Capital Gains Tax (Rates)

Debate between David Anderson and Edward Leigh

Monday 28th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I welcome this Budget because I believe that it is an honest Budget. I have now sat through nearly 30 Budgets, and it is often a profoundly depressing experience, because there is great excitement during the Budget statement only for us to receive a let-down the next day when we actually start to read the Red Book. There is a lot of difficulty and pain in this Budget, but what you see is what you get. What we heard on Budget day was the essence of this Budget, which is the need to try to resolve the desperate financial crisis in which we find ourselves, with a potential debt of £20,000 on every man, woman and child, and £1 out of every £4 spent being borrowed.

I accept that there are many things in the Budget that many of us do not like. Does anybody in this Chamber like a VAT rate of 20%? We are in the desperate position of having to impose that rate on everything that we buy, apart from essentials—I am not sure why newspapers are zero-rated, considering all the rubbish that they put out, but it applies to some useful things like food—because we are faced with this financial crisis. However, contrary to what the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) said, the pain is shared. I agree that a VAT rise is regressive, and we did not want to do it, but we have increased personal allowances, and in doing so ensured that is not the rich who benefit.

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. Who has done more than him to try to raise people out of the poverty and unemployment trap? Who has done more than he in setting up the Centre for Social Justice? Who has done more than he to visit all these areas and try to create a benefit and tax system that encourages people into self-reliance, self-help and self-belief, and does not trap them in sink estates without a job and without hope for the future? He has been working on this problem for more than a decade. Now, at last, he has a chance to put some of his ideas into action, and we welcome him to the Front Bench.

[Mr Anderson]

I understand the long and proud record that the Secretary of State has in this House. Does the hon. Gentleman understand, however, that some Labour Members have not just been there for 10 years, but have lived this? We lived this same experiment in the 1980s and we saw the devastating impact on the people we represent—the people who had to pay for the failure of the Government at that time, when unemployment was not a price worth paying in the areas where I and many other Labour Members come from.