Jacob Rees-Mogg
Main Page: Jacob Rees-Mogg (Conservative - North East Somerset)Department Debates - View all Jacob Rees-Mogg's debates with the HM Treasury
(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
May I begin by congratulating hon. Members on a series of excellent maiden speeches? My hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) spoke. I did not know that area of the country at all before he did so, and I feel much better informed as to its great beauties. The hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) told the House, to its considerable relief, that he is not going to be a pugilist, as one of his predecessors once was, so I am glad to note that, if he disagrees with my speech, I may not end up with a broken nose—[Interruption.] I could not quite catch that, and I expect the Hansard reporters could not, either. My hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer), as Edmund Burke said of Pitt the Younger, is not so much a chip off the old block, as the old block itself. And finally, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Cambridgeshire (Stephen Barclay) told us that he was—on the internet, under the same name—a cabaret artist. I may be rare in the country at large, but in this House probably not, in that I much prefer a political speech to a cabaret artist, so I am very glad that we had the wrong website for him.
Let me come to the matter at hand, the Second Reading of this incredibly important Finance Bill. It is, like the one in 1981, of considerable controversy but great importance. We have heard at length, but interestingly, from Opposition Members that, actually, this is not a serious circumstance, and that, if we pay off the debt, though a bit too high, in dribs and drabs, all will be well. Sadly, that just is not correct. The deficit that we have faced has reached levels that in peacetime we have never had, and a key factor about the funding of the deficit last year has been missed. It was that almost all the gilts that were issued were bought by the Bank of England under its programme of quantitative easing. That programme has now stopped.
Even with this Finance Bill, we face an increase in the amount that the Government need to raise from £40 billion to £160 billion, and if we had stuck to the Opposition’s proposals it would have been higher still. Where does that money come from? Who is willing to give this country £160 billion? As it is collected, who finds it harder to borrow? The answer is the very businesses that Opposition Members say find it difficult to make investment decisions. If we borrow and borrow, and the Government use up all the money, we force up interest rates for mortgage holders and squeeze out the investment that private companies need to make.
Helen Goodman
I am trying, but I am having great difficulty following the hon. Gentleman’s train of thought. On the one hand, he says, rightly, that the deficit and the debt stock are too large, but he then connects that with extremely high interest rates. We do not have extremely high interest rates; we have record low interest rates at the moment.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am sorry to say that the hon. Lady left my train of thought at the wrong station. The point I was making was that, if we carry on issuing gilts at an even faster rate, long-term interest rates will rise, and it is on long-term interest rates that mortgages end up being priced. If we look at the gilts market, we see that the very thought—the prospect, the hope—of a Conservative Government saw it rally, therefore reducing the cost of borrowing to people in this country, whether Her Majesty’s Government or private individuals. So yes, we have very low overnight rates, but the long-term rate set by the gilts market is more important for mortgages.
Chris Leslie
But surely the hon. Gentleman, as a sensible and grounded individual, will recognise that there is a world of difference between the Greek situation, to which some of his more hot-headed colleagues have compared our country, and the rather sturdy and well managed way in which we deal with our debt and gilts issuance in this country.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I do not believe that I had mentioned Greece in the few words that I had spoken. I would say, however, that it is better to cut before getting into a Greek situation. I admire my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer because, in his foresight, he has brought forward action early. Countries in a Greek situation find that they can get no money from the financial markets and have to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund or the European Central Bank. How much better it is—how much more “prudent”, to use a word once popular with Labour Members—to get our house in order before reaching that state of desperation.
Kate Green
I am following the hon. Gentleman’s argument, I think, thanks to the probing questions of my hon. Friends. Are we not talking about a balance between getting the long-term interest rates sufficiently low and not overreacting and over-dramatising, which I fear the hon. Gentleman is in danger of doing?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The hon. Lady ought to allow me to get over-dramatic before accusing me of being so. Her point is to some extent valid; of course we need to consider these things rationally and deal with them in a sensible and prudent fashion. That is exactly what we have done. The point that I am trying to establish is that the level of debt needs to be tackled urgently. I am not saying that the United Kingdom is bankrupt; there are studies that show that there has been no default on our debt since 1688. I do not believe that the situation was going to lead to a default on gilt-edged securities. We had not reached that stage.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
However, I do not believe that it would have been impossible, purely because of our strong history, for us to have reached that stage if we had not done something early—sooner rather than later. Does the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) still want to intervene? I shall be delighted to give way.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. That is why, as I was saying, it is right to address the problem now, when we are in a strong enough position to do it and take the pain. Nobody denies that cutting is painful. It is always difficult.
Having, I hope, established the seriousness of the situation, I want to move on to the balance between tax rises and spending cuts and why I think, once again, that Her Majesty’s Government have exactly the right balance. One figure has not been drawn out in these debates, but it is noteworthy. If we take net tax receipts and national insurance contributions as a percentage of GDP, we see that they will reach 36.4% in 2013-14. That level has not been achieved in any single year of socialist government from 1970-71 onwards. We are having the highest level of taxation as a percentage of GDP because of a Conservative Budget, of all things. Incidentally, the same figure was reached under the chancellorships of Lords Howe and Lawson. So the Conservatives are willing to tax when it is necessary to ensure the financial stability of the country.
Owen Smith
Given the manifest command of economic history that the hon. Gentleman is showing, will he answer a question that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury could not answer when I asked him earlier today? It was about growth. Can the hon. Gentleman name one five-year period during any of the past 40 years when we have seen the level of growth projected by the OBR—in particular, the level of job creation in the private sector?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman asks the wrong question, for a very straightforward reason. I would happily ask a question back. Can he point to a deeper recession in the history of the United Kingdom? The fact is that recovery rates from very deep recessions are much faster than those from shallower recessions. That is the point that my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) made earlier. We get very strong recoveries after a very serious downturn, and the seriousness of the recent downturn goes back to the 1930s, as the right hon. Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling) so rightly pointed out.
