Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
Debate between David Anderson and James Cleverly(9 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Anderson
The people who die leaving property worth £1 million. In the past, some of that would have been taxed and now it will not be. Instead, the Government will tax poor working people, people who are on the dole and people who have more than two kids—they can have two kids, but no more.
Let us also consider the deliberate misuse of language by this Government over the past five years. They have replaced the notion of social security with the idea of welfare, yet they pretend to be the workers party. The concept of social security is crucial to the notion of how civilised we are in this country. Social security underpins the lives of working people and is based on the real concept of people being in this together, with a national insurance scheme that we all pay into if and when we can work and a security net that will support us when we cannot work for whatever reason. I know that the Conservative party has spent the past 10 years trying to paint everybody who uses public services or needs social security as a skiver and not a striver, or a shirker and not a worker, to further its own political narrative. That despicable tactic has to be challenged as the poor, the vulnerable, the ill, the young, the women and the disabled people of this country struggle to make ends meet in desperate times. They are the people the Tories are making pay for the economic mess that their friends in the City, the banks and the hedge funds got us into.
At the same time, the Tories are attacking the millions of public sector workers in this country who take care of the nation by freezing their pay for what will become a decade. We have to stop making nurses, careworkers, firefighters, police and other public sector workers pay the price for the failure of the Tories’ friends. Let us acknowledge in the debate about productivity the productivity gains that have been made in the public sector, where far fewer people are doing a lot more.
James Cleverly
If the hon. Gentleman is so proud of his party’s credentials in relation to working people, perhaps he would like to explain why the working voter has deserted his party for mine and even for the United Kingdom Independence party?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. It might help if I remind people that this is a Budget debate, not an election debate.