Health and Care Bill

Debate between Baroness Meacher and Lord Forsyth of Drumlean

Lords Hansard - Part 3 & Committee stage
Wednesday 26th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, for tabling his amendment. I was asked by other noble Lords to make it absolutely clear, and I have no problem with this, that I fully and strongly support his amendment. I did not speak to it because of time.

I thank a lot of noble Lords for being very good this evening about not addressing the great issue of assisted dying, because that would have been entirely inappropriate. Many noble Lords have been careful not to do that, so I am grateful to them. I am also grateful to the many noble Lords who have made clear their support in particular for Amendment 297. I was very clear about my own amendment; it is a probing amendment. I thank the Minister for his response and the Chief Whip for placing this at the very end of the day so that we did not spend 12 hours on it—I think we can all be grateful for that. I thank all noble Lords here tonight. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords, it is late. Tempted as I am to respond to all the arguments that have been put—I have some extensive notes here—I want to make just two points.

First, on the procedural arguments that have been put, if the amendment was not in order, it would not have been allowed to be put on the Marshalled List. Had the clerks advised me that there was any constitutional or procedural problem with the amendment, of course I would not have tabled it—a tradition which I hope will be maintained in this House. All these arguments about procedure—people can think it is not the right thing to do, but ultimately it is for the House to decide. I am most grateful to my noble friend the Minister; I suspect the Chief Whip will not be as accommodating as he might have hoped when he has his conversation with him.

The Minister made the point that many of the people who supported my amendment had a particular view on this issue, but it is important to point out that all those who sought procedural reasons for why it would be inappropriate also have a particular point of view. That is why we need a proper debate.

On the Private Member’s Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, the most disingenuous argument has been that which says, “Well, we’ve got a Bill before us”, when there is not time even for a Committee stage and there are some 200 amendments. It is well-trodden path.

I shall not say any more other than that if I wanted to summarise succinctly, I would probably have said everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said. Not only is this the first occasion that I have praised the Scottish Parliament to the skies but it is the first occasion that I have relied on a Liberal to put into words what I feel about an issue. The Committee should also take notice of what my noble friend Lord Bethell, who was the Minister, had to say. He said that he would like to have done this as a Minister. I do not know whether my noble friend wants to change places with him again so that he can come back and make it happen. It is wonderful how when one is no longer in government one is able to say all kinds of things one was not able to say in government.

On the basis that I believe that this matter needs to be decided by the House, I shall consider the points that have been made and come back to it on Report, but I think that I will want at that stage to test the opinion of the House.

Tax Credits (Income Thresholds and Determination of Rates) (Amendment) Regulations 2015

Debate between Baroness Meacher and Lord Forsyth of Drumlean

Monday 26th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

If the noble Baroness is right that the Government do not have a majority in the other place, why can we not respect the democratic process and leave it to them?

[Baroness Meacher]

I will attempt to answer that question.

Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Debate between Baroness Meacher and Lord Forsyth of Drumlean

Monday 25th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, perhaps I may pick up on some points made by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie. I have the highest respect for the noble Lord, Lord Low, and nothing would give me greater pleasure than to vote for the amendment. There is a problem, however, in that we cannot afford to vote for the amendment. The noble Baroness who has just spoken talked about cuts. We are not talking about cuts but about not having increases. It is true that there might be cuts because of inflation, but if we go down the road proposed by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, inflation will be even higher and the cuts will be more severe. It was Lord Callaghan who pointed out, as a Labour Prime Minister in the 1970s—sometimes I feel that we have gone back to the 1970s; even the Daleks made an appearance in Westminster last week—that inflation is the father and mother of unemployment.

It is really quite extraordinary for the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, to make so much of the rating agency’s downrating of the UK from AAA status. I do not know whether he has read what the rating agency had to say about why that downrating was being made. It was because the agency believed that the Government would not be able to meet the targets that they had set, and which the Opposition are constantly urging us to abandon. The noble Lord talked about the impact of the sliding pound and of inflation, which is a consequence of not meeting these targets. On the idea that finding money out of thin air will not hurt the poorest hardest in the long term, because of the inflation that would be created and the impact it would have on the pound, the hard reality is that we simply cannot afford to do what the noble Lord, Lord Low, would ask of us.

