My hon. Friend, with his emollient and soothing words, makes a fair point. The Minister has done a fantastic job in presenting these compromises. However, they raise severe questions both in terms of the specificity of the number of companies that will be affected by this additional change and the fact that they were presented to this House at the last minute on a “trust us, we will change it” basis. Yes, it is a step in the right direction, but would it not have been so much better to have this sorted out before and to have included the proposals in the Bill or in the amendments so that we could debate them here today in this House?
This issue shows some of the problems with Government intervention into industry. Essentially, anyone who runs a business knows that they cannot trust the politicians. They cannot trust the politicians to keep the guidelines for the industry safe and secure if we have an interventionist as Business Secretary, and we certainly have that. They cannot trust the Government if they know that they will change the rules one week so that the next week they will affect the industry.
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On Second Reading, I likened the Secretary of State to Saruman, the all-seeing wizard in “The Lord of the Rings”—somebody who in his quest for order and discipline found his own downfall. That is the fate of all of us in this House. We believe that because we are politicians we can somehow magically understand what makes an entrepreneur and what makes an industry work. There are times when industries fail and when intervention is required, but they are far less frequent than we in this place would like to think is the case and we should be modest in our efforts to change things that are working. We should be precise about the regulations we seek to impose and we should listen intently to those who are affected by the changes we make. Today, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) has said, the Government have made modest changes, but as someone who believes passionately in small business I do not want us to relent. I fear the reach of the interventionists in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
We have today raised the standards of the family brewers: the lion rampant of Camerons brewery in Hartlepool; the black swan of Donnington’s of Stow-
on-the-Wold; the griffin of the Fuller’s brewery of Chiswick; and, most notably of all, the eagle of Charles Wells of Bedford. To these standards, to my Conservative colleagues, to the principles of family and small business, I say be steadfast and stand against Saruman. Let us ensure that our principles are firm and yield not one quarter in defence of family businesses.