As my Honourable Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire said when he opened the Queen’s Speech debate last week, these are difficult times in Parliament.
But this has always been the case when our country faces a point of inflection – a pivotal moment in British history.
We have spoken at great length about Brexit, this week. I do not intend to add to what has already been said in this chamber. There’s been altogether enough talk on the technicalities of the issue.
The last time we took such a momentous step as this was in the late 1970s. This country went through a historic transformation under the government of Margaret Thatcher. Her reforms were hugely controversial, but they were successful because they were so comprehensive; from currency controls to trade union law, from monetary policy to the sale of council houses, it was a revolution. But it was not just a policy revolution.
Under Thatcher, the United Kingdom once more realised that it could stand on its own two feet. We regained the pride we had lost. We learned to stop apologising for the past, and instead looked to the future.
Above all, Thatcher’s revolution was a revolution of expectations.
In truth, in the next decade, Brexit will not be our biggest challenge. Fast globalisation of trade and the dramatic pace of technological change creates a whole host of opportunities and challenges.
In the last 30 years, free trade has raised huge numbers of people – half the world – out of poverty.
We need to be ready to act both politically, to ensure free trade remains central to the world’s economic operating systems, and commercially, to seize the advantages that it offers.
Brexit is the catalyst in this process, but – by itself – Brexit is not enough.
We need to use the freedom given to us by Brexit to overhaul British society.
And high-quality public services - education, healthcare, social support, the rule of law – are a vital part of a decent society.
But the government can only provide them if it has the resources to pay for them.
The growth rate of an economy determines job creation, wage rates, tax revenues, and hence public services. And, growth rate is determined by the productivity of the economy.
So, productivity determines the affluence of our citizens, the delivery of our public services, and the level of social mobility in our society.
Well, from 1948 until the financial crisis in 2008, both total productivity and labour productivity grew every year by 2.3 per cent. Since 2008 until now it has grown by less than half a per cent per annum.
That means wages today are 22% less than they would otherwise have been. Tax take is lower than it would have been. Cutting the deficit is much harder than it should have been, causing much more public sector pain than it would have been.
The financial crisis landed us with a huge debt to pay off, and simultaneously undermined our capacity to pay it off.
So this dramatic – and apparently permanent – reduction in productivity growth has spectacular consequences across all of the economy and all of public services.
The productivity problem is a universal problem.
No productivity means no progress.
So how do we deal with this problem? The answers include education, skills training, research, and investment.
Significant improvement in these areas are scattered throughout the Queen’s Speech, but in most cases are only the first step to grasping the opportunities Brexit has to offer.
Take research. The last 30 years, under governments of all persuasions, have seen the UK decline from one of the most research-intensive economies in the world to one of the least. All our competitors are ahead of us, China having overtaken us in the last decade, and South Korea now spending three times as much as us.
The Queen’s Speech committed to establishing the UK as a world leader in science, with greater investment. However, we need to at least double the current R&D spend, and in the medium term much more.
This will help us maximise our already-present advantage in these areas, such as Artificial Intelligence, biosciences, computing and genomics. Ensuring continuing British pre-eminence in genomics, for example, will be fantastic for public health initiatives, but also for research, and for medical and pharmaceutical productivity.
We also must think hard about the university structure that underpins it. The government has yet to formally respond to the Augar Review of tuition fees and student loans. That system, created by the Blair government and continued by Brown and Cameron, has proved to be an expensive failure, both for the lives of many students and the quality of some of the education given. It needs drastic reform.
As does the rest of our education system.
The last few decades have seen a great deal of reorganisation in our schools, again under governments of all parties, but not necessarily with great results. There was significant improvement of the UK’s mathematics achievement in the late 1990s, attributed to the National Curriculum and subsequent numeracy strategies. But since then, the UK’s education performance has, against international measures, been broadly static.
Meanwhile our competitors, such as China, are grasping the myriad opportunities presented by revolutionary advances in educational technology and AI.
To them, this is not just about ideological differences in classifying schools.
It is about re-engineering the classroom.
Over the course of five years, one educational technology project based on using artificial intelligence to guide learning has opened 1,700 schools with thousands of teaching staff educating in over 200 Chinese cities. They’re embracing technology to give all their children – the brightest and the weakest alike – the very best opportunities in life.
We need to do the same to our schools.
The productivity issue will only be fixed with a universal approach. British productivity will only be remedied when we tackle the whole issue,  head-on. Brexit gives us the chance to have this revolution.
Brexit has seized too much of our political bandwidth in recent years. The world at large is transforming because of globalisation and technological innovation. This generates both challenges and opportunities. In our country’s interest we should have the imagination and the courage to deal with what lies ahead, and seize the opportunities we are presented.

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