Budget Resolutions
Debate between Daisy Cooper and John Hayes(2 days, 10 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Sir John Hayes
My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right. Young people are being forced to compete with those foreign workers for a scarce number of jobs. The only people who support that policy are dim-witted bourgeoise liberals and hard-hearted plutocrats, because both of them glory in the idea of foreign labour. That foreign labour is edging Britons out of jobs and, by so doing, weakening our economy.
Daisy Cooper
The right hon. Gentleman surely has not missed the evidence that, since his party’s botched Brexit deal, it has become more expensive to do business in the UK, businesses are wrapped up in red tape, and many businesses have moved abroad, taking good, high-quality jobs with them. We have a NEETs crisis in this country, caused by many different factors. One of the reasons that there are graduates who cannot get jobs is because his party’s ridiculous Brexit deal has driven businesses abroad. If we get back into the single market and make doing business cheaper, those businesses will come back here and create jobs for British young people.
Sir John Hayes
I was going to address the issue of trade later, but the hon. Lady has encouraged me to do so now. The truth is that the balance of payments has been a neglected subject in this Parliament and for successive Governments for decades. We never sold as much to Europe as Europe sold to us, and that balance was out of kilter for the whole time that we were members of the European Union.
Sir John Hayes
No, I will not give way again, because there is only so much you can teach the Liberal Democrats!
The balance of trade figures was once a pivotal announcement in Parliament and for Governments. That has been forgotten as we have chosen to import more and more goods into this country, and to make fewer and fewer. The hon. Lady will recognise that, given that I represent a rural constituency that grows a lot of the food we consume, I am particularly sensitive to the fact that we have made ourselves dependent on foreign food imports. That is preposterous. We need to shorten supply chains and make ourselves more economically resilient. As the Prime Minister said, actually—
Sir John Hayes
I was about to make a point, but I will then give way once more to see whether I can teach the hon. Lady something more. As the Prime Minister said, we must remanufacture—we must build our manufacturing capacity again. Successive Governments have failed to do this. I do not claim any credit for any political party, and I certainly claim no credit for the Liberal Democrats.
Daisy Cooper
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely contradicting himself. He has simultaneously said that we need to shorten supply chains to improve our food security while defending the very trade barriers that prevent British importers and exporters from getting food to each other on a shorter supply chain. It was the right hon. Gentleman’s party that agreed the terrible trade deals with New Zealand and Australia that have put up food prices and undermined British farmers. Would he like to apologise for that? After 10 years, we are still teaching the Conservatives how damaging their trade deals were.
Sir John Hayes
I mentioned my record on apprenticeships. I was in the coalition Government when I was able to bring about that outcome, with the full support of Liberal Democrat Ministers. It was Vince Cable, actually, as Secretary of State, who understood the need to build skills and train domestic workers so that we were not dependent, in the way that I described, on European goods or goods from anywhere else in the world. We just need to make more of what we consume. It is not hard to work out.
I said that I would deal with one or two other things, and time is pressing. Productivity is a macroeconomic problem that has faced all Governments. Declining productivity over time means that we spend a great deal of money on things from which we do not get a great deal of outcome. Our productivity is worse than some of our key competitors. The Government need to focus on that; the previous Prime Minister and his Ministers said that they would, but there was little about that in the Budget.
To summarise, I think it was Disraeli who said, “Men are not the victim of circumstances; they create circumstances.” It is not enough to blame context for the failure to address the macroeconomic problems of skills, productivity and immigration. More must be done, and done soon.