The Economy — House of Commons, 2015-11-18
Topic: Mixed Topics
David Thomas Charles Davies (Conservative, Centre-right): In the light of the disgraceful and shocking attacks in Paris, there have been calls from our constituents and from Members for the Government to spend more money on policing and security. Those calls are perfectly understandable. As someone who has spent nine years working as a special constable in the United Kingdom, I have enormous respect for the work of the police and for the role that they play in combating terrorism. None the less, it would be a huge mistake to think that we can increase our security on the back of borrowed money. The lessons of history tell us, over and again, that that would be a mistake Let us look back at a few examples in recent history. A nation that has an unsound economy is unable to project itself militarily, to guarantee its own existence and to guarantee the security of its borders. Suez is perhaps seen as the last military defeat for the United Kingdom. However, it was not a military defeat at all, but an economic defeat. We were unable to continue in Suez—I make no comment as to whether we were right or wrong to be there—because our nation, already mired in debt as a result of the second world war, could not secure further borrowing from the IMF, as the Americans were threatening to devalue our economy The history of the DDR— Deutsche Demokratische Republik—is something that has always been of interest to me, because of my wife’s eastern European nationality. The writing was on the wall for the Communist bloc and for East Germany in the early 1980s, although nobody saw it coming, when the East Germans had to go off and negotiate emergency borrowing from their competitors and their apparent enemy, West Germany. Anyone could have seen what was eventually going to happen as a result of that A few years ago, when I was on the Council of Europe with my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch and Upminster (Dame Angela Watkinson), I went to visit Greece and was shocked by the state of the economy and the impact that it had had on its border control. It has lost complete and utter control of its borders, because its economy is in ruins. I am sure that I do not need to remind the Government of that. It is vital that we continue in the direction that we are going to reduce our dependency on borrowed money. When we came into power, we were borrowing £160 billion. As we know, that figure is down to about £70 billion. It is still too high but it is going in the right direction. I very much hope that, despite the challenges that we face, we will be able to protect police funding to as great an extent as possible I very much welcome the Government’s announcement that there will be thousands of extra people recruited into the intelligence agencies. I know that the Government understand the pressures that the police are under and that they will be looking at how we can get more police officers on the streets without spending extra money. I am talking about cutting bureaucracy around things such as the stop and search forms. I would be very happy to give a few suggestions of my own as well The fact of the matter is that our long-term economic plan is not just about raising living standards for people in this country or controlling inflation and increasing growth, but about underpinning the long-term security of everyone in this nation.