore the position on beef exports to what it was before 27 March, except in the areas where we have prohibited sale in the UK. In other words, we would be in a position of being able to sell for export to the EU young animals and all the beef that could then be sold in the UK. That would open the way for exports worth some £530 million per year. The only remaining category is meat from animals over 30 months except, of course–as I indicated to the House a moment ago–for that from certified herds, which should be lifted in October. Meat from animals over 30 months is still banned in the UK because of the greater incidence of BSE in older animals.

    The targets that we have set are ambitious. It is now up to us in this country–the farming and ancillary industries and the Government–to ensure that we meet them. The point is that this timetable is essentially in our hands. When we have met the conditions, the normal procedures for such decisions, involving the Standing Veterinary Committee in particular, will apply. But we have the firm commitment from all Heads of Government in Florence that those decisions will be taken only on the basis of scientific and objective criteria.

    One aspect not adequately covered in the Commission framework is the early export of British beef to third countries. That was complicated in the minds of our partners by their concerns about the possibility of re-export to the EU, and by the European Court of Justice case against the Commission. We believe that our case against the ban on exports to third countries is particularly strong, and our court application for interim relief should be decided in the next few days.

    We none the less secured a presidency statement–accepted, it has to be said, reluctantly by the other member states and the Commission–that the Commission will consider individual requests from third countries to buy British beef exclusively for their domestic markets. If such requests come forward soon, I hope that, either through Commission procedures or the European Court case, exports from Britain to third countries will begin to flow.

    We have a lot to do in a short time to meet the conditions necessary to enable the EU and world markets to be fully open again. But I believe that we have taken a great step forward in the past few days. We shall go on doing everything possible to protect public health, restore consumer confidence and secure the interests of the British beef industry. Our overriding aim remains, as it has been from the start, the eradication of BSE from Britain.

    Let me now refer briefly to the other main issues discussed in Florence–the intergovernmental conference, employment, economic and monetary union and the Europol convention.

    The European Council agreed that the intergovernmental conference should now turn from analysis to negotiation. We need to move from exchanging ideas to considering texts. I was therefore happy to lead the call for an outline treaty text to be prepared in time for the Dublin European Council in December. The Government’s position on the substance remains as set out in the White Paper, “A Partnership of Nations”. In Florence, I set out once again our policies in key areas such as qualified majority voting, and the need for flexibility as the EU further enlarges.

    We also discussed employment. At the Essen European Council in 1994, we agreed an approach that recognised the primacy of action by member states and recommended a number of lines of action reflecting this Government’s approach. In Florence, the European Council confirmed the priority attached to tackling unemployment and agreed to carry forward the Essen approach, taking account of the initiative taken by the President of the Commission on a confidence pact for employment. There are some good things in this document, but others that we cannot accept.

    Unemployment in this country is now the lowest of any major European competitor. We have created more jobs over the past three years than Germany, France, Italy and Spain–indeed, we have created more than Germany, France, Italy and Spain added together. That is because we have followed policies that help job creation. That is why we will not sign the Maastricht social chapter or accept European Union measures that would damage competitiveness or inhibit our ability to pursue our own successful policies.

    Florence was not a decisive stage in discussions on economic and monetary union. The European Council considered a report from Economic and Finance Ministers on work done since Madrid. That included the relationship between those inside and those outside any potential future single currency. It covered the proposal to create a new exchange rate mechanism. Most of our partners favour creating such arrangements. Let me assure the House that it has been confirmed that any new scheme of that sort will be voluntary, and I reaffirm that this country will not rejoin any new ERM.

    The European Council also reached agreement on the role of the European Court of Justice in the Europol convention. I said at the Cannes European Council that the ECJ would not be the arbiter in any case relating to Europol which involved the United Kingdom Government or arose in the courts of the UK. Other member states saw a need for a role for the ECJ on questions of interpretation of the convention arising in their national courts.

    The outcome allows other member states the option of providing such a role for the ECJ for themselves. The United Kingdom and our courts will not be bound by that in any way. That is a satisfactory outcome and a further example of the EU developing in flexible ways.

    Finally, the European Council confirmed that enlargement negotiations with central European countries should open at the same time as with Cyprus and Malta–that is, six months after the intergovernmental conference ends. It also agreed a number of statements on external issues, the most important of which were on the middle east and Russia.

