Enville Pigeon
March 2009
As you read this the world's most powerful and influential leaders will be leaving London after one of the most important peacetime summit meetings ever. We can only hope that they will have succeeded in agreeing on proposals which will help to stabilise the world's financial systems and so bring a new sense of confidence and hope to all of those whose lives are touched by the current crisis – and that means almost everyone. It is difficult to have a conversation anywhere these days without being asked ‘When are things going to get better?' and it is deeply frustrating to have to answer ‘I do not know'. What I do know is that we need to establish a new sense of values (or perhaps to return to an old one) where greed is replaced by patience and panic by calm. What I also know is that whatever success the G20 may have achieved it will be some years before a new and sounder order has been firmly established, and even longer before all the debts have been paid.
Being in Parliament at the moment is extremely frustrating. Day after day the House deals with business that has little relevance to the crisis. If ever, as a Member, I felt sidelined it is now. Parliament remains not only the forum and the safety valve of the nation: the only place where those who truly represent the people can have a voice. Parliament today merits the inversion of Baldwin's favourite remark that the press have power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages. I often feel that we have responsibility without power – the prerogative of the Eunuch! For when a government has a large majority it is very difficult to hold it properly to account.
Is there any wonder, therefore, that I feel more comforted than ever when I return to Enville at weekends? It is not just the countryside in spring that gives a new sense of hope, a new sense of purpose, and a chance to recharge the batteries. It is also that I have chance to be of real help to real people. A constant stream are now coming to my office for advice with individual problems caused by the crisis – threats of repossession, banks pressing for repayment, the looming threat of unemployment. Of course I cannot save homes, pay off overdrafts or give jobs but what I am often able to do is to intercede in a way that can sometime soften the blows.
Let me end with two hopeful anecdotes. Three weeks ago I had the great pleasure of welcoming a group of South Staffordshire members of the NFU department. They were able to sit in the Gallery of the Commons and the Lords, and to go across to the Cabinet War Rooms (and see how the Government of this country was conducted by really great men in really dire times). In the evening we met for discussions and for dinner. The Secretary of State himself, Hilary Benn, very kindly joined us for the best part of an hour to listen to the farmers' concerns and made a very good impression. After dinner, James Paice, the Shadow Agriculture Minister, talked to us and began by saying that one of the difficulties of his job was that the Conservative team were shadowing a group of essentially decent and extremely likable Government ministers. As they left a number of the farmers said to me that they hadn't realised ‘politics could be quite so civilised'.
Then on St Patrick's Day I was in Northern Ireland with the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee which I chair. We went to Downpatrick, where Ireland's patron saint is buried. Some of my colleagues went to the Roman Catholic Mass, and I went to Communion in the little church on the hill in Saul where St. Patrick founded the first church in Ireland in the mid fifth century. Then we all gathered in the Cathedral for a great ecumenical service. After laying wreaths at the Saint's tomb, and having a wonderful Irish stew lunch in a vast tent, I had the great honour of being asked to help lead the St Patrick's day parade, with the local SDLP Member of Parliament and the Chairman of Council. We marched through flag waving crowds of thousands of people, many of them decked in Nationalist colours. Now if you had told me that such a thing would have been possible even three years ago I would have laughed. Yet, a week after three despicable shootings, the real new Northern Ireland showed itself. I came back with new hope.
