Amendment of the Law

Debate between Charlie Elphicke and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Friday 23rd March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jackson]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, which explains why this Budget has had consensus support and been viewed from a positive perspective by business organisations across the country.

We should be talking a paradigm that involves tax and spending, not just tax. There has been too much focus in the last few months on cutting or increasing taxes, when we should be talking about expenditure. Are we really asking the public to believe that a net 6.8% reduction in public expenditure over the comprehensive spending review period is enough to rebalance the economy when we saw a 53% real-terms growth in public expenditure between 2000 and 2010? We were spending £450 billion just 10 years ago on public services, and we are now spending £702 billion. Are we getting value for money for our constituents and our taxpayers?

Of course, Conservative Members will not let the electorate forget the disastrous and poisonous economic legacy left to us by the Labour party—to the extent that we have to pay £120 million a day in debt interest and are £47.6 billion a year in debt this year. As I said earlier to my right hon. Friend the Transport Secretary, had Labour remained in office, they would have had to borrow another £200 billion. They left us a structural debt in a period of economic growth. They left us a situation in which individual net borrowing doubled in just six years, while we have massive sectoral imbalances and a systemic dependency on debt. That was Labour’s legacy.

Labour Members still have no economic credibility; if they were a party with a cogent and coherent narrative on the economy, they would pledge to reinstate the 50p tax rate and reverse the policy on freezing age-related allowances. They do neither because they are opportunistic and they know that if they were elected to government, they would need the money.

[Charlie Elphicke]

My hon. Friend is being far too generous in saying the Opposition are being opportunistic. They are going back to the 1970s class warfare old Labour that they used to be, and they have forgotten all the modernisation they achieved in 1997.

[Mr Jackson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Labour party will not make progress with the electorate until it does two things: apologise for the debt millstone they left to our children and grandchildren, and develop a policy that is not written on the back of a fag packet.

I welcome the cut in corporation tax, which gives us the fourth lowest such tax rate in the G20. I welcome the reduction in the top rate of income tax from 50p to 45p, too, as the 50p rate was damaging competitiveness and not collecting the sums it should have collected, and was an impediment to entrepreneurial activity and business growth in our country.

Let us nail the myth about taking poorer working people out of tax. It is a Conservative policy, enunciated by Lord Forsyth in the tax commission in 2005, and restated by Lords Saatchi and Tebbit. It is a Conservative policy to boost people’s incomes because we trust them to spend their money wisely.

I also support the policy on age-related allowances. There is consensus on the issue of generational fairness—even the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith) will agree with me about that—and this Government have a very good record on provision for pensioners, including the largest ever cash rise in the basic state pension from April this year, the uprating of the pension credit guarantee, and the help with fuel bills for poorer pensioners. We have a much better story to tell on that than the last Labour Government had, with their ridiculous and insulting 75p pension rise in 2000.