    The Florence European Council marked a decisive turning point in our efforts to protect the interests of the hundreds of thousands of people working in the British beef industry. The issue will now be dealt with on a proper, rational basis, with the timetable for the lifting of the ban dependent on our own efforts. That has enabled the restoration of normal business in the European Union.

    This has been a difficult episode in this country’s relationship with Europe and not one that I was seeking. We were right to stand up for our interests, but I now look forward to working with our partners on our positive vision of Europe as a strong partnership of nations.

    Mr. Tony Blair (Sedgefield): I shall confine my remarks mainly to beef. First, on dates, the Prime Minister chose his words with elaborate care. Can we be clear as to what he is saying? Is he saying that he can give dates and that the ban will finally go in total in November?

    Some Conservative Members are now shaking their heads, but that was the clear impression–they are now all shaking their heads, but if one was listening to the Prime Minister, that was the impression–[Hon. Members: “The right hon. Gentleman was not listening.”] I was listening.

    If the Prime Minister is now saying that those are definite dates, why were they not in the European Union agreement? I suspect–perhaps he will confirm this–that all that he is really saying is that he will table proposals by October and November, but the decision will be taken through the process of the veterinary committee, inspection, verification and so on.

    So, can we return to the question that we have consistently asked the right hon. Gentleman? When will the ban finally be lifted, so that people in Europe can eat British beef under the same conditions as people in Britain?

    Secondly, will the Prime Minister confirm that–again, contrary to the impression that he sought to give–there is no automatic link under the agreement between the steps that Britain must take and steps towards lifting the ban? We are obliged to do certain things in Britain, but other member states are simply obliged to follow certain procedures. There is no binding agreement on them, merely an agreement to consider. As for stating that he has won an undertaking that they would refuse consent only on scientific grounds, is not the committee that we have to satisfy the very same veterinary committee with which we had the problems in the first place? It has always ostensibly said that it was acting on scientific grounds; it has never said that it was acting on political grounds. The Prime Minister is no further forward on that.

    If the basis is supposed now to be science, why have we agreed to a massive additional slaughter policy when we say that it is not scientifically justified? I suspect that the principal changes that the Prime Minister got were made once the British Government had submitted a programme for eradicating BSE and taken it round the European capitals–which, frankly, is something that they should have done a couple of months before.

    Thirdly, as for the much vaunted concession on the third country ban, I agree that the ban is completely unjustified, but will the Prime Minister confirm: that it is only an undertaking from the Italian presidency and not an undertaking from the European Union; that it has no legal force; and that within minutes of it being given, a Commission official said:

    “it didn’t commit the Commission to anything”?

    Foreign Ministers have said that the third country ban will remain. Is that right or not?

    Fourthly, will the Prime Minister confirm that the extra compensation at Florence was for all European Union farmers and that British farmers will see only a small part of it? Will he confirm also that this country’s bill, net of European Union payments, for the BSE crisis will be well in excess of £2 billion in the years to come? Is that not the price that the British people will pay for the utter incompetence with which the matter has been handled from the very beginning: the failure to intervene in the way necessary when BSE began; the failure to compensate and inform farmers when the crisis was under way; the failure to announce the link with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, with proper consultation; and now the failure to secure the lifting of the ban once one was imposed?

    The Whitehall farce even continued at Florence, where we had the spectacle of the Government trying to hang on to one Minister who was threatening to resign and hanging the poor Minister of Agriculture out to dry to try to get him to resign. [Hon. Members: “Where is he?”] There appears to be a notable absentee from our deliberations.

    This has been an object lesson in the Government’s capacity to turn any crisis into a catastrophe. The truth is that whatever fig leaf the Prime Minister has today, the damage will be with this country for many years to come.

    The Prime Minister: The right hon. Gentleman has just illustrated that he is not interested in what is right for this country. In this House, he claimed to support our policy of non-co-operation because he did not have the guts to criticise it. In Germany, he criticised British policy because he did not have the guts to defend it. He has spent half his time claiming that we have been too hard in our relations with Europe, and then jumped to the other side of the fence and claimed that we have been too soft. He has invented objectives that we did not set and then criticised us for not meeting them. It is my job to look after the interests of the British beef industry, and despite his obstruction and his determination to do anything or say anything, irrespective of the damage to the beef industry, in his own interests, that is precisely what I have done.

