Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville: My Lords, your Lordships’ House is in debt to my noble friend Lord Lexden for having obtained this Question for Short Debate slot and for his discrimination in choosing this topical subject. I emphasised the very rebalancing of this Motion in the speech that I made in your Lordships’ House in the debate which followed the final declaration of peace and the return of the Assembly. We should also congratulate him on the enchanting comprehensiveness of his introduction.

It is now nearly two decades since I gave up ministerial responsibilities in Northern Ireland, so I shall leave the corporation tax issue to others, including, retrospectively, my noble friend, who for understandable reasons maintain closer familiarity with the Province. That does not exculpate me for not having pursued it more vigorously when I did have ministerial responsibility. Perhaps since I came to Hillsborough direct from four years in the Treasury I had too much respect for its then rationale when, of course, the present level of devolution within the total realm was still a thing of the future.

I shall, however, briefly relate one telling and not irrelevant moment in the 1997-2001 Parliament, when I chaired the Select Committee on Northern Ireland affairs. We were engaged in a report on cross-border petrol smuggling between the Republic and Northern Ireland and were examining the then Treasury Minister responsible to Parliament for Customs and Excise. I asked the Minister to remind the committee of the Republic’s responsibilities under the Kyoto Protocol for carbon emissions. The Minister asked to be allowed to consult the accompanying Customs official and responded audibly, within the hearing of the committee, to the latter’s advice, with the words, “That can’t be true”, until appreciation sank in that the Republic enjoyed privileged treatment under the protocol as a non-industrial economy, whereas Northern Ireland’s treatment was as part of the United Kingdom. I do not blame the Minister’s Private Secretary for deleting the expostulated remark from the official record but it was an incidental insight into the precise extent of the Treasury’s understanding of the Province’s difficulties.

In my confidence that others will fully air the corporation tax dilemma, let me turn to personal experience of my own 50 years ago this autumn and look at the debate’s gravamen from the private sector’s end of the telescope. I realise that the debate is about Her Majesty’s Government’s encouragement but one of the ways in which the economy will be rebalanced is through entrepreneurial activity. Fifty years ago, I was the first head-hunter in the United Kingdom. I was the seventh consultant member of a small firm which had been established five years earlier in Chicago. I undertook to join it for a year to set up a new office in London, although I told the eponymous founder of the firm, who died in January of this year, that I had no idea whether there would be a responsive British Market; I had no idea whether I would be any good at it; and I had no idea whether I would enjoy it. In the event, we planted an acorn, we have harvested a forest—of course including subsequent competitors, some of which were started by our own people— and that firm is now the largest firm of its kind in the world to be still in private hands, which, in that industry, is exactly where it should be. It was on that firm’s business that I first visited Northern Ireland in 1963.

Why is that relevant to Northern Ireland today? I go back again to my time there as a Minister when anything that created private sector activity was of course a plus. I used to keep my eyes open for gaps in the economy where the Province was consuming products or services, however small, that it was not itself making. Where I needed to buy services, which I could have bought in England but which were available in the Province—my mind goes back to a fair amount of bookbinding; certainly, to a commemorative sampler; and, more grandly, to a fibreglass dingy for the Hillsborough Castle lake, which had then an island and a boathouse but no boat, that was baptised as the “Tom King” after my predecessor—I bought them out of my own pocket as a tiny contribution to the local economy. When there was no local product that I could buy, I made quiet inquiries as to why not.

We all know the skills base of the local economy. Today there is not time to tell the moral tale in the public sector of the Passport Office crisis at the beginning of the 1990s and the Province’s dramatic resolution of it—unlike Dr Watson’s remark about Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra, the world is ready for that story but we have no time. But it was a particularly vivid index of the Province’s superlatives.

I hope that out of this debate, whether through Her Majesty’s Government or the devolved Executive or even from an enterprising charity, will come an analysis of all the things that today the Province consumes but does not make or internally provide. I hope too that at least one person of 27, as I was 50 years ago, has the excitement of creating a business that creates a new industry or service—of course, there is nothing about being 27 that is mandatory—and that there will emerge from the analysis a whole raft of opportunities. Anything that Her Majesty’s Government do in the mean time to favour the entrepreneurial spirit will be a bonus and to be welcomed the more in the Province.

Finally, as to the public sector, I remind your Lordships’ House of Lenin’s doctor, the Armenian Armand Hammer, to whom Lenin offered a monopoly of a single product in the new Utopia. Dr Hammer, who could recognise a bureaucracy when he saw one, chose pencils, and from that acorn grew Occidental Petroleum.