European Affairs

I do know of that, but I would trace the problem back even further. Martin Wiener and Correlli Barnett trace it back to the 19th century, when finance was always able to outwit manufacturing. There is a connivance whereby the City of London has grown more powerful. It has done so not only in its own right, but because it has destroyed manufacturing. Any manufacturer in this country will be incandescent at their inability to derive flows of capital. The capital gets sucked up into housing, high finance and bank-rolling around the world at the expense of our manufacturing industry. If we are serious about restoring that industry—and we have an opportunity to do so given the relative depreciation of the pound—we can only do so if we go back to owning those assets nationally and deriving the ability to manufacture in our own right in this country. That would begin to raise the role of manufacturing in terms of its GDP percentage, and that should be one of our targets. I am not a great target setter—Governments tend to set all manner of targets and then cannot reach them—but we should aim to double the amount of manufacturing over the lifetime of the next two Parliaments. That is not much to ask, given that that is where we were in 1997. We probably will not get back in the next two decades what we lost in the last decade, and I realise how hard it will be, but that is what we have to do. The anti-industrial culture that has been rife in this country for the last 100 years or more has to be taken on. I never worry when the City of London has its wings clipped or when high finance is curtailed and controlled, because it is at the root of the failings of the British political system. All that has happened is that the City of London has exported its power to the EU, which has been a willing co-conspirator in that regard, and British manufacturing has declined ever more quickly. We must face up to that problem, because otherwise we will rue the day that we failed to deal with it. As always on these occasions, there seem to be more sceptical voices on the Labour Benches than voices in favour of the EU. That is because those of us who care passionately about Europe are still fighting our corner. We may not be in the majority at the moment, but stranger things have happened and parties have changed their mind.