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JONES – PRIME MINISTER IS TRYING TO SAVE HIS OWN SKIN

Westminster, 18 December, 2008

Summing up for the Opposition in the Welsh Grand Committee debate on the Queen’s speech today, Clwyd West MP, David Jones, said:

When the Prime Minister decided not to call an election in the autumn of 2007, he said that he did so because he wanted to have the time to set out his “vision” to the country.
The result of 15 months of formulation of that “vision” is the thinnest Queen’s speech for many years.
The fact is that the Prime Minister has no big vision for Britain.
He is a Prime Minister who operates on a short-termist basis.
It has now become increasingly obvious that this is a fag-end Government limping towards an inevitable conclusion.
The Prime Minister, who must be kicking himself that he did not have the courage to go to the country in October 2007, is now desperately clinging to power without any real idea what to do next.
This Queen’s speech reflects that.
There are some good ideas, but the best ones are ideas that the Prime Minister has pinched from the Conservative Party.
We do not begrudge him doing that.
Indeed, if they make the country a better place for people to live, then he is welcome to them.
Apart from the Conservative ideas, however, there is very little of substance.
The Government have spun the line that the Queen’s speech has been streamlined to allow ministers to “focus on the economy”.
But their claims about the economy are falling apart.
As Chancellor, the Prime Minister boasted continually about his prudence, yet his so-called prudence has landed this country with the largest budget deficit in the developed world and the largest since records began in this country.
He claimed to have ended boom and bust.
Well, he certainly succeeded in the first part of that.
And now the Prime Minister boasts that he is the man to get us through the recession; indeed, he says that he has saved the world.
The truth is he is doing his best to save his own skin.
But sadly, whilst he clings on to power, the country goes from bad to worse.
Unemployment in November was over 1.92 million, 98,000 in Wales.
It has now, given the mass redundancies over the last 2 months, probably passed the 2 million mark.
The judgment of the international community on this Government’s record is amply set out in the collapse of the pound against both the dollar and the euro.
When I checked at lunchtime, the pound stood at just over $1.37; last July, it was over two dollars.

This is a Government that has run out of ideas and that has nothing big to say to the people of the UK or the people of Wales.
This set of proposals may well turn out to be this Government’s last Queen’s speech.
For the good of the people of the UK, for the good of the people of Wales, one can only fervently hope that it is.