I thought I would take a leaf out of the shadow Chancellor’s book by bringing a red book into the Chamber to wave around in his style. It is a copy of “The Middle Way”, by Harold Macmillan, written in 1938. I brought it here because I think that what is significant about the Bill is not any of the individual measures, which we all accept
are very technical—they are not particularly headline-grabbing or, dare I say, sexy—but the context. This is a serious point. I think many people feel that they are still living in a time when capitalism itself—in which I believe very strongly—is being questioned. It worries them that it is not seen to be fair, and they fear that our economic system is not rewarding everyone evenly.
Here we are, eight years after the credit crunch and its major impact. Macmillan wrote his book in 1938, nine years after the Wall Street crash, but, then as now, the impact of the crash was still being felt by society, and there was a drive towards populism. I believe that such a move to populism can be resisted only through sensible measures from centre parties that address the injustices of capitalism while still ultimately supporting its success and its growth.
We are very fortunate, in that when Macmillan wrote that book there was high unemployment and a deep depression. The situation was very different, but it was comparable in the sense that people on both the left and the right were turning to much more extreme alternatives. Interestingly, Macmillan’s answer was a national living wage. His answer was nationalisation. His answer was making all kinds of what we might typify as socialist interventions in the economy. Since 2008, we have nationalised the banks. A Conservative Government have introduced a range of measures that could be seen as potentially hitting—dare I say—our voters.
I think that the most classic example, for which I had argued myself, is the introduction of measures relating to buy-to-let landlords. We have seen a huge surge in that area of home ownership, with people owning multiple portfolios. I know that those measures have not been popular with the few. If we were the party of the few and not the many, we would never have introduced them, but we had the guts to do so because we felt that that was right at a time when first-time buyers were struggling ever harder to get on to the property ladder.
I think that this is the key point. The sense of injustice that is out there now, and which leads people to question our economy, is about asset wealth. Yes, wages have been under pressure since the crash, but when we came out of the crash, what did we do? In order to escape the worst effects of the depression, we pumped huge amounts into the economy. Inflating assets again, the help-to-buy scheme and quantitative easing—all those measures were right at the time, and in many ways continue to be.