John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con):
Given that we do not want too much pressure on mortgage holders, who will be struggling, will the Government launch a series of supply-side measures to increase the supply of things that are short, to promote more home-grown food and home-produced energy, and above all to work with public sector employees and managers to have a productivity revolution in the public services where there has been a collapse in output?

Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer:
As so often, my right hon. Friend is absolutely right and it is in supply-side measures that we see the long-term solution to the inflation problem that we and many other countries face. That is why the Budget was focused on labour supply measures such as a massive reduction in the cost of childcare—a reduction of up to 60% for families with young children—and it is why my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury is launching the very productivity review my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) has called for many times, to make sure we are getting better value for public money spent.

Please find below

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2023/06/29/planet-normal-interest-rates-strain-mortgages/

The government has allowed a huge increase in public spending since 2019. Some of this was meant to be temporary relief or offsets for the grave economic damage lockdowns caused. Some of it has been further reliefs and subsidies to offset the inflationary effects of  the Ukraine war and the Bank of England’s inflationary expansion of money and credit.

Both these special interventions now need to run down as energy prices retreat from the Ukraine invasion highs. Meanwhile we also need to examine the magnitude of the net zero costs. The government is using taxpayer money to intervene to deal with consequences of carbon taxes and windfall taxes, to back as yet uneconomic new technologies and to seek to pick winners. There is no need to do so, as markets are perfectly capable of backing good ideas and competing to  sort these things out. The public sector costs of carbon capture and storage and hydrogen development are too high.Trust the  private sector more and draw on the results of experiments  and developments worldwide.

We need more normal affordable levels of public spending, and need advances in public service productivity.

As a young man I voted in the 1975 referendum on staying in the European Community. I read the Treaty of Rome which bound us and realised it set out a long journey to European Union. The main political parties told me to vote to stay in something they called the Common market. This lovely myth was a free market, with no damage to our ability to make our own laws and spend our own money. I did not believe them and voted to leave. I found it difficult to grasp how they could so misinterpret the Treaty we had signed.

             It was a blow when I heard the result. As a  good democrat I congratulated the winners and did my best to get behind their winning vision. I had no wish to undermine their action which I had opposed. I resolved to help the winners implement their vision of keeping the European Community to just a common market, or more likely helping opt us out of all the obvious other integration tasks it was inevitable  the EEC/EU would wish to advance. The Yes campaign had strenuously denied the European foreign policies and military task forces, European migration and crime policies, European taxation and much else that was to evolve.

              I was in this spirit for twenty years, never challenging the decision to stay in. I was appointed Single market Minister. That was the worst job I had to do in government and showed me from the inside just how far the EC  and its single market had deviated from the common market vision of 1975. Using the market as cover the EC bombarded us with laws over wide ranging topics from the environment to taxation, from health and safety to employment. They sought to lay down in law how businesses in different sectors should do their jobs. The Franco-German axis had undue weight with the Commission, seeking to embed the business models of their main companies into EC law. It was a brilliant power grab. It was anti enterprise and innovation, creating trade barriers without and barriers to innovators and small business from within. My job was the negative one of seeking to delay, defer or amend the worst proposals. I went hoarse explaining a common market just needed the rule that any product deemed to be of merchandisable quality  in one member state could be sold in another. With clear labels consumers could make their own choices,

The net result of single market excess law making has been to give a huge competitive boost to the USA where companies have not faced the same controls and legal strictures. The digital revolution which has changed lives and been powered by smartphones, downloads, social media and the web has been dominated by the US. Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, Nvidia and the rest are US titans. There is no single large global digital company from a European base. this is such a dominant part of a modern economy.

When the EC moved to being the European Union and wanted to press on with a single currency I wrote the books and some of the articles to keep the pound. It was obvious most UK voters understood surrendering our currency would end any pretence of effective self government. Polls  always showed strong majorities against. It was also clear that many MPs and top civil servants wanted to join the Euro or would go along with it. I fought battles within the Conservative Party to firm up our view that the UK should keep its own currency. We persuaded John Major to secure the all important opt out from joining but then had to battle to make sure no Conservative leader flirted with joining nonetheless.

