Jacob Rees-Mogg
Main Page: Jacob Rees-Mogg (Conservative - North East Somerset)
Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
The hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) lays down the challenge that not enough was said on Brexit, so let me try to put that right; it is a challenge I am happy to rise to. If one thinks back to just a few months ago, we were expecting this to be the “punishment Budget,” and that my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne) was going to be telling us that it was all doom and gloom. I have looked up a quotation from one Mr Angel Gurría, the secretary-general of the OECD, which yesterday gave us a little good news. He said there would be a Brexit tax of £2,200 per person and went on to tell us:
“The costs are piling up, and we are still two months away from the referendum.”
He said it was getting worse and worse.
I rather feel as the diners must have felt at Belshazzar’s feast, when the words appeared written on the wall, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,” and Daniel came and translated them and said, “You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting.” After the feast they all went to bed and woke up the next morning, and instead of Darius the Mede having taken over, Belshazzar carried on as normal. It was business as normal, and that is what is so impressive about this Budget.
We are, indeed, in a period of transition with Brexit; we are heading out of the door, I am glad to say, in spite of their lordships’ obstructionism, but we are doing so from a position of extraordinary strength and remarkable stability. And that stability is deliberate and is part of Government policy.
It is worth looking at page 57 of the Red Book, because we see there the percentage of GDP that is anticipated to come in as public sector receipts. It will be consistently between 36% and 37.5% over the period we are looking at. If we look back over a much longer time period, all the way to Harold Wilson’s prime ministership, we see that public sector receipts remain in the region of 34.5% to 38.5%.
However detailed, pernickety and fiddly the changes in taxation, it is remarkably difficult to raise that taxation much above current levels, and therefore what we are talking about in this Budget is more a question of how the cloth is cut than whether there should be more taxation or not. Expenditure must then fit in with that, and to ensure that expenditure remains under control remains the business of government, whether they are this Conservative Government, they were the last coalition Government, or, heaven forfend, they are a socialist Government, should Labour ever manage to return from its current sorry state.
Geraint Davies
Does the hon. Gentleman not agree that the Brexit vote reduced the size of the cloth at a stroke? It shrank by 15% through devaluation—of the value of our economy, our wages, our savings and our assets. Moreover, after the short-term window of export growth because of that devaluation, we are going to face tariffs that clobber us again.
Mr Rees-Mogg
That really depends on how we measure our cloth. I am in favour of measuring my cloth in imperial measures—that is to say, pounds and ounces, inches and feet and so on, and therefore of using sterling as my base for measuring things. If we do that, our international assets have gone up enormously, because any dollar assets we hold are worth 15% more in pounds. That is more income coming in, and that helps reduce the current account deficit; it is good news for the British economy. Our exporters are 15% more competitive. That deals with any tariffs that may be imposed—if any are imposed. What is more, we are at the front of the queue for a trade deal with the strongest and biggest economy in the world, so, actually, post-Brexit we are fighting fit. The Chancellor of the Exchequer said that he would ensure that we were fighting fit, and we are. We are open for business with the world. With the continuing cuts in corporation tax, we are showing that we are absolutely willing to compete with anybody in attracting capital investment and that we are ready to do business in a way that investors will like.
Rob Marris (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)
May I sound for the hon. Gentleman two notes of caution? First, he has just said that post-Brexit we are fighting fit. May I remind him that we have not even triggered article 50 yet? We are a member state of the European Union and are likely to remain so for the next two years and two weeks. Secondly, he prays in aid the Red Book, but I cannot see in it—perhaps he can tell me otherwise—any forecasts caveated with a statement that when we do Brexit, the situation may change for the better or for the worse. There are no caveats at all.
Mr Rees-Mogg
The forecasts are taken from the OBR and if the hon. Gentleman looks at its rather thicker report, he will see its comments in relation to Brexit and trade deals. The OBR is still rather negative on trade deals and I think that it is wrong. I have the greatest respect for the OBR, because it is the one body that during the Brexit campaign behaved properly and within its remit and did not dabble its fingers into the politics of the Brexit debate. Its view is cautious on trade. It thinks that over the next 10 years, post-Brexit, our trade position will be less good. I happen to think that that is wrong.
Helen Goodman
The hon. Gentleman should give way not to me, but to the OBR, which he has been complimenting so much. Paragraph 4.6 on page 86 of its report states:
“Given the uncertainty regarding how the Government will respond to the choices and trade-offs with which it will be confronted in the negotiations, there is no meaningful basis for predicting the precise end-point on which to base for our forecast.”
