Committee on Standards

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker

Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am, as always, grateful to the hon. Gentleman, as he proves my point. The pieties espoused from the other side about being non-partisan are always undermined by the hon. Gentleman, who is the epitome—the very acme—of partisanship.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

Is the plain truth not that if the amendment passes today, my right hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson) could actually find himself in an even worse position? He could be further condemned by an appeals process, which could find against him.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is right about that.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker

Thursday 13th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

There is a socialist Mayor of Bristol and a socialist Mayor of WECA, and they have responsibility for a lot of these development areas. Levelling up is something for the whole country, as I know very well in my own constituency. I am very much looking forward to things such as the introduction of the lifelong learning loan, which will help people who may have been left behind in education previously and who will be able to get a second chance. Levelling up is for everybody, but I fear it is true that money leaks out of North East Somerset into Bristol under WECA, and that is not something I am broadly in favour of.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con) [V]]

I believe I represent the largest population from St Vincent and the Grenadines outside the islands. In the aftermath of the eruption of the volcano La Soufrière, I of course share my constituents’ acute concerns for their family, friends and property. May we please have an oral statement on the situation on the islands and the British Government’s response?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is a great champion for his constituents and is right to bring this important issue to the attention of the House. I assure him that Her Majesty’s Government are monitoring the situation in St Vincent and the Grenadines closely, and our thoughts are very much with those affected by the eruption. The Minister of State for South Asia and the Commonwealth, Lord Ahmad, spoke to the Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines and his high commissioner to the UK on 14 April. They discussed initial and continuing UK support for the recovery following the volcanic eruption. Our resident British commissioner in St Vincent and the Grenadines has also been in contact with the Prime Minister and other officials there. I encourage my hon. Friend, in the first instance, to apply for an Adjournment debate, so that this matter may be aired more fully.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker

Monday 21st October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

In my right hon. Friend’s approach to the withdrawal agreement Bill, is he mindful that many of the same Members who insisted on statutory meaningful votes are the same Members who then voted for the surrender Act and the same Members who voted on Saturday to make a meaningful vote meaningless and now seem to be opposed to Brexit altogether?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My successor—and predecessor—as chairman of the European Research Group, as so often, hits the nail on the head. There are many people who do not like Brexit at all and who have opposed it from the beginning. They use this great mantra when they say, “We don’t like this. We don’t want to leave with no deal,” when actually what they mean is they do not like Brexit, they did not like the referendum and they want to stop it. That is not true of them all, and my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) is a notable exception to this, but many of them use this terminology and use procedure to try to thwart the will of the British people. They will be exposed.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker

Thursday 25th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

This is an issue of the greatest importance. These terrible events move anybody who hears about them. The death of a 15-year-old through a criminal act is invariably tragic. I absolutely believe that one of the founding principles of our nation is that justice is blind and there is equal justice for everybody, and that is something that all Members of Parliament should commit to. As regards a debate, the Chairman of the Backbench Business Committee will have heard the hon. Gentleman’s appeal, which I am sure that many other Members of the House may want to support.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

It is an absolute joy to see my imminently right hon. Friend in his proper place at the Dispatch Box, and of course I congratulate him. I know he will want to join me in congratulating our right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) on her return to Government. Can he give the House any indication of when we can look forward to the eagerly awaited and anticipated, I am sure, election of the new Chair of the Treasury Committee?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

That is a very important question. I threw my hat into the ring last time and it was thrown back at me very firmly. It is really important that our Select Committees have Chairmen in place. The matter will be dealt with in the normal way, but I would hope that it is dealt with urgently.

European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker

Monday 14th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

The problem with the withdrawal agreement is that it does not do what the Conservative party said we would do. In our manifesto, we said we would leave the customs union, but annex II, under the backstop provisions, would keep us in the customs union. We have had endless guarantees that the United Kingdom would not be divided, but the whole appendix divides Northern Ireland from the rest of Great Britain—something that Unionists are opposed to in principle, not just as the details of a treaty but because it seeks to divide our country.

The Conservatives and those who campaigned for Brexit always said that we must be free from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. Why? Because it is a political court as well as a legal court, and because, Mr Speaker—I know you think this is very important—it could overrule this House and overrule our democracy. It could make laws for us that could not be stopped by Parliament—unless of course we withdrew altogether, which is what we are doing, with the purpose of taking away its authority to rule over us. For all this—for potentially being locked in a customs union, for dividing our nation up, and for allowing the European Court of Justice to continue—we are going to pay our European friends £39 billion of taxpayers’ money. For that we get nothing in return—no guarantee of any trade deal in future, but a vacuous political statement that could mean anything to anybody.

In the detail of this treaty and its failures, and its inability to deliver the Brexit that people voted for, perhaps we forget the economic benefits that come from making decisions for ourselves. We know from our own lives that the decisions we make for ourselves are likely to be better than those made for us by other people, but that is true as a nation as well, because any decision made in this House is accountable to the British people. The aim for us as politicians in all parties is to see the standard of living of the British people improve generation after generation, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West (Conor Burns) said. That is something we seek to do. In the Conservative party, it was one of the founding principles that Disraeli followed—the “condition of the people” question.