Gregg McClymont (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman asked whether it was possible to name any recession in which there has been such a recovery. What about the 1930s? I understand that it was only through rearmament that Britain recovered from the deepest recession of all.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I do not believe that the hon. Gentleman is accurate about the recovery in the 1930s. There is a common misconception that the recession of the 1930s was the same in the United Kingdom as in the United States, but that is not correct. What really happened in the 1930s is that when we came off the gold standard, there was a gigantic monetary stimulus, and that led to the recovery. The one thing that is of crucial importance, but outside the strict remit of this debate, is that we must maintain a loose monetary policy, which will be supportive of the recovery, as it was in the 1930s.
Gregg McClymont
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that answer. However, my understanding is that we had mass unemployment until the war took its course and we had to rearm. Am I not right in saying that the unemployment problem that emerged after 1929, and particularly after 1931, was not solved until rearmament and the war occurred?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about the problem of unemployment in the 1930s, although the situation began to recover in the United Kingdom considerably earlier than in the United States. I accept that in the United States, rearmament led to recovery, but I suggest that in the United Kingdom the recovery resulted from coming off the gold standard and the boost to trade that that provided.
Mr Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Lab/Co-op)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman has promoted me, but I will give way for the flattery.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I think that Neville Chamberlain managed to balance the budget, so we had a Chancellor who was a Conservative doing quite a good deal of work in the 1930s. However, we may be getting a little abstruse and far away from the 2010 Finance Bill.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I know that I am accused of being old-fashioned, but I do not want to conduct the whole debate in the 1930s.
Let us move back to 2010 and the need for the tax rises to be as they are, not higher. Clearly, at 36.4% of GDP, we are at a tax level that it is very difficult to surpass. I remind Labour Members who disparage the great Professor Laffer that when tax rates were at 83%, they still failed to get above 36.4% of GDP, so taxation is as high as it can be.
My final point is on spending. The problem with spending is that it got out of control post the period when Labour followed the Conservative plans for public spending. It is simply not sustainably to have Government spending at 48% of GDP when the tax base is 36.4% of GDP.
Grahame M. Morris
If that is the case, why did the Conservatives support the Labour Government’s spending plans until 2008? In fact, my recollection is that there were demands for more spending—more police numbers, more support for carers, and so on.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
There were political reasons, I think it might be said, for supporting those spending plans. I was not a Member of the House at that time, and it is a bit harsh for me to be expected to take responsibility. I think a lot of people, not only in this House, held to the mistaken idea that the economy was going to carry on growing for ever. I have always thought that boom and bust is a fact of life. We always have booms and we always have busts, and we will have them again. One can look at studies of financial cycles going back to biblical times, so the thought that there would always be growth was simply wrong, and to try to match Labour’s spending programme was a mistake. However, even Homer nods. The point is that spending was out of control and had to be cut, and taxation is at its limit.
Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
I know that the hon. Gentleman keeps quoting the figure of 36.4% of GDP, but is that not dependent upon what GDP actually is? According to the coalition Government’s prospectus, GDP will actually go down.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman ought to bear in mind that we will achieve growth if we leave some money for business to borrow rather than it all being pinched by the state. That was the point that I was making at the beginning—if the state borrows all the money that is going, in the absence of quantitative easing, it crowds out private investment.
I know that Members do not want to listen to me all evening, so I shall—[Hon. Members: “No, more!”] Well, as I understand it, if I go on long enough tomorrow’s business is forfeit, and that is an Opposition motion, so I will conclude.
We know that the situation is serious and that tax is as high as it can be, therefore spending must be cut, however difficult it is. I commend the Liberal Democrats for their courage in supporting that and facing up to the realities of government, which they have not needed to do for a few decades. If I were wearing my hat, I would take it off to the Liberal Democrats.
Mr Jones
As a former trade union negotiator, I can tell my right hon. Friend that that is an old trick. People go into negotiations asking for 50% knowing that they will come out with 5%. It is exactly as she portrays.
If anybody wants to read about the Government’s game plan, or war plan, I recommend an excellent book—someone sent me a copy from Canada—called “Shooting the Hippo” by Linda McQuaig. It is nothing to do with wildlife, and I say to the more delicate individuals in the Chamber that it is not actually about murdering hippos, but where the title comes from is interesting. Part of the media hype in Canada centred on the example of the baby hippo that would have to be shot because the zoo could no longer afford the size of compound it needed. We thereby get into a self-fulfilling prophesy, in which there is somehow no alternative.
Hon. Members have mentioned the comparison with Greece; the Canadians used the example of New Zealand. The Tories and the Liberal Democrats have justified the emergency Budget by talking about our “sovereign debt crisis” as though it were the same as Greece’s, or that of some other southern European country. That has been the entire justification for the proposals. The hon. Member for North East Somerset referred to gilts and other investments as though they would be at risk if nothing were done, and actually claimed credit for the Government for the change in the gilt yield. However, the 10-year bond yield in the UK today is around 4.5%, but it actually dropped to 3.5% in February, way before the election.
Mr Jones
To somehow attribute that decline to— [Interruption.] From a sedentary position, the hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands) asks me to give way. I am glad he is now either a Parliamentary Private Secretary or some other kind of bag carrier on the Back Benches, because it will stop him making his fatuous contributions. I hope that the Exchequer Secretary is a good Minister to carry bags for, unlike the Minister for Equalities or one of the other Liberal Democrat Ministers. I shall give way with pleasure to the hon. Member for North East Somerset.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The financial markets in February had the intelligence to work out that there was an election in May and to consult the opinion polls. It was not exactly a case of consulting Mystic Meg.