It is the cheapest of cheap politics to keep going on about millionaires being given a subsidy. First, that assumes that the state is entitled to their money and that it can spend that money better than they can; and, secondly, that if they spend it by investing or buying goods it will not generate wealth and prosperity in the economy, while somehow a state bureaucracy involved in spending money and taking it by force through an Administration will get better value and growth. That is a delusion which we happily abandoned in the 1970s when we abandoned rates of income tax at 98% and discovered that the consequence of cutting taxes to 40% was that the rich ended up paying a higher proportion of tax than in the past. Already we are seeing that the proportion of tax paid by the very rich is falling and the proportion paid by the poorest is rising. That is not as a consequence of the recent measures made by my right honourable friend the Chancellor in his Budget but as a consequence of the politically inspired 50% tax, which the previous Government introduced as some kind of political gesture to try to create division between the parties.

We can all make speeches saying that we would like to have more money available for those who are poorest but if we were to follow the prescriptions of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, and his party—in so far as we can work out what their prescriptions are—the effect would be higher inflation, higher interest rates and higher unemployment, with those who are poorest in our country being the most disadvantaged. It would not be the rich or the people in the public sector but those who are unemployed, while the prospects for new jobs would be reduced.

I say to my noble friend that she is right to press ahead and, I hope, to reject this amendment. It is not because we do not care about those who are most vulnerable in our society but precisely because we do that we want an economic policy that will deliver the wealth that is necessary to pay the bills. The truth is that we are in this mess because the previous Labour Government spent money on welfare that was based on an unsustainable bubble. That is why we now have the problem. It is very regrettable that noble Lords opposite should seek to make party politics out of this issue while not acknowledging the very heavy burden of responsibility they carry for having brought this situation about and the real courage being shown by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State in bringing forward this Bill. It is trying to bring into effect a welfare system that will be within our means and will recognise the need to encourage those who have the greatest need.

[Baroness Meacher]

It is very fashionable to blame the previous Government for our predicament but does the noble Lord accept that the banks have to carry perhaps 90% of the burden of responsibility, and that the banking crisis started in the United States—not even in this country? In fact, if there was a weakness, it was in the degree of regulation. My understanding is that the previous Conservative Administration opposed even the level of regulation that this country had. This is therefore not a party political issue; it is about banking, and this country has been deeply wounded by the banking crisis.

The other question for the noble Lord is whether he accepts, as Lord Maynard Keynes argued rather powerfully, that if you are in a terrible state of recession the best way to get yourself out of it is to generate growth. That means that you should not be withdrawing demand from the economy in this incredibly irresponsible way. What the Government are doing is very worrying.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I am most grateful to the noble Baroness. I disagree with the idea that leaving money, as Gladstone would have put it, to fructify in the pockets of the people is withdrawing money from the economy, and that somehow the state would spend that money more effectively.

As to her particular question about whether I accept that all this difficulty was caused by the banking crisis, no, I do not. I think that the banking crisis was caused by the monetary policy being pursued by the previous Government by targeting inflation. The noble Baroness seems surprised by this, but the fundamental causes of the financial crisis were the huge financial surpluses that were being built up—I hesitate to stray too far from the amendment—in China and the Middle East, which kept interest rates low, and an inflation-targeting policy being pursued by the Bank of England that meant that they were very low interest rates. As a result, the banks tried to go for yield. The banks were certainly at fault in devising packages that they thought would reduce risk and give a higher return, and it is certainly true that regulators such as the FSA should have been on to this.

However, the fundamental point is that while Labour were in charge they did nothing about that; indeed, they revelled in it. We were told that they had abolished boom and bust, and that they had come up with a new paradigm. That is why that Labour Government, even at the height of the boom, with huge revenues coming in and house prices and asset prices going through the roof, did nothing except collect the tax. Instead of putting the tax away for a rainy day, what did they do? They spent it on welfare that they could not afford, and when the boom collapsed there was a sudden gap in the market that my right honourable friend is now having to deal with. So let us not rewrite history here; let the Labour Party take responsibility for what it did in government.

The fact is that under both Governments we have been living beyond our means. We have been spending about 10% more than we earn, and we have been saving nothing. We need to save 10%. The consequence of that is that our living standards will fall unless we are able to create growth, and you do not create growth with the state taking more and more from the productive part of the private sector. According to the OECD, close to 50% of our GDP is being spent by the Government. We used to define communist countries as those where more than 50% of the state’s production was spent by the Government.

I say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that this is not an easy amendment to oppose—of course it is not—but she is absolutely right to do so because it is in the long-term interests of the most vulnerable people in our country that we stick to this policy and do not go further down the road that has brought us to this mess. If we travel down that road, it will mean that the hardship endured by the most vulnerable will be all the greater.