    Let me reiterate the points that were clearly made in my statement, which the right hon. Gentleman then asked about again, having failed to understand them. First, there is no massive additional slaughter policy, as I have explained to him repeatedly on many occasions. I hope that he now fully understands that. On the mechanism for the future, the great new European is effectively saying that he distrusts the word given to Britain by the European Heads of Government and by the European Commission. He distrusts it, despite all that he has said. Let us be clear about what he is about.

    Let me deal with some of the other points. As I explained repeatedly in my statement, we have set out what we sought at the outset: objective criteria that we can meet in order that the ban can be lifted. The dates for lifting therefore lie in the hands of the British agriculture industry and the British Government; I have set out the dates by which we think that they will be met on each and every part of the agreement over the past few minutes. It is a shame that the right hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair) failed to understand that. [Interruption.] I invite hon. Members to read the statement when it is printed in Hansard tomorrow; if they did not understand it when I made it, perhaps they will understand it when they read it.

    We sought an agreement that that matter would be dealt with objectively, without politically blocking the correct scientific judgment. That is what has happened in the past; that is the political commitment that we have achieved; that is the commitment that we expect our partners to meet.

    Mr. Douglas Hurd (Witney): Given that the Government adopted a legitimate, even familiar, tactic for a specific and limited objective that they have now obtained, will my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister take no notice of the Leader of the Opposition’s confused mischief making? Does my right hon. Friend accept that the best service that the House, particularly we on the Conservative Benches, can do in the difficult times that lie ahead is to take what may be the last chance in this Parliament to give united and effective support for the policy which my right hon. Friend set out last week and which is also set out in the Foreign Secretary’s White Paper, published in the spring?

    The Prime Minister: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who is certainly right about the Leader of the Opposition’s capacity for mischief against the national interest. It is equally true that we have set out in our White Paper what we believe is the right way for future developments in the European Union in this country’s interests. We have set out a clearer definition of that than any other country that will be negotiating in the intergovernmental conference. It is precisely so that we can get down to the details that I invited the Irish presidency to introduce detailed texts, so that we can begin to look at the details of what people specifically expect to be agreed at the intergovernmental conference rather than deal with the generalities, which have been the subject of the debate so far.

    Mr. Paddy Ashdown (Yeovil): I am glad that the puerile policy of posturing masquerading as war on Europe is now over. When the Prime Minister announced it, I told him that it would achieve nothing that could not be achieved by other means. The damage that has been done to Britain’s influence and respect will be great. The Prime Minister tells us that he had to take the action as Europe had been obstructive for eight weeks; is not the truth that the Government did nothing for eight weeks, which is why nothing happened? The Prime Minister tells us that we have set hurdles that were not originally set. Does he remember the statement made by his Downing street spokesman on 22 May, the day after he announced the policy in the House of Commons? Presumably speaking on the Prime Minister’s behalf, the spokesman from No. 10 Downing Street said:

    “Nothing short of a full timetable for the phased lifting of the entire beef ban will be sufficient.”

    Is it not true that no such thing has been achieved?

    The Prime Minister said that he was looking for binding commitments from our partners in Europe. Is it not true that every one of the steps must be validated through the Commission, the Scientific Veterinary Committee, the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee–“super-SEAC”–and the Standing Veterinary Committee–the very people who, the Prime Minister claims, obstructed the actions in the first place? Far from our achieving success in lifting the third country ban, is it not true that, within minutes of the Foreign Secretary announcing that success, a Commission spokesman,in whose hands the matter is supposed to be, said that any beef that we were not able to sell to Germany or France could not be sold to South Africa?

    We shall judge the package, which is far heavier and more damaging to British industry than it would have been if the Government had acted earlier and postured later against three factors. The first factor is the Prime Minister’s timetable: if he wants to clear the 30-month-plus backlog by October, he will have to put a lot more effort and resources into doing so. The second factor involves the level of compensation. The third factor relates to whether the binding responses, which are necessary as we pass each of the thresholds, have been achieved.

    It is perfectly clear that the Prime Minister–like a previous Prime Minister–has returned from Europe claiming a victory, the cost of which we shall feel increasingly over the months ahead. This has been a policy of folly abroad and chaos at home, which has left Britain damaged both abroad and at home.

