I welcome the Prime Minister’s speech and the contents of the Gracious Speech.
I urge my right hon. Friend to telephone the President of the United States and say that it is high time Guantanamo Bay was closed down, which we read the President is minded to do. It is a moral blot on the west that people are still there without facing trial or being released for their liberty. If there are people for whom there is not enough evidence for a proper trial but about whom there are still legitimate worries, could they not be let out under surveillance? Surely it is high time we no longer tolerated that prison.
I strongly support what the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister said about our armed forces. They have shown enormous strength, great professional service and huge bravery, especially in Afghanistan. I hope that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary will move to get our troops away from risk and danger in Afghanistan as soon as possible. Some might have to stay there for longer, to provide training and support, but surely the Afghans are by now sufficiently trained to do the patrolling and take on the more dangerous tasks. They have the local languages and contacts. I want our troops out of risk and out of danger. So many have died. They have created the conditions in which the Afghans can now have a more secure future, so please now trust the Afghans and take our troops away from those risks.
I hope that the Prime Minister will be extremely careful about being dragged into any intervention in Syria. None of us likes what the regime is doing—the terror, the bombing and the huge loss of life is unacceptable —but we also know that the forces of opposition range from the friendly and those in favour of democracy and liberty to very different types of people whom we would not normally choose to be our allies. While I welcome the Prime Minister’s wish to use what diplomatic weight the United Kingdom has to try to find a solution, I hope that he will resist any hot-headed moves to commit our troops to Syria, whether directly on the ground or indirectly, and be very careful about the idea that killing some more Syrians might be a helpful contribution to an extremely dangerous situation.
I welcome the fact that the Gracious Speech has relatively few Bills in it. That is very good news. We legislate too much in this House, and we often legislate in haste and repent at our leisure. I think everybody would agree that this Government are trying to reform a very large number of things already. A lot of very complex legislation has been put through affecting many of our public services. Surely now is the time for Ministers to supervise those reforms and ensure that they are well thought through, properly administered and embedded, while the rest of us must subject them, and every penny of public spending that Ministers propose, to increasingly extensive scrutiny.
This Government face a mighty task. They inherited an extremely broken and damaged economy. All Ministers now need to lend their weight and their talent to dealing with that one central issue and not get too distracted by other things of interest abroad, and we in this House need to make sure that every penny they propose to spend is well spent, because the origins of our debt and borrowing crisis lie in an enormous surge in public spending. Unfortunately, some of that spending was not well judged and did not lead to the better schools and hospitals that all parties and people of good will want but, instead, added to the complexity, the unnecessary cost and sometimes the waste throughout the public services.
In order to promote this economic recovery, I hope that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will inject a new sense of urgency through his new energy Minister in the Department of Energy and Climate Change. One of the most oppressive things about our current economic situation is the very high energy prices that have been imposed on individuals, families and businesses, and we now need to regard cheaper energy as fundamental to getting better economic growth. Our American friends and competitors have energy prices 50% below our own for running industry, which these days is often more energy-intensive than labour-intensive. That is too big a gap, and it is a matter of great urgency. I hope the Government will look very carefully at ways to get energy prices down and to go for cheaper energy in the United Kingdom.