The advantage of leaving the European Union is that we can once again make these decisions for ourselves. We can have a trade system that opens us up to the world, rather than being the fortress that the European Union has created to try to maintain its standard against the winds that blow from the rest of the world and have made the rest of the world grow so much faster than Europe has managed in recent times—a Europe that is mired in recession and economic failure.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

I can reassure my hon. Friend that if he takes just a minute longer, he might persuade me to join him in the Lobby.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am delighted to hear that. I think there will be a cascade of Members going into the Lobby to vote against this bad deal, because it denies us the opportunities that will make Brexit a success. It takes us further away from the ability to open up our economy to the benefits of free trade and the benefits that would allow the prices of food, clothing and footwear to be reduced, increasing the standard of living, most particularly of the least well-off in society. Instead, we are tied into a protectionist racket that keeps prices high and makes our economy less efficient. The rest of the world is overtaking us and the whole of Europe because it becomes less competitive as it seeks an outmoded, anti-competitive system, thinking that it can simply protect itself.

In this withdrawal agreement, there is no end in sight to the backstop—it could go on for generations. How long did the backstop turn out to be for Norway when it voted not to join, before it got a fully-fledged deal of its own? Over 20 years. “Temporary” in European terms is, for most of us, a generation. Of course, “temporary” in parliamentary terms is even longer, as we remember with the Parliament Act 1911 and the Liberal promise never delivered on to abolish the income tax—typical of the Liberals, you might say, Mr Speaker.

We risk denying ourselves these extraordinary opportunities and, in doing so, taking ourselves away from the electorate, for whom we promised to deliver on Brexit. Ultimately, whatever we think, surely we owe it to our voters to deliver. Otherwise, why should they ever trust us again?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker

Thursday 1st February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

Will the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), confirm that he heard from Charles Grant of the Centre for European Research that officials in the Treasury have deliberately developed a model to show that all options other than staying in the customs union are bad, and that officials intend to use the model to influence policy? If that is correct, does he share my view that it goes against the spirit of the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms that underpin our independent civil service?

[Mr Baker]

I am sorry to say that my hon. Friend’s account is essentially correct. At the time I considered it implausible because my direct experience is that civil servants are extraordinarily careful to uphold the impartiality of the civil service. We must proceed with great caution in this matter, but I have heard him raise the issue. We need to be very careful not to take this forward in an inappropriate way, but he has reminded me of something that I heard. It would be quite extraordinary if it turned out that such a thing had happened.

Finance (No. 3) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker

Tuesday 26th April 2011 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

There is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repenteth than over the 99 who are not in need of repentance, and it has been wonderful to listen to the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty), because he made a wonderfully Conservative speech, saying that taxation and over-regulation are fundamentally bad things—bad for the economy, bad for business, and bad for Britain. That is absolutely true, but unfortunately it misses the point that when this Government came into office, the coffers were bare. There was no money left, and therefore tough action has needed to be taken on both spending and taxation. I want to see taxes fall in every possible area—I want taxes on income, capital gains, companies and oil companies all to be reduced—but I only want Her Majesty’s Government to do that when it can be afforded.

We need to look back at the seriousness of the situation we inherited, and at what this Government are doing. Gross debt issuance from 2008-09 to 2010-11 is £540.5 billion. That is money that has to come from savers and from foreigners, and a good chunk of it actually came from the Bank of England: some £205.9 billion—getting on for half the total—was just printed by the Bank of England. That is not a way in which any responsible Government could ever have carried on; to have done so would have been desperately inflationary.

I want to come back to the point made so eloquently by the shadow Chief Secretary about Ricardian equivalence, because that is relevant. No one is saying that every £1 in debt is necessarily going to relate to £1 in future taxation, but the broad principle is right. The electorate understand this; they understand it from their own financial affairs and they see it from the Government’s. They understand that if a huge debt is built up, it has to be repaid, and it will be repaid by them out of their earnings or their assets. We already see not far short of £50 billion a year being spent on interest payments. The British electorate know that that £50 billion is coming out of their taxes, as will the repayments. Indeed, as we get on to the repayments and refinancing, we will have a further gilt issuance of £578 billion between now and 2015. Enormous amounts of money are still being raised on the debt markets even when the Government are implementing a programme of tough cuts and some tax rises, which people do not like, but that is because of the severity of the situation the Government inherited, and if they had not implemented that programme, the confidence of the markets would have evaporated.

That confidence is what allows the Government to finance themselves. This is where the gilt market is so important. The five-year gilt is trading 5% away from its historical real average; that is 500 basis points, which is a gigantic amount in gilt market terms. The five-year gilt is usually at a 2% premium to the retail price index, but it is currently at a 3% discount to RPI. That shows that the financial markets believe that the Government have got it right.

Most economic decision making takes some years to come into effect, and I must confess that in this regard we have heard a lot of nonsense about quarterly growth figures relating to decisions on cuts taken before any of their consequences had actually come through. It takes much longer than that for economic results to happen, and I would therefore say that the figures for this quarter, the last quarter and the one before that are to the credit of the Opposition, and not as yet to Her Majesty’s Government; it will be to the credit of Her Majesty’s Government when we have got 2.5%-plus growth. The gilt market and the currency market are, however, immediate responders to Government policy, and the response that they have given is a vote of confidence. They know that the Government have broadly got it right. The currency has