    The Prime Minister: I certainly do not intend to take any lectures on posturing from the right hon. Gentleman, who approaches every issue in Europe from a kneeling position–whether this country is right or wrong. He is accurate, in that he has said before all the things that he has repeated today. He was wrong then and he is wrong in most of what he has had to say today. The statement that he has quoted is wholly inaccurate. I have seen the right hon. Gentleman’s letter containing the assertion, and I have written back to him this morning telling him that he is wrong, and that no such statement was made. The right hon. Gentleman had better take that up with the Press Association.

    If the right hon. Gentleman looks at what I said in the House of Commons, he will see what the policy of the Government was at the outset and what it has remained, right from the beginning of this affair through to the present time.

    Both the right hon. Gentleman and the Labour leader, who says that the ban was unjustified, have failed to say what they would have done in the circumstances. They would have done absolutely nothing–except carp and criticise, the twin names by which we have come to know them.

    Mr. John Redwood (Wokingham): I am glad that my right hon. Friend has had success in getting our EC partners to see the difficulties facing our beef industry. I trust that people in this House will think twice before jeopardising more livelihoods and businesses in the beef industry.

    Does my right hon. Friend have equally persuasive ways of raising the issues of the powers of the European Court of Justice and the plight of our fishing industry, which are also on our minds?

    The Prime Minister: As I have told the House, both matters will certainly be subject to negotiation during the intergovernmental conference. I mentioned quota hopping, which was certainly not what was envisaged when the common fisheries policy was agreed. As I said in my statement today and in our White Paper, we seek some changes in the European Court of Justice also.

    Mr. Peter Shore (Bethnal Green and Stepney): This is not exactly an occasion for national rejoicing; but will the Prime Minister now answer the question put to him by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair)? Do we not, at every stage, have to obtain not just the consent of the European Commission for relieving the ban, but the consent of the Standing Veterinary Committee, a nationally appointed body? Is it not also true that the great cost of the mass slaughter–or 80 per cent. of it–will have to be borne by the British taxpayer and the Treasury? Will the right hon. Gentleman give an estimate of the actual sums involved?

    The Prime Minister: I believe that I have given the estimates over a period of three years before–but the point that the right hon. Gentleman did not address and may care to deal with now is that the principal issue is getting the ban lifted. It has never been a question of extra resources from the EU, for two good reasons.

    First, we have sought to keep all spending across the EU within the guidelines approved for expenditure. There are repeated claims from other nations wanting to break those guidelines; breaking them would result in substantial extra costs to this country. So if we sought to break the guidelines by asking for extra resources, the costs for this country would increase, not diminish, over the years ahead. I do not think that a prudent policy to follow, and I have no intention of following it.

    Equally, I have no intention of letting anyone take the opportunity of extra help being sought to change the agreements that we would otherwise seek to reach in the intergovernmental conference. For both those reasons, we do not propose to seek extra resources beyond those that normally apply under arrangements agreed in the past for circumstances such as these. There is also the special question of the British rebate and the arrangements that inhibit it when an extra payment needs to be made. They are the credible reasons why it is not in this country’s interests to seek compensation over and above what is normally available under the usual arrangements. It is impossible to determine the cost, but we broadly anticipate that it will be approximately £2 billion over the next three years.

    Mr. George Walden (Buckingham): Is my right hon. Friend aware that we have lost prestige, that we have lost money and that we have lost umpteen thousand more cows? If we feel big after that, we must have been feeling rather small before. Is he also aware that the Labour party did not condemn his tactic outright because it was frightened by the atmosphere of petty chauvinism in the press, which helped to push him into his mistaken policy in the first place?

    The Prime Minister: I cannot answer in relation to the judgments of the Labour party, but I can answer in relation to the Government’s position. We were not prepared to be in a position where objective criteria were ignored, where there was no way to seek a removal of the ban and where science was deliberately being subordinated to national prejudice in countries across Europe, rather than there being an objective judgment of what ought to be done to help a member state facing a particular difficulty.

    I can recall no occasion in the past when a single nation state faced a difficulty of this sort and political criteria in the other member states prevented a solution that was unanimously proposed by the Commission and supported by scientific evidence. Before my hon. Friend criticises the Government or anyone else, he should bear that in mind.

    Mr. Giles Radice (North Durham): Is it not the Prime Minister’s duty to remind the Euro-sceptics on his Back Benches, who have rubbished the European Union throughout the crisis, that it would not have been possible to reach an agreement without the help of the European Commission, the European Council of Ministers, the European Court of Justice and European money?

