Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Gregg McClymont and Thérèse Coffey

Friday 23rd March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Gregg McClymont]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Hon. Gentlemen on the Conservative Benches are becoming rather vexed, and one does not have to wonder why, given the message that they are sending out to the electorate with this tax cut, which will cost more than £3 billion at a time, as the Government emphasise, of austerity.

The hon. Member for Watford (Richard Harrington) suggests that empirical evidence shows that the 50p tax does not raise any money, but there is no empirical evidence in the document presented by the Government. There is a series of estimates, based on a view of behavioural change, itself based on a view of human behaviour, which one would have thought would have at least been challenged by the financial crisis and all that it brought.

This Government are taking a gamble that the £3 billion that they would have had in the bank—in their coffers—will be almost cancelled out by millionaires from Monte Carlo and Caribbean boltholes rushing back to show their patriotism to this country by paying a slightly lower rate of tax. Those are not my words, but the words of the Business Secretary in a previous incarnation. This tax cut for millionaires is the wrong priority for this country at this time.

We have a crisis of employment—a crisis of youth unemployment, with 1 million in the UK and one in four in Scotland now unemployed. What we need are measures to get young people back into work, but how long are they meant to wait, to take the argument of Government Members? A national insurance holiday for small and medium-sized enterprises—that is what we need. A bank bonus tax to create 150,000 jobs for young people—that is what we need. A temporary VAT cut to stimulate the economy and help out hard-pressed motorists—that is what we need. And a VAT cut for home repairs and maintenance to stimulate that important sector of the economy—that is what we need.

Then we have the granny tax. Under the guise of simplification the Government have brought in a stealth tax on more than 4 million pensioners. Some 700,000 people turning 65 years old will lose more than £300 per year—[Interruption.] Someone shouts, “No one will pay more,” and there is a debate to be had about sharing burdens.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Gregg McClymont]

I am afraid that I have no more time to do so.

There is a debate to be had about sharing burdens across the generations, but to begin it with a stealth tax described as a “simplification” is surely not the way to encourage a healthy, long-term debate about that kind of distribution.

I finish on this point: wrong priorities, wrong values, wrong Government.