As the war over the Treaty of Maastricht developed it became clearer to more people the EU was not mainly about trade and a market. It was about building an integrated Union with a flag, a Parliament, a Supreme  Court,extensive law codes, EU taxes and debts, with common policies across all fields. It became obvious to more Conservatives that we needed a new  referendum. The new question would not be to reverse the idea of the common market but to test out the reality that the evolving Union was so much more than a market, and its market was not free. Belonging to its market meant accepting many clumsy laws, paying a large tax to be in it, and putting up with many restrictions on internal and external trade.

The UK’s predictable and tragic ejection from the European Exchange Mechanism and the nasty recession that caused led to the exile of Conservatives from office for 13 years. In opposition the party wisely opposed the further integration of the Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon Treaties. Under our democracy it was unacceptable for a new government to get into power unable to govern in many ways owing to the surrender of big powers to the EU by the outgoing government with Opposition support. I and a few other MPs campaigned for a referendum. David Cameron’s good decision to promise one in the 2015 Manifesto helped us win a majority to govern that year for the first time since 1992.

I am so pleased the UK electors voted to take back control in 2016.  Everyday since I rejoice that we can now shape our future again. So far government has been too cautious, sticking to failed EU laws and policies. Too many MPs and civil servants have fought to prevent the UK altering things to help us succeed, seeking to keep us tied to the EU whatever the costs.   In a future piece I will set out how we can use our freedoms more. It is high time we had some Brexit wins. The USA need not always build the main global business successes. We could narrow the gap in income per head if we tried, now we are free to do so. It will take lower and fewer taxes and better laws to do so.

Sent from my iPad

Dear Grant

I am glad you have decided that it makes sense to grant licences to get more oil and gas out of the North Sea instead of importing more. As you say, that means more tax revenue collected here, more better paid UK  jobs, less transport costs and less CO 2 for the world as whole. LNG is particularly CO 2 intensive compared to domestic piped gas given the amount of energy needed to compress, cool, transport and convert back to gas.

The same logic should apply to other areas where some want to stop the UK making materials and products that entail substantial fossil fuel energy use. If instead of making them here we just import them, world CO 2 production will increase by at least the amount created  by transporting them longer distances and in some cases by the less fuel efficient processes in overseas factories.

The imposition of high carbon taxes in the UK is closing factories here to transfer the jobs and energy consumption elsewhere. It would be a good idea to reduce our taxes on industry using energy to stem our losses of plant and activity. To get inflation down we need to produce more, not less.

The UK also needs to cut down on public spending and borrowing, whilst ensuring enough money well spent to provide better quality public services. The energy money go round is a good area to look into. Subsidies chase windfall and carbon taxes, as government tries to offset the damage done  by high taxes leading to uncompetitive energy harming business. We need to disarm both the excessive taxes and the consequential subsidies.

I understand the government and Opposition wish to lead in green transition technologies. We are still in the early stages of a world debate about whether transport and industry should shift all electric, or go to hydrogen, or to fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage. We are still seeking the affordable popular electric vehicles that more people want to buy and can buy. We are in the early phases of trying to find  non fossil fuel heating systems for homes that are affordable and good. There are still  big debates to be resolved about how you store wind and solar energy for times when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. What combination of pump storage, hydrogen and battery storage or other methods  will be needed?

These are world issues. The answers have to work in the big CO2 producing areas, China, the USA, India and the EU as well as in the UK, otherwise your efforts will  be of no avail. The UK government should not be trying to fund all these technologies itself before it has a clear idea of the winners and the industries  are closer to commercial roll out. The UK should avoid spending so much on say carbon  capture and storage before the world commercial interests have got further. The UK is good at raising capital and can incubate many starts up and  ventures that might  be able to come up with the right answers to these energy issues. The UK government is unlikely to pioneer commercial successes on the back of large financial commitments to projects with no current stream of underlying customer revenue.

Yours

John