    The Prime Minister: If the hon. Gentleman looks at the many statements that I have made, he will see that I have made it clear that the Commission and the presidency have played a helpful role in seeking to find a way through these difficulties. However, that is not universally the case with the other member states. I have thanked the presidency and the Commission–most recently at my press conference in Florence–for the support that they have given us during this difficult period.

    Sir Teddy Taylor (Southend, East): Is it not a clear sign of the Prime Minister’s success in negotiating that only this morning the senior spokesman for the German Chancellor stated that he would have preferred to deal with the Leader of the Opposition, because he would have been more accommodating to German interests?

    The Prime Minister was quite right to tell his colleagues that Britain’s unemployment has been much lower than theirs since we left the ERM, but will he also make the point to them that the two European states that voted not to join the EC have even lower unemployment rates? Should they not think through the implications?

    The Prime Minister: I am sure that they will make their own decisions on that and on other matters. My hon. Friend is quite right about the relative rates of unemployment. Unemployment has continued to fall in this country for almost three years, but it has remained constant or increased in other countries–all of which live in the same general economic climate. I do not think that the difference in policies is an accident in the sense that unemployment has been falling in this country. The House will have noted my hon. Friend’s comments about the Leader of the Opposition with interest.

    Mr. Doug Hoyle (Warrington, North): Does the Prime Minister remember that on 21 May he said to us that he would be seeking a clear framework that would lead to the lifting of the European ban and the worldwide ban on British beef? However, he has returned with an agreement that gives us no timetable, no dates and no guarantees. He could have got that agreement without the policy of non-co-operation. He has soured relations with our European partners and he has left a bitter legacy for a long time to come. Even our closest friends, such as the Irish Taoiseach, said that the policy of non-co-operation was a mistake. Has not the Prime Minister–

    Madam Speaker: Order. This is not a debate. Almost the entire House wishes to ask a question, so questions to the Prime Minister must be brisk and I am sure that he will oblige and give brisk answers. Will the hon. Gentleman now put a question?

    Mr. Hoyle: Yes, I shall. The Prime Minister has got nothing for Britain. When will the ban be lifted by Europe and when will the worldwide ban be lifted?

    The Prime Minister: On the last point, if the hon. Gentleman reads the statement, he will find out. If he thinks that I could have got that ban lifted without the non-co-operation policy, why was there no progress over an eight-week period and why was there great progress over the next four weeks? The reality is that we accelerated the agreement of a framework and ensured the lifting of the beef derivatives ban precisely because of the action we took.

    Mr. John Butterfill (Bournemouth, West): Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Leader of the Opposition is nitpicking over the timetable and has overlooked the fundamental point, which is consumer confidence and its restoration? Having a timetable and an agreed procedure that relies entirely on scientific evidence gives us the means by which worldwide consumer confidence in British beef can be restored.

    The Prime Minister: Of course, my hon. Friend is right. The Leader of the Opposition knows that as well as any Member of the House. He just has his fingers crossed behind his back in the hope that he can score a few political points, irrespective of the reality of the situation.

    Mrs. Margaret Ewing (Moray): Some of us have listened carefully to the Prime Minister’s statement. Does he realise that his use of language in his statement gives no hope at all to the agriculture community in areas such as mine, where thousands of jobs are dependent on that industry? The use of words such as “aim”, “expect”, “believe” and “hope” shows pious optimism by the Prime Minister. The right hon. Gentleman specifically referred to certified herds. How will those certified herds be identified, and does he envisage a region-by-region lifting of the ban, which would be of substantial benefit to Northern Ireland and Scotland, because we have had quality assurance schemes?

    The Prime Minister: It is not specifically region by region, but herd by herd. In Scotland, it is likely that many herds will be certified because of the way in which cattle are reared. It was precisely to provide such help for Scotland and probably other regions that we decided to seek, and obtained, a framework that will enable us to identify herds in collaboration with the agriculture industry and the European Union, so that the ban may be lifted at an earlier date than would otherwise have been possible. As I told the House earlier, I expect that we shall be able to tell the Commission by October when, on the basis of the agreement that we have reached, the objective criteria would be met and those certified herds would be removed from the ban.