Mr Rees-Mogg
That was broadly the point I was making—the OBR is quite cautious. I was not disputing that it is cautious, but I am not cautious. I am sorry to say that, much though I respect the OBR and much though I think it does its work diligently, it got it hopelessly wrong a year ago and had to raise its forecasts for GDP growth consistently, because it did not manage to get them right. It revised down the November autumn statement and has had to revise back up again now. I think it is a terrible mistake, though earlier I quoted holy scripture, to take forecasts from these people as holy writ. They are not.
This comes down to a question of judgment, both political and economic. The political judgment is on whether this Government are going to be competent to negotiate well and effectively. I have complete confidence that they will do that—that they will be able to negotiate in the councils of Europe more effectively than anybody else could on our behalf. The economic judgment is on the balance between what we get from the European Union and what we can do with the rest of the world. I expect that, if we trade more freely with the rest of the world, that will more than compensate for the risks that we may take in having harder terms of trade with the European Union.
Having taken up the challenge from the hon. Members for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) and for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie), who both wanted a Government view on Brexit—I cannot claim to speak for the Government, but I can at least say something about Brexit—I want to go through some of the details. This Budget has some very good news about the deficit. Although £51.8 billion, the deficit for this year, is still a very large amount of money, as a percentage of GDP we are now back within the norms of the types of deficits that Governments can run with. That is not to say that I think having a deficit is a good thing in principle, but GDP growth is near 2.6% and this is about remaining steady with total debt and GDP. If we go no further than that, it is an amount that can be lived with. That is important, because although there is more to be done, the vast bulk of what was necessary to live within our means has now been done.
I want to make some little points about certain areas of concern. I would encourage the Government not to proceed with the personal injury discount rate reduction to minus 0.75%. The idea that awards against the Government should be calculated with a negative time cost of money is wrong. It would be better and cheaper for the Government to underwrite annual payments, rather than making lump-sum payments with a discount rate of a negative kind—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Rob Marris) mutters that I do not understand this. I do understand it, and I know that the Government are obliged by law to do this, but they have the ability to introduce new laws in this House and can often do that as part of the Finance Bill.
Rob Marris
I will tell the hon. Gentleman what I was chuntering on about. He talks about periodic payments. They are called structured settlements, and in order to calculate the future value, we have to use a discount rate. That is what it is all about.
Mr Rees-Mogg
We can set rates in a different way. We can set them, then adjust them for inflation at a lower initial rate, rather than having a payment based on a capital sum. Reducing the rate from 2.5% to minus 0.75% is a mistake and will result in an undue cost to the Exchequer.
I also have concerns about the probate tax. I see that it is likely to be judged by the national statistics people as a tax rather than as a charge, and I do not think it right that the Government should introduce stealth taxes. Probate charges should relate to the cost of the probate work, which is broadly irrelevant to the size of the estate. There might be some more work for bigger estates, but the difference will not necessarily be as large as has been proposed.
The biggest issue is national insurance contributions. I see the logic in what the Government want to do, because there is an unfairness between self-employment and employment, but the question is not so much one of revenue as of whether having a structure in the economy that encourages self-employment is beneficial overall, and whether that is a price worth paying. If we look at what has happened since 2008, we can see that unemployment in this country remained so low as we went through a deep and challenging session partly because of the great flexibility within our labour market. Part of that flexibility comes from self-employment, because employers do not have to take on all the risks of full employment, with all the benefits such as holiday and sickness pay that that entails. That means that the self-employed are a major contributor to the flexibility of the economy.
I very much doubt that increasing the national insurance contributions for the self-employed by 1% and subsequently 2% will fundamentally change the balance, but in economics, things often happen at the margins rather than being an easily identifiable inflection point when we are starting out. I would therefore be cautious about this change, and I urge the Government to look at the whole question of the relationship between national insurance and income tax in the round. National insurance represents about £130 billion of revenue. It is an enormously important source of funding for what the Government wish to do, but its relationship to income tax creates confusion and distortion within the system. This is just one of those distortions, and I am not sure that making a minor change at the edges is the right way to go about changing the relationship in taxation between the self-employed and the ordinarily employed. Those are the three minor cautions that I would offer on the Budget, but I remember a Conservative party slogan, “Britain’s on the right track, don’t turn back”, and that seems to me to be where we are.