Transcripts
MURNAGHAN – 10.00 – 23.10.11 – INTERVIEW LORD HESELTINE
October 23, 2011
DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
Now a year ago the government appointed Lord Heseltine to head up its regional growth strategy but as the economy falters it emerges this week that only two businesses so far have benefited from the £1.4 billion fund in the past sixteen months. Well Lord Heseltine joins me now live from Banbury, a very good morning to you Lord Heseltine, I know you are a firm believer that regional growth has a huge part to play in the economic recovery, why then is the growth fund progressing so cautiously it seems at the moment?
LORD HESELTINE:
I think that people haven’t fully taken on board that when we announced a deal under the Regional Growth Fund, in many cases the private sector or the partners, put up the money and spend the money first. The government support comes at a later stage so the schemes go ahead, money is spent but the actual taxpayers money which enabled the scheme to go ahead, tends to come rather later. There have been some very exciting schemes which I have personally visited and my colleagues have visited where the work is underway although at this moment the government money is committed but not actually spent.
DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
Okay, well let’s just talk in more detail about an area you know so much about, the north west and in particular Liverpool, and you’ve been arguing recently that it’s not just about the money and the cash, it’s about effective leadership as well.
LORD HESELTINE:
I can’t overstate the significance of that. London, the Whitehall bureaucracy, central government, over the last half century has taken more and more power away from the localities. Now there’s been a shift recently, we see self-evidently Alex Salmond all over the television programmes talking about Scotland and we see Boris Johnson making a great pitch for London but who ever hears from Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Birmingham? That’s a very big gap. There’s no other country like us in the world that has such a monopoly of power in its capital city so creating a framework of leadership in the big cities is fundamental to getting them going again and enabling them to much more equally compete with the power of the south-east. So rebalancing Britain is an important part of it, economic growth using the power of local people and local ideas is a vital part of it.
DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
So a real devolution of powers. The government has got a Localism Bill going through, does that do enough in your book to address those issues?
LORD HESELTINE:
It can do a lot, of course it is a permissive piece of legislation and the government are committed to creating directly elected mayors in the twelve large English cities. That in my view is a very, very overdue step and very welcome one so the legislation can achieve that but there is more to it than that, there is a question of looking at the powers that the central government has got in Whitehall and seeing what could be transferred to local people. Secondly, there’s an attitude of mind – do central government come up with all the ideas and say to local people, you get on with this or do they say to local people what do you think would be the best way to gear up your economy, create more jobs, improve the quality of the environment in your area? Now my very strong view based on looking at all other countries is that there is far more reliance on the spontaneity and the initiative of local people than on the capital cities.
DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
Okay, so they need that spontaneity to be let loose but has anything, talking about Liverpool in terms of your thirty years and more involvement in looking at the area, has it really progressed economically?
LORD HESELTINE:
Well David Cameron asked Terry Leahy and myself a few months ago to look at Liverpool, looking ahead based on the last twenty or thirty years and Terry and I came away absolutely overwhelmingly impressed with the way in which Liverpool has improved and changed its prospects and its reputation. Liverpool is now full of talented people with good ideas and a track record. The challenge for government is, if you like, to set them free, to say look, we’re behind you. There’s a terrific opportunity to rebuild or enhance the Port of Liverpool, the scheme is called the Atlantic Gateway but Terry and I produced this report which we have sent to the Prime Minister which is full of things that could be got going if the government were so minded. We shall see the government’s response but David Cameron has been extremely kind in his initial reaction to the report.
DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
Well looking back over the decades of Liverpool, let’s look back over the decades of Europe as an issue for your party, Lord Heseltine, something you know one or two things about in terms of the battles you personally have been through. Do you see the issue as dogging this current leadership and causing Mr Cameron et al more problems?
LORD HESELTINE:
Well it’s dogged every leadership, it’s a hugely controversial issue, you can’t be surprised about that. It is perceived in this country that we have changed from being an Atlanticist orientated nation to a European one and historically that is seen as a readjustment of Britain’s position that is extremely difficult to live with. The truth of course is very different, we’ve always been a European power. If you think of the great Shakespearean plays, they were about in many ways the battles in Europe and what was Empire? Empire was a battle in which the Brits fought the other Europeans for world supremacy and we won. So the whole of our history has been interwoven with Europe and that is unavoidable given the proximity. Today the single market is absolutely vital to Britain’s jobs and investment prospects but you can’t expect changes of this sort to be uncontroversial.
DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
But the Common Market that we joined all those years ago when we did have a referendum, after we joined of course, has changed beyond recognition, especially with the problems that it’s facing at the moment. Do you understand those in your party who are saying, especially after listening to David Cameron, especially when he was in Opposition, flirting with the idea of referendum, do you understand those calls that say well now is the time, given those changes and given what’s going to happen in the future, that we here in Britain have another referendum?
LORD HESELTINE:
There’s always been this debate in Britain about Europe. You will remember, well you won’t remember but a lot of people of my age remember we refused to join. When the European venture was getting effectively underway and the Treaty of Rome was on the agenda, Britain refused to sign for all sorts of reasons to do with our Imperial past, because of what we perceived to be the special relationship and of course the consequence of the war, but anyone who knew anything about what was going on in Europe at that time never thought it was simply a European economic union, the whole vision of Europe was driven by men and women who had come out of the resistance movements, come out of the prisoner of war camps, had seen the huge sacrifice and had vowed it would never happen again. Before the European Union, the iron and steel and coal pact was all about Europeanization of those industries so that they could never be used by nation states for war making again. So the background was always much more than economic union although that was very important. The whole of the CAP was all about preserving the outlying areas of southern Europe, particularly France, in order to make sure that there was what we in this country have always called a regional policy but that’s what the CAP was basically about.
DERMOT MURNAGHAN:
Well, Lord Heseltine, must end it there, thank you very much indeed for your time.
LORD HESELTINE:
Thank you.