My King's Speech remarks

My speech in the Commons was compressed to just five short minutes - but here’s the full speech as drafted!

Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour to speak in today's debate, but it has been a great pleasure to listen to so many extraordinary maiden speeches.

It is clear that there is a wealth of experience, insight, passion and intelligence in this chamber that augurs well for the debates in this place in the parliament to come.

In the time that I have, I want to throw a light not simply on the King's speech, but on the strategy behind the speech.

When the Prime Minster launched our manifesto, he was clear; that this is a manifesto for wealth creation. Not for some but for all.

That ambition Mr. Speaker, is right.

Because amongst the worst aspects of our inheritance is the moral emergency of the inequality that now scars our country.

Mr. Speaker; today,

•    The luckiest in our city could wander off to a new coffee house called Shot and order a coffee for £265. 

•    They could saunter off for dinner to Arugula in Mayfair and order a steak for £900 pounds.

•    They could stay the night in the Raffles Hotel up the road for £25,000 pounds a night.

These sums are extraordinary. But the luxury should not surprise us. 

As we now live in a country where we have super yacht sales, Rolls Royce sales, private jet sales that are all at all-time high.

And yet this absurdity of affluence flourishes alongside a poverty that is deeper than any of us have ever seen in our lives.

•    On the last figures, we have 1300 people who now die homeless.

•    We have tens of thousands - 90,000 - who now die of diseases of poverty.

•    We have millions - 2.1 million - who now put food on the table thanks only to the tender mercies of our food banks. 

Mr Speaker, this is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Now, we have been writing books about the wealth of our nation since the days of Adam Smith in 1776

But today the way that we share that wealth has grown profoundly unfair.

Perhaps it is best illustrated by a single fact that in the last 14 years, the wealth of the top 1% in our country has grown by 31 times faster than the wealth of everyone else.

That is simply not right. It is a moral failure. It is an economic failure. It is a national failure.

And that is why we need the measures in this bill:

Measures that will foster faster growth.

•     That will foster a fairer share of that growth through rising wages.

•     Measures they could help us create a new universal basic capital.

•     Measures to renew the wealth that we have in common with national wealth funds,

•     And I hope one day soon to underpin this with a restoration of fairness to our tax system.

Mr Speaker, let me touch on each of these measures in turn.

Growth is of course, the key to progress and this King's speech is the advent of a modern supply side economics to cast away the failed strategy of the last 14 years.

I particularly want to welcome the devolution bill, the skills England bill and the planning and infrastructure bill.

But my plea to ministers is twofold:

(i)   to maximise the power in the hands of regional mayors particularly over skills, over transport and over planning;

(ii) and to craft a new industrial strategy that de risks and decarbonises our economy and leans into our comparative advantage - but this must be married to a trade strategy that capitalises on the assets we aim to strengthen.

Second, we have to make sure that growth is fairly shared.

•    That's why the Employment Rights bill and the draft equality bill are so important,

•    Those Bills must take account of the investigations made by the business and trade committee that uncovered all sorts of bad behaviour in P&O, in McDonalds, in Asda, including the need for strong information rights are required in a world where companies seek to obscure their accounts in offshore jurisdictions.

•    We must also harness one opportunity more: the opportunity to harness the pension schemes bill and the audit reform and corporate governance bill to inaugurate a new era of civic capitalism.

•    In this country, we should be rolling together the 32,000 different pension funds into a handful of super funds in a way that allow us to leverage the £2 trillion worth of pension savings in this country as a lever of good business.

•    And if we want to know what that definition looks like, we need look no further than the good business charter championed by great business leaders like Julian Richer.

Third, I want to see us to use the pension schemes bill as a vehicle to roll out sidecar accounts and universal basic banking.

•    It is simply wrong that a quarter of people in our country now have net savings of under 100 pounds.

•    NEST have shown that universal banking is something that can be delivered just in the same way that auto enrolment accounts were delivered forth.

Fourth, I would like to see his majesty’s government start paying into those accounts new bonds for young people, to help them assemble a deposit for a home to call their own - and these bonds I believe could come in the shape of dividends from the new National Wealth Fund.

In practice, we should use both the National Wealth Fund Bill and the Crown Estates Bill to create a new foundation for one of the world’s greatest sovereign wealth funds.

We should be consolidating these two funds together and into the pot should go much of the investments that are currently in the hands of UKGI.

Some of those things are unusual assets. But close inspection reveals that the state has made all sorts of investments - from the government wine cellar, shares in Bolton Wanderers Football Club, a ‘holistic’ whisky distillery called ‘The Lakes’, and a firm that throws international sex parties called ‘Killing Kittens’.5

But 80 countries around the world have funds like these. On average, they return around 8% a year.

If we matched that we could afford to split the dividend and pay say 4% as bonds into the accounts of young people.

Before long, those bonds would be £10,000 for every young person - which is the average shortfall on a deposit for a home to call your own.

Alongside measures in this Speech, to build more homes - and new ideas to introduce long term fixed rate mortgages, then I think we can genuinely make progress providing houses for millions of young people.

The final point, which is not in the King's speech, but which I hope will come in the budget are measures to restore fairness to the tax system,

Because the reality is that if we want to genuinely rollback inequality that scars our country, then it is ridiculous that we have a situation where the former Prime Minister is paying just 23% tax on the 2 million pounds of income.

Mr. Speaker, I would urge everybody in this chamber to read the former Prime Minister's tax statement.

It's not a long read.

It's only a page long, but the numbers are very clear.

£2 million a year.

23% tax.

At a time when one in five people in our country pay a tax rate of over 40%. I say that that is wrong.

Mr. Speaker on this side of the house, we know how futures are really built.

We have always known in our movement, that if freedom is to be real, if opportunity is to be real then those freedoms and opportunities must be secure.

As we've learned down the centuries, there is freedom without security, and no security without wealth.

And that is why we need to build not just a wealthy democracy, but a democracy of wealth.

That is why I'm glad to see that this King speech takes the first step to turn that vision into a reality that will change the future of this country and its possibilities for millions.