    Mr. Michael Jopling (Westmorland and Lonsdale): Is the Prime Minister aware that the beef settlement is an important and welcome step towards the ultimate solution of the crisis? Is he further aware that he should not take notice of those who speak for the two Opposition parties, who seem to have turned being wise after the event into a minor science? With regard to the accelerated slaughter process and in the event of dairy cows being slaughtered before the end of their natural time, will my right hon. Friend also give an undertaking that if we end up under-producing on the British milk quota, it will not have any long-term adverse effect on our milk quota in years to come?

    The Prime Minister: My right hon. Friend makes an extremely good point about milk quotas, which we are examining at the moment. As to the accelerated slaughter, according to the fourth cohort, it must be voluntary as there is no other way in which it can be done. Farmers will of course receive compensation, the levels of which are being determined.

    Mr. Dennis Skinner (Bolsover): Is the Prime Minister aware that, in industrial terms, he decided to take strike action without a ballot? He wanted to bang together the heads of all those in the Common Market, and it is the British people who have the headache. Will the Prime Minister now answer the questions: when will the ban be lifted and how much will his supreme folly and that of that gang over there cost every man, woman and child in Britain?

    The Prime Minister: The hon. Gentleman manages to carry his own absurdity to further lengths this afternoon even than in the past. I thought that he would welcome a strike without a ballot, based on his reputation and his past–it is the way in which he seems to have operated for most of his life. As to his other questions, I refer him to the answers that I have already given to several of his hon. Friends, when I set out those points.

    Sir Michael Spicer (South Worcestershire): Will my right hon. Friend confirm that the Government have not been diverted by the beef crisis from pursuing their general objectives in Europe as outlined in the White Paper: that is, preventing any further moves towards a federal state of Europe and, where possible, returning powers to this country and to Parliament?

    The Prime Minister: I can certainly confirm that our policies remain as set out in the White Paper, and they were reiterated again in Florence at the weekend.

    Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow): The Prime Minister referred to the middle east in his original statement. Did the Greeks, the Italians or the Germans tell him that they would go ahead and trade with Libya and north Africa, despite the sanctions? Is not British industry the loser, as the recent Egyptian delegation to the House made clear, as a result of sanctions against Libya?

    The Prime Minister: There was no such comment by the countries concerned during any discussions about the middle east. Those discussions tended to deal primarily with the middle east peace process.

    Sir Hector Monro (Dumfries): May I welcome the achievements of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister in Florence, in securing the lifting of the ban in due course? I agree that it is important to get beef off the front pages of the newspapers and back into the high-quality food chain. To achieve that aim, will he ensure that the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food makes fair payments to farmers involving the least possible bureaucracy?

    The Prime Minister: I shall ensure that that is the case.

    Mr. D. N. Campbell-Savours (Workington): The Commission’s position paper requires the introduction of an effective animal identification and movement recording system, with official registration. The hon. Member for Wantage (Mr. Jackson) and I called for those measures 11 weeks ago. Have those 11 weeks been lost? Is the programme under way? Will the Prime Minister provide some details?

    The Prime Minister: On the contrary, the 11 weeks certainly have not been lost. It is a massive undertaking to produce a proper identification programme for all cattle across the country, but that is our intention. A programme of that sort is available in Northern Ireland, but it does not extend across the rest of the United Kingdom. It involves a massive amount of computerisation and co-operation from the agriculture industry. A great deal of progress has been made in the past 11 weeks, and as a result of that progress I was able to set out the indicative dates for the House a few moments ago.

    Mr. Nigel Forman (Carshalton and Wallington): On the basis of what has happened with the beef issue in the past few months, is it not clear that the Government’s tactic of non-co-operation has proved both legitimate and effective? In order to put that in context, will my right hon. Friend tell the House how the 74 occasions on which we used our national veto during the period of non-co-operation relate to the occasions when was it not necessary to use our national veto, because matters were decided by qualified majority voting? That might show the House whether the European Union is as supra-national as some of my hon. Friends claim.

    The Prime Minister: I shall certainly provide my hon. Friend with those figures. I do not carry in my head the number of occasions on which there were qualified majority voting agreements in the past month, during the period of the non-co-operation policy, but my hon. Friend makes a good point. He is also entirely right to point to the fact that the policy has been effective in securing the objectives that I set out at the Dispatch Box, and in securing them far more speedily than would have occurred in any other way.

