Sir Edward Leigh

It is a great honour to follow the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Adam Jogee), who is fast establishing a reputation as an effective parliamentarian and a thoroughly nice chap. His speech was appropriate and excellent in every single way, and I agreed with everything he said. It is not often that Labour MPs quote former Tory Prime Ministers—that was certainly a first, and we all much enjoyed it. Of course, as we all do, the hon. Gentleman rightly mentioned the famous people from his constituency. Well, I can match that for Lincolnshire. I can talk of Sir Isaac Newton, John Smith of the pilgrim fathers, the great poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Joan Plowright. I can also mention one other person who came from Lincolnshire. I do not want to break the cosy consensus of this debate, but it is a lady whom I greatly admire. I believe that she restored greatness to this country when she was Prime Minister—I need not even mention her name because she is so famous. St George is a saint. He was not English, of course. When the far right try to capture the flag of St George, they should perhaps try to remember that he was an Anatolian Greek. I think it is quite good that our national saint is not actually English, and that we know virtually nothing about him. What we do know is based purely on legend and is almost certainly wrong. I think that says much about the easy-going nature of the English people. We are surrounded by saints here. In the Undercroft, we have St Etheldreda, St Edward the Confessor, St Margaret of Scotland, St Edmund and many more. In Central Lobby, we have the four great patron saints of our countries. There is a well-worn joke about St Andrew being on the way to the bar, St Patrick on the way to the exit, St David on the way to this Chamber, where we all like to talk, and St George on the way to the Lords. Saints unite; politicians divide. I have many times expressed in this Chamber—it is rather an unfashionable point of view, but I will mention it briefly—the importance of religion in binding people together. Religion, on an ecumenical basis—being proud of one’s religion and its social ethos—should be a unifying factor. All the great religions have much the same moral creed, and I think the decline of religion in England has been rather sad. The theme I want to talk about, so that I do not indulge entirely in clichés, is the essence of a nation being a sense of community—a community in which everybody is in a project together, all doing their bit. Sadly, there has been a decline in that sense of community in our nation. For instance, my parents, although English, were brought up in France. They came here as refugees in 1940 when the Germans invaded France because they had British passports, and they met in Bletchley Park. They had a very mixed upbringing, but they had a complete dedication to this country. When my mother was very old, she would still insist, despite being very infirm, on tottering off to the polling booth. The wartime generation, who we are celebrating today, had an absolute sense of duty and community, and we want to recreate that. Let me make one or two points that may be more controversial. There are some factors that are breaking our sense of community, and, frankly, we all saw from the results last week that they are fuelling a feeling of disillusion. One, of course, is illegal migration. We have got to understand that this infuriates everybody. It does not just infuriate right-wing people who do not like the idea of migrants. It also infuriates many people who are working hard and feel that some are taking advantage. I do not want to make any criticism of migrants, and I do not want to attack them personally. Take a Somali migrant—why is he trying to come here? Because for hundreds of years, his family could fish off the coast of Somalia, and then we in the west sent in huge trawlers to take all the fish away and took away his livelihood, so he resorted to piracy. Quite rightly, we then sent in warships to deal with that, so once again, they were starving, and he is now on the way here. I do not think we should approach the issue of migration in a nationalistic way. What I liked about the speech made by the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme was that it was patriotic, not nationalistic, and it tried to heal divisions. The fact is that illegal migration is an open wound in our society. It is not just the cost of it, with £4 million a day spent on hotels; there is also a sense for many in our country that people who could apply for asylum in the proper, normal way are bypassing that route. We have seen from a study in The Daily Telegraph this week how easy it is to pay a people smuggler, come over here, be put in a hotel and act as a courier. That is really infuriating people. Our fate in the Conservative party, because we are no longer in power, is that we are dependent on the Labour Government solving this problem—and they will have to solve it, because we cannot go on as we are. It is fuelling a great sense of anger in the nation. The Government have to get a derogation from the Strasbourg Court, as I have argued many times, in order to arrest, detain and deport people, and then this horrible trade will stop immediately. Of course, there is a humanitarian point to be made here: these people smugglers are putting lives at risk, and people are dying. They are feeding on human misery. We cannot do much about it in the Conservative party; Labour is now in power. My advice to the Government is that if they want to resist this sense of disillusion in society, with people turning away from both the Labour party and the Conservative party, they have to do something about it. They have to do something about legal migration, too. There is a great sense among people who are working hard here that people are pouring in or have poured in. I blame my Government as much as any other; I do not make a party political point here. The Labour party has taken over a difficult issue. We all know the reasons to do with the pandemic and all the other excuses, and about how we had to keep the NHS and our care homes going, but the fact that the Conservative Government allowed 1 million people in legally last year is infuriating people, and it is depressing wages. It might be good for overall GDP, but it is certainly bad for individual wealth. Again, we can do very little about it in the Conservative party, but the Government need to act. I know they are trying to take steps. This is relevant to the debate about St George because it is about trying to recreate a sense that we are one nation, and that everybody works hard, everybody pays their taxes, and we get benefits such as free education and free health so that when we fall ill we are helped by the state. I was talking to a constituent only today and she is clearly a lady in some distress. She cannot move but has just had her personal independence payment cancelled. She has been told she has to work from home, but she cannot work from home because she does not have those sorts of skills. Ever more people are feeling angry that they have done their bit and worked hard, but when they fall ill or need benefits they are not being helped. We have to all work together to try to again get that sense of the wartime spirit—that is a bit of a cliché, but it is about a time when everybody mucked in, everybody had a job, everybody did their bit and there were, frankly, very few freeloaders. I represent an agricultural constituency. One might wonder why I am now getting on to that subject, but again there is a sense among people in agricultural constituencies that the Government do not understand their point of view. We are all in favour of green energy in Lincolnshire. We are leading on green energy with wind farms in the North sea; there is no opposition to them, but we are angry that entrepreneurs are importing solar panels from China made by slave labour and covering 10,000 acres in my constituency with no proper local planning. We are not against solar farms and we are not against the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero; we just want a sense of fairness that local communities have a say in this and there is some sense of proportion. I think I have said my bit. I congratulate the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme and hope we have a very good and worthwhile debate.