Amendment of the Law

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I shall try to honour the time constraints that you have imposed Mr Deputy Speaker.

Today the United Kingdom has the highest inflation since the days of Margaret Thatcher. The RPI stands at 5.5% and the CPI at 4.4%. Today the United Kingdom has seen the Chancellor announce a lowering of the growth forecast from the 2.6% predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility last year and the 2.3% in the last Budget to 1.7% today. Today the United Kingdom has the highest unemployment since 1984, when John Major had just taken over from Margaret Thatcher. This is not a Budget for growth into the future. It is a Budget that will take us back to the future of Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

Inflation at 5.5% has a devastating impact on families in the UK, as £1 in every £20 that they earn is now lost. For example, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs gave up an enormous 24% of her departmental budget to the Treasury over this spending period, but inflation has now turned that into a real-terms cut of 31%. Have Treasury Ministers commissioned, or do they intend to commission, any research into the capacity of Departments to deliver on their performance indicators, given the effects of rising inflation on the departmental spending cuts that have already been incurred?

It is risible that this Budget has been delivered by a Government who style themselves the greenest ever. The establishment of the green investment bank has been delayed until 2012, and it is still unclear whether it can fully function as a bank or whether it will simply be a glorified fund. The carbon reduction commitment has already outraged the CBI and British business. Instead of rewarding energy-efficient businesses and returning £1 billion to business, as the Labour Government proposed when we introduced the scheme, the Treasury has shifted the goalposts and taken all of the money to itself. I had thought that the implementation of the scheme had been delayed until 2012-13, and that was certainly what was announced to business, but I see from measure O in table 2.2 on page 44 of the Red Book that the Government are now forecasting £715 million of revenue to the Treasury in 2011-12 from that scheme that only goes live in 2012-13. I ask Treasury Ministers to reconcile that anomaly.

The carbon floor price appears on the face of it to be a positive green measure, but in fact it betrays the lack of coherence in Government thinking on this area. The Government’s electricity market reform recognises the need to incentivise 18 GWe of new generation capacity in the UK by 2024. That is the equivalent of £200 billion of investment between now and 2020. As Ministers know, much of this generation capacity will come from gas. At a stroke, the Government have pushed away the very investors they sought to attract. They are now likely to encourage more imports and external dependency. Why should European generators generate in the UK when they can generate abroad with no such tax upon them, and then benefit from higher UK prices by use of the interconnectors? One element of the Government’s energy market reform strategy has been to increase the use of interconnectors. As a result of this step, investment will be pushed into France, Belgium and the Netherlands. There is incoherence at the heart of the Government’s thinking on this matter.

I did not support the Government in the Lobby on Monday night in the vote on military action in Libya. I pay tribute to our armed services, and to their valour and the work they do, but I cannot support the cost of the military escapade taking place in Libya, and I look to what could have been achieved if the funds being expended there were instead being expended around the rest of our country.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Barry Gardiner]

No, I will not.

One Tomahawk missile costs £350,000, and 140 of them were launched in the first 48 hours of the attack, which amounts to a cost of £50 million. It is estimated that the cost of prosecuting this military conflict is £6 million each day. The cost of one day of action in Libya could restore in its entirety the £2.25 million of cuts in children’s services forced on my community in Brent by this Liberal-Conservative coalition Government. One month in Libya could protect children’s services across the whole of London. Nine months in Libya could protect children’s services across the entire UK. Aneurin Bevan once said that priorities is the language of socialism. Those are my priorities and that is why I will oppose this Budget.