    Mr. Jeff Rooker (Birmingham, Perry Barr): Will the Prime Minister take this opportunity to confirm that the other members of the European Union are our partners and friends, not our enemies? When he was explaining his proposals to them over the weekend, did he explain why, on 20 March, two of his Ministers came to the House to make statements on the same issue–one raising a health scare about the transfer of BSE to human beings, and the other saying that no cattle would have to be slaughtered as a result? Given the massive job losses in this country and in France and Germany, how did he explain to our partners and friends the fiasco that was started by two Ministers not being remotely aware of the consequences beyond the statements that they made?

    The Prime Minister: I seem to recall that when my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health came to the House, the Opposition congratulated him on bringing the problem to the House as speedily as he had, because it was thought that that was the right way to deal with it. The hon. Gentleman will recall that there had been a leak in the morning papers, I think, that day. In the absence of a statement, undoubtedly there would have been demands from the Opposition for one. Undoubtedly there would have been a private notice question. My right hon. Friend received praise from the Opposition for coming to the House and setting out the position. The way in which the hon. Gentleman refers to it now is a total and utter travesty of what happened.

    Mr. David Howell (Guildford): Can my right hon. Friend detect a strong whiff of sour grapes coming from the Opposition Benches this afternoon? Was it not quite simply a very positive deal, achieved as a result of a tough negotiating approach?

    Moving away from beef, did my right hon. Friend notice at the Florence summit that, whereas previously all the pressure was supposed to be on this country to conform to EU social and labour market policies, it is now the other way round and the EU is seeking to follow our policies? Did he hear any comment on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development forecast that, over the next two years, Britain will be the fastest-growing economy in the whole of Europe?

    The Prime Minister: There was some comment by me, for I certainly mentioned that, but I did not hear a great deal of comment from our friends and partners in the discussion at Florence over the weekend. My right hon. Friend is entirely right that the new position of the Opposition on these matters seems to be, on every occasion, that everybody is right except the United Kingdom. That seems to be the case, whatever the merits of the argument.

    Mr. Peter L. Pike (Burnley): Will the Prime Minister say precisely when and how the scientific basis and information changed to justify the climbdown in the number of cattle to be slaughtered? Will he assure the House that the Minister of Agriculture will not be slaughtered before the last of these cattle are slaughtered?

    The Prime Minister: There was no change in the scientific criteria. My right hon. and learned Friend is at the Agriculture Council in Luxembourg at the moment.

    Sir Jim Spicer (West Dorset): Does my right hon. Friend accept that we all want to consider other members of the European Union as our partners and friends, but after the weekend in Turin, when he was so badly let down by our partners, was it not inevitable that the ban would follow? All of us in the agriculture community very much welcome the support that he has given to the farming community over the past three months. Does he accept that the farming community will take on board the need for the accelerated slaughter, but only if the commonsense approach to it is coupled with fair compensation?

    The Prime Minister: It is certainly true that we were promised co-operation in Turin. It is equally true that a few days later, in the Agriculture Council and elsewhere, that co-operation was noticeable only to the extent that it did not materialise. That is the background to the policy that we subsequently adopted.

    Mr. Llew Smith (Blaenau Gwent): The Prime Minister said that employment matters were also discussed in Florence. As we know, to meet the convergence criteria for a single currency, cuts of £18,000 million in public expenditure and public services such as health and education are required. Would he care to anticipate the likely effects that those cuts will have on employment?

    The Prime Minister: If the hon. Gentleman thinks that that applies to this country, he should have a look at what will be necessary in each and every country right across the European Union. I see that he does think that. He clearly does not envisage the sort of policy that is set out by his party’s Front Bench. There seems to be a certain disagreement between the Labour party’s Front and Back Benches. It is quite sad to see the splits in its European policy that open up daily.

    Sir Wyn Roberts (Conwy): I welcome the underpinning given at Florence to the policy of eradication, as well as progress towards the lifting of the ban. Does my right hon. Friend agree that, come the autumn, the British beef industry should be in a stronger position than it has been for some time, and that the grounds for increased consumer confidence–both here and elsewhere–should be stronger as well? Does it not appear that, if Opposition Members were ever to negotiate on our behalf in Europe, they would be dictators at home and appeasers over there?

