My Lords, I rise to pay tribute to Lord Cockfield, who died on Monday. He was born in 1916, and was educated at Dover Grammar School and the London School of Economics. In 1938 he joined the Home Civil Service, starting at the Inland Revenue. He was called to the Bar in 1942.
Before joining this House, Lord Cockfield had a long and distinguished career, holding many posts across government. He was considered to be one of the greatest authorities of his generation on taxation, as well as being a statistician of renown. He was raised to the peerage in 1978, and very quickly joined the Government Front Bench. I am told, and I am sure that many Members of longer standing will remember, that he was a notable performer at this Dispatch Box, with his own particular manner of delivering answers.
In government, Lord Cockfield first served as Minister of State for the Treasury and then as the Secretary of State for Trade from 1982 to 1983. He held a further Cabinet post as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster from 1983 to 1984.
He was Vice-President of the European Commission between 1985 and 1989 and, rather unexpectedly, became a champion of the European project. He is regarded as one of the principal architects of the European single market. He continued his interest in the European Union when he returned to this House. In a debate on enlargement of the European Union in December 1999, he said:
“The successful enlargement of the European Union to comprise virtually all the countries between the Atlantic and the borders of the former Soviet Union would be the greatest achievement of the 21st century”.—[Official Report, 7/12/99; col. 1213.]
I am sure that he was glad to see so much of the project completed in his lifetime. He is survived by a son and a daughter and I believe that the whole House will wish to join me in sending our condolences to them.
My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness the Leader of the House in paying tribute to the late Lord Cockfield, a colleague whom Peers on all sides viewed with affection and respect. The noble Baroness set out the facts of an extraordinary career. It is hard to overestimate the scale of the noble Lord’s talent. He started life with no advantage. Indeed, his father was killed before he was born. He joined the Customs as a junior clerk at the age of 17, but he became a tax professional with a distinguished Civil Service career, a lawyer, an industrialist—the finance director, managing director and chairman of a FTSE 100 industrial company—and a statistician, becoming the president of the Royal Statistical Society, all before entering Parliament at the age of 62. He was that very rare thing, one who makes the transition from the world outside politics to Parliament and government, and does so with lasting success. His oratorical style—some said he spoke like a royal commission report—can more politely be described as stately, but his words were almost invariably those of a statesman.
For a decade, he was a leading figure in British and European politics. He was a Cabinet Minister in days when there were three or four Cabinet Ministers in your Lordships’ House, and government was no worse for that. Then he was Vice-President of the Commission from 1985 to 1989. His name will be linked indelibly with the single market in the EU, the blueprint of which he in effect wrote himself. Whatever our views of the twists and turns that the EU has since taken, the single market is a giant achievement. It would not have happened but for his energy and vision, for which he will be long remembered.
The noble Lord sadly lost his wife soon after leaving politics, but he attended here regularly until very recently and in his 90th year. We always welcomed him, and we benefited from his deep wisdom. Our sincerest sympathies go to his family. They should feel honoured by his memory.
My Lords, we on these Benches associate ourselves with the memory of a wonderfully anti-political politician. He was one of the most understated people, whom one nevertheless heard talk with an underlying passion about political issues. As I got to know him in his later years, I found that you had to listen very hard to catch the underlying humour of some of the things that he said. He loved to pretend that he was dry and technical, even when he was not.
He was chairman of the Price Commission under the Conservative Government of 1970 to 1974. My noble friend Lady Williams has reminded me that she re-appointed him when the Labour Government came in because, although he was clearly a Conservative, he was recognised to have an entirely fair-minded and balanced approach to competition.
The most remarkable memory of him was his achievement in introducing the single European market. It was perfect for him because the 1992 programme was a collection of extremely dry and technical issues, but he managed, with the help of President Delors and others, to package them into a politically saleable programme.
He had a remarkable rapport with Jacques Delors as President of the Commission—remarkable because they were such very different characters, who nevertheless got on extraordinarily well. Madame Delors and Monica Cockfield also got on remarkably well in that peculiar world of Brussels. There were accusations in the British press that he had gone native when he went over there. He had not, but he did see that there was a problem to be dealt with and that it was his job to deal with it.
He was much more adventurous than many people knew. He once told us that he and his wife had gone around the world in 1968 on a cargo boat and, when they were in the South China Sea during the Tet offensive, their cargo boat, like others in the area, was asked to call in and stand off the Mekong Delta just in case there were large numbers of Americans to be evacuated from the mainland. So their journey was rather delayed.
He had a passionate commitment in his later years to informing the younger generation about the real benefits of European co-operation, and the Lady Monica Cockfield Trust provided, in a particularly close relationship with the University of Sussex and the Sussex European Institute, scholarships for young British students to learn more about Europe. I enjoyed many conversations with him in this House and I, like many others, will miss him.
My Lords, I join others in expressing our regret at the death of Lord Cockfield. He was a major figure in public life, in the government of our country, and in the European Union for very many years during a long period of public service.
I knew Lord Cockfield well over many years, and had experience of his relentless progress towards his objectives, occasionally falling under the tank tracks as he moved across the lawn. It is quite remarkable how he combined in one life different careers and different types of expertise and knowledge, some of which have been referred to. He was a very able economist and statistician, with degrees from the London School of Economics, and he was president of the Royal Statistical Society. He was a civil servant in the Inland Revenue and the Commissioner of the Inland Revenue. He was finance director and managing director of Boots Company for quite a long time. He was chairman of the Price Commission. He was Minister of State at the Treasury and he was Secretary of State for Trade and President of the Board of Trade.
Throughout western Europe, it was recognised that when he was appointed a Vice-President of the European Commission, he was the single-minded driving force behind the creation of the European single market. This made a major contribution to the increased trade and greater prosperity of millions of citizens. As he came from a Thatcherite background, it might have been thought that he would not fit easily into the European institutions, but he became an unexpected hero with his persistent determination to remove barriers to trade and to extend the freedom of trade within the Union. That great single market of almost 500 million people is his memorial, but I would like to remember today also what at other times he contributed to national life and to the work of this House. There are few politicians who have had a greater direct impact on the lives of so many, and he will be greatly missed here.
My Lords, we have heard of a very distinguished career—indeed, of a man of five careers; the fifth career being in Europe—of a man of formidable intellectual ability, of a man of great personal energy and hard work and of a man with professional focus who never craved personal popularity. We on these Benches certainly want to associate ourselves with all that has been said in tribute to him today throughout this House.
As Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, I shall pay tribute particularly to the role that he had in one of our great industries in the east Midlands: the Boots Company. He was first its finance director, then its managing director and then its chairman. He not only headed up a leading commercial company in our local and national life but was also heavily involved in the historic great works of philanthropy, benefaction and charity.
Arthur Cockfield also had a very active interest in the successful development of the University of Nottingham, which, as noble Lords will know, was founded on the philanthropy of Jesse Boot, the enterprising Nottingham chemist, who was later to become Baron Trent. Lord Cockfield served as a member of the university’s court of governors from 1967, which was a period of significant expansion. During that time, eight new halls of residence were constructed on campus, and research schools developed and flourished. The period led also to the establishment of a new medical school at the university, which has grown to be one of the world’s leading medical schools in human tissue development and research in cancer and the biosciences. When he initially became a supporter of the university, it had two campuses; now it has seven, including one in Malaysia and one in China. So he was a key man at the right time for Nottingham. He actively believed the university motto, sapienta urbs conditur: a city built on wisdom.