Capital Gains Tax (Rates)

Brian Binley Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Glenda Jackson]

No. The idea that you have allowed children to languish in that state in Peterborough for all these years and done nothing about it—no, I am sorry, I cannot give you time. You voted against Sure Start. You voted against the new deal. You voted against every single policy that the Labour Government brought in over our 13 years to give every child a chance and to ensure that we as a nation invested in our greatest national treasure: our people.

[Mr Brian Binley (Northampton South) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Glenda Jackson]

Oh, go on then.

[Mr Binley]

I am most grateful to the hon. Lady. Does she not have any regrets at all about the massive rise in the number of young people who are not in education, employment or training? That can be laid at no one else’s doorstep but the Labour Government’s.

[Glenda Jackson]

May I just point out to the hon. Gentleman that, when his party was last in government, it was not children who were not in education, employment or training? In Birkenhead, the city in which I was born—admittedly, I have not lived there for a very long time—there were men who were entirely fit, healthy and capable of work, but the only way for them to earn a living was to pick over the rubbish dumps to see if they could find anything to sell.

[Mr Binley]

I am a working-class boy.

[Glenda Jackson]

You did not have to go through a rubbish dump to find things to sell. And I am a working-class girl.

There is a fantasy about a big black hole of debt that is resting on the shoulders of every man, woman and child in this country. I have lived all my life under the debt incurred by this country fighting and winning the second world war. We paid that debt off about five years ago, but I had not even been aware of its existence. During those decades, I and millions like me were given opportunities to move forward, to develop our talents and to create work that had not been dreamt of by the preceding generations. That could have happened again, but it will not happen under this Budget. This Budget is quite deliberately following the good old Conservative rule of divide and rule, and blame the poor—

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[Mr Brian Binley (Northampton South) (Con)]

May I first pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton)? She is no longer in the Chamber, but she held her own with charm and interest among the many excellent maiden speeches this evening. I congratulate all who made such speeches, especially the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Anas Sarwar), who delivered an informative, interesting and hard-hitting speech. He clearly has a great future in the House. I know I speak for all hon. Members when I ask that he pass on our good wishes to his distinguished predecessor—his dad.

It will come as no surprise to Labour Members that I welcome the Chancellor’s Budget, but I have been amazed when listening to some of their speeches during the Budget debates. It seems to me that they have a collective delete button that has erased the last 13 years of their memory. I regret the situation left by the previous Government, which has motivated the many tough measures that the Chancellor has been forced to take. I also regret that they left such a massive budget deficit and such a large public sector debt, and that they let spending rip to sustain the previous Prime Minister’s vain boast that he had done away with boom and bust. How empty those words seem now.

[Mrs McGuire]

rose—

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Binley]

I will gave way to my hon. Friend, if the right hon. Lady will forgive me. Time is limited to only seven minutes per speech, so I ask her indulgence.

[Charlie Elphicke]

Does my hon. Friend also regret the fact that child poverty has increased by 300,000 since 2004-05? Does he welcome the fact that it should be frozen in the next two years?

[Mr Binley]

I welcome the Government’s pledge to ensure that child poverty does not increase in the next two years in these difficult times, but I was dismayed by the previous Government’s record, which left so many young people out of employment, education and training. That was terribly sad.

I regret that the previous Government thought that they had only to create a project and throw money at it to solve a problem. I come from industry, and I can tell Labour Members that in truth, how projects are managed determines their success or otherwise. Perhaps they can take that lesson on board.

I congratulate the Chancellor on his courage in the face of what he had to deal with. I think he produced a fair and balanced Budget, as do many of my electorate in Northampton. To fire a warning shot across the bows of Labour Members, I can tell them that a number of those who told me that this weekend were in fact Labour voters. Labour Members might need to temper their comments in the light of that information.

The success of the Budget is not assured. It depends on achieving the projected growth figures, which means being competitive. How sad that on the World Economic Forum’s global competitiveness index, the UK fell from seventh to 13th in the rankings between 1997 and 2010. Sadly, that is another Labour failure.

As I said, the Chancellor did a great job in trying to be fair and balanced, not only for this generation, but for our children and grandchildren. Had we not taken that action and set out on that course, they would be left with the burden.

[Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)]

rose—

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[Mr Binley]

I will not give way because time is very limited.

One thing that makes me most angry is the idea that we should spend the money and expect our children and grandchildren to bail us out. That is totally unacceptable.

I said that the success of the Budget is not assured, but I welcome the many initiatives that the Chancellor outlined in his speech, including the reduction in corporation tax, particularly for small businesses. The Federation of Small Businesses announced that they will help more than 850,000 small and medium-sized concerns. Along with the FSB and the Forum of Private Business, I welcome the extension of the enterprise guarantee scheme, which will likewise help those small businesses. The FSB reckoned that a 1% increase in national insurance contributions would have brought about the loss of 57,000 jobs. So the previous Government’s record continues. The issue is not only what they did, but what they said they would do. We need to take that into account.

I am delighted that the Chancellor listened to our concerns about raising capital gains tax and that he has increased the threshold to £5 million from £2 million to further encourage entrepreneurs. All of that, welcome though it is, might not be enough to ensure that business has the available financial resources to produce the growth that we need. I am especially worried about that because some 94% of the people who work in the private sector in Northamptonshire work in small or medium-sized enterprises. I fear that they will not have access to the credit from the banks that they require to continue their businesses. Some 70% of the nation’s creativity comes from that sector, and SMEs added 2 million jobs to the employment list at a time when UK plc was shedding 1.5 million jobs. Without that sector, we would not have had the jobs growth that we had in the five or six years before the beginning of the recession.

We face some serious issues in ensuring that the SME sector receives the credit it needs to provide the growth that my right hon. Friends the Chancellor and the Chief Secretary require. The G20 agreement to force the Government to make sure that the banks hold on to even larger amounts of capital flies in the face of our work in that respect, so I ask the Chief Secretary to look at ways of ensuring that the sector receives the money it requires. I want him to look at the levy on the banks to see whether he can allow some of that money to be spent on providing credit for the small business sector and I also want him to promise that he will look at ways of alleviating the £130 billion figure placed on us—seemingly by agreement—by the G20. I welcome the Budget, but I need my Government to recognise the need for SMEs to get the money they need to continue to grow to provide the jobs that we require.