    The Prime Minister: My right hon. Friend is right about the impact of our policy over a period. We are seeking a complete eradication policy for BSE. As that is increasingly achieved, it will reopen not only the European markets that have recently fallen foul of the European Union ban, but the markets that were barred to British beef some years ago in the United States and elsewhere. That is why, given the scale of the present problem, it is right for us to seek a full-scale eradication policy. The incidence of BSE is falling dramatically at present, and will continue to do so as a result of the measures that we have adopted.

    Mrs. Alice Mahon (Halifax): Is it true that the eradication plan that the Prime Minister has now accepted is three times larger than the original proposal? In the light of what he has just said, would it not have been better, cheaper and safer to go down that route earlier?

    The Prime Minister: I simply do not recognise the statistic that the hon. Lady has just produced. I have not seen it, and I have no reason to believe that it is remotely accurate. As I just told my right hon. Friend the Member for Conwy (Sir W. Roberts), what we are seeking is a comprehensive plan to eradicate BSE entirely from British herds. I think that that is right in itself. It is certainly right in terms of bringing confidence back to the consumer, and ensuring that British beef–which I consider an excellent product, and which has traditionally been seen as such by the world–can once more enter world markets without let or hindrance.

    Mr. William Cash (Stafford): Did my right hon. Friend note that, in yesterday’s The Sunday Times poll, the British people approved his tough stance by a majority of two to one? Cannot a number of useful lessons be learnt, both by the Labour party and by those who drive for a federal political union in Europe? Those who drive for political union should recognise that we will not–and the British people will not–tolerate the abolition of the veto as expressed by Mr. Dehaene, the Belgian Prime Minister, who, after all, is now governing by decree. As for the Labour party, since our adoption of a tough stance, its rating in opinion polls has dropped by nearly 10 per cent.

    The Prime Minister: I certainly believe that we have been following the right policy on its own merits. My hon. Friend is entirely right about the veto. Some of our European partners would wish all matters to be dealt with by qualified majority voting–which, of course, is what the Labour party signed up to in its European socialist manifesto. The impact of that would be that there would be no veto for this country. I assure the House that, if there had been no veto at the Edinburgh financing arrangements in 1991, we would have lost the British rebate. No other country in the European Union likes the British rebate; every other country would vote to get rid of that rebate, which saves this country millions of pounds a year. The little piece of paper that the Labour party signed in its European socialist manifesto is a little piece of paper that will cost the country billions of pounds and more every single year.

    Mr. Ieuan Wyn Jones (Ynys Mon): Does the Prime Minister realise that there is considerable concern among Welsh farmers at the accelerated slaughter programme, because we are taking out of production some of the most productive animals in the dairy herd? Does he realise that farmers’ disappointment is coupled with the fact that there is no firm timetable for lifting the ban? Will he make it clear what type of compensation package will be introduced for farmers? Will it cover the replacement costs of productive animals and the consequential loss of income? Does he realise that his policy of non-co-operation did not affect the timing or the outcome of the Florence deal, but that it might have affected relations with our European partners?

    The Prime Minister: I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman feels that way, because I just think that he is wrong. I have spent six years sitting round the European table with my partners, and he has not. I can assure him that we have made more progress by following this policy than we would have done if we had followed the policy that he seems to advocate. Animals in the accelerated slaughter scheme would in due course have been slaughtered under the 30-month-plus scheme, and the overwhelming majority of them would have been slaughtered only a few months later than under the arrangements that we advocated last week.

    Compensation will be offered. As I told the House earlier, we are discussing precisely what the compensation will be. I certainly understand the hon. Gentleman’s point on that.

    Mr. John Townend (Bridlington): As the Prime Minister has achieved most of the objectives that he set when he started non-co-operation, would he hesitate to use those tactics again in future if British interests were at risk? My farmers are very worried about the influence of the veterinary committee. If the committee is again subject to political influence–as it has been in the past–will it be able to stop the lifting of the ban, or does the Commission have the power to overrule it?

    The Prime Minister: The answer to my hon. Friend’s last question is, yes, it has the power if it were felt that the committee was not acting on the basis of objective science. That will be extremely helpful. As for his question about policy, very unusual circumstances led us to use that tactic–circumstances that I hope and expect not to see again. I cannot recall another issue on which our European partners voted against the unanimous recommendation of the the Commission, when that unanimous recommendation was clearly backed by science. The position taken by our partners was clearly taken for domestic political reasons and was not objective. That caused our response. I very much hope that that type of circumstance will not occur again.