Charlie Elphicke
Main Page: Charlie Elphicke (Independent - Dover)Department Debates - View all Charlie Elphicke's debates with the HM Treasury
(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. On that particular point, why is the right hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Tessa Jowell) reported as being unhappy and feeling that she had not been consulted? Why did he not consult the shadow Cabinet?
Ed Balls
I do my politics on the record. I am not going to comment on that kind of trash. [Interruption.] In view of all the Cabinet Ministers who have been briefed against in recent weeks by the Treasury—the Defence Secretary, the Health Secretary, the Lord Chancellor—perhaps the Chancellor should take a leaf out of my book on how to do things.
It is the contention of Labour Members that the Chancellor is wreaking long-term, as well as short-term, damage on British investment, incomes and employment. We know from the downgraded OBR forecast that our economy is already £5.6 billion worse off than it would have been if the Chancellor had got it right. The danger is that these policies will have a long-term impact, leading to a return of the long-term unemployment of the 1980s, a new lost generation of jobless young people and a permanent dent in our nation’s prosperity.
Ed Balls
The IMF is there to help countries through situations like this. We are a shareholder and a contributor to the IMF and that is quite right. It is a different matter our putting liquidity money into a eurozone strategy that patently is not working because it is flawed. My argument to the Chancellor is that it is ironic to see a British Conservative Chancellor backing the German Finance Ministry’s view over sanity and common sense. We have not seen that in our country for a very long time.
Charlie Elphicke
I put it to the shadow Chancellor that this is not just about the business of the unfunded VAT cut that he proposes; it is also about some £10 billion-plus of spending commitments on the Welfare Reform Bill. Billions here, billions there—that does not add up to a credible economic policy from the Opposition.
Mr Osborne
My hon. Friend is absolutely right that a crucial element of our strategy must be to undertake structural reform of the British economy in order to reduce regulation and the burdens on business and make our economy more competitive. We would have to do that in any case, even without the recovery from recession we are having to undertake, but the truth is that it has been made more difficult by the accumulation of all the red tape over the past few years. It is remarkable that when we propose important changes—although not changes that go as far as we would like—to employment tribunal law, Labour opposes them. Those are basic changes that would enable more people to be hired and to be in work, but they are opposed by the Opposition. [Interruption.] We can tell by Opposition Members’ reactions that they simply do not understand what it takes to create jobs in the private sector.
Charlie Elphicke
The Opposition not only want to hold back the growth agenda; they also have a series of unfunded spending commitments and go in for gimmicks and bandwagon chasing. They will not be a responsible Opposition, or electable at the next general election, if they carry on in this way.
Mr Osborne
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. In the last week alone, not only has the shadow Chancellor made a huge unfunded tax promise, but Labour voted against the welfare Bill, with its billions of pounds of savings. It is perfectly right for an Opposition to say, “I don’t agree with that, and I’ve got an argument with you on this,” but Labour’s voting against the entire welfare Bill was a catastrophic error of judgment, and we will remind it of its failure to reform the welfare system from now until the end of this Parliament. The Labour leader recently said that his party had become known as the friend of the welfare scroungers and the bankers. He was absolutely right about that.
The shadow Chancellor’s central argument was that the reason why we are undertaking this deficit reduction plan is because it is all part of some great partisan ideological plot. I therefore have a question for the shadow Treasury team: presumably therefore, the Bank of England is part of this plot? Is that the case?
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)
It is a real privilege and an honour to follow the hon. Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans), who has spoken quite brilliantly. I cannot understand why he has not caught the eye of the Leader of the Opposition before now. He richly deserves to do so, particularly after delivering such a fine speech as we have heard a few moments ago.
I shall now deal with the motion. This is a case of fantasy economics. It advocates the idea of building 25,000 affordable houses and creating 100,000 jobs for young people from a bank bonus tax, which raises less money than the Government’s own banking levy. There is a double-counting issue there, which causes me substantial concern, added to which the Opposition voted against £800 million being raised from tax avoiders. Yet again, Labour Members talk about all these wonderful things that people want, because they want to seem populist, while in reality supporting the very rich. The people on whose side we need to be are the grafters and hard-working people; we should ensure that they get better jobs.
Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. To clarify the issue, the vote on the Finance Bill happened as a result of hundreds of amendments being tabled with almost no notice. The shadow Minister responsible said that we supported the intent behind the measure, but we wanted the Government to bring it back and review it. That is all on the record. The hon. Gentleman should not mislead the House in that manner.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. An hon. Member has been accused of misleading the House. I assume that the hon. Lady meant unintentionally misleading it. She should withdraw that comment.
Charlie Elphicke
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for the U-turn she has announced.
When I intervened on the shadow Chancellor, he attacked me for opposing the weakening of our border controls. The previous Government were not well known for being strong on border security or on immigration controls, yet he criticised me for standing up and defending my constituency. Just as the motion before the House is fantasy economics, it was the shadow Chancellor’s fantasy that this Government cut our border controls. It was the previous Government who cut our border controls, such was the commitment of the previous Prime Minister to keeping our borders safe. He had the grand plan of selling off our English borders at Dover in a privatisation, so much did he care about England. In many ways, I wish that he were in the Chamber more often, rather than hidden away in Portcullis House, so that we could set forth to him our concerns about the policies he pursued. The recession and misery that have been brought upon people up and down the land by his serial mismanagement of the nation’s finances are nothing short of a disgrace.
The Labour party has gone from government to opposition, but has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. It has proposed a £13 billion unfunded VAT cut—populist but unrealistic. It has made £10 billion of welfare reform spending commitments—nice for the base of people in dependency culture, but unrealistic and unaffordable. We need to ensure that work pays.
Charlie Elphicke
No.
We already have a situation in which our debt interest costs us £49 billion a year. We cannot afford to carry on like this. We need to get the nation’s books back into balance, and the country back under control. The Government are doing exactly that.
Let us look at the detail of the Opposition’s motion. It refers to 25,000 new affordable homes, but the reality is that in the five years of the previous Conservative Government, 34,786 affordable housing units were built on average each year, compared with 24,560 under the last Labour Government. That is a 30% fall in the amount of affordable housing built. The Labour party should not be proud of such a record, and no one reading the motion before the House can have any trust in the Labour party on the issue. The motion refers to jobs, which Labour destroyed during the latter part of their period in office.
Lilian Greenwood
The hon. Gentleman is fond of statistics, so is he not concerned that while in 2010 there were 3.9 jobseekers for every vacancy in his constituency, that has risen to 8.1? What does he have to say to that?
Charlie Elphicke
Employment has gone up in my constituency, and unemployment has been falling, which is welcome. We are going in the right direction: across the nation, there are 520,000 new private sector jobs, while public sector employment has fallen by 143,000, so we see a net rise. The most recently announced figures show unemployment falling sharply by 88,000.
Charlie Elphicke
No. Time is pressing, and I need to allow time for the wind-ups.
Youth unemployment has also started to move strongly— although perhaps not as strongly as wider unemployment —in the right direction. Surely the House must welcome that. Manufacturing output is also moving more in the right direction, after being halved in the Labour years, and now being about 11% of our economy. I hope that the economy will rebalance under this Government so that we are less dependent on banks and fat cats—for party donations, frankly—on handing out knighthoods and on bonuses, and more dependent on much more productive service and manufacturing industries. We need less of financial services and housing, and more of making things, producing things, servicing things, and—yes—education.
The narrative of what this Government are doing is to ensure that our economy is stronger, that our work force are more incentivised to work by making work pay through universal credit, and that they are not only incentivised to work but given the skills to work under the Government’s skills and education agenda. We can have a country that is more productive, where more people want to be in employment, where we do not suck in people from overseas to do the jobs, and where we ensure that our countrymen are encouraged to get into work, do their part, fulfil their potential and have more of a sense of dignity, happiness and well-being. That will allow us to build a Britain that is fit for this decade, and it will ensure that we steam ahead, further ahead, of our European colleagues, and do well. The Government are working on that, and deficit reduction is part of it, but the growth, rebalancing, welfare reform and skills and education agendas are parts of the narrative that add up to a much stronger, much more vibrant economy—a much more exciting Britain-to-be where people will be able to benefit from much more success, much more money and much more good fortune, built on a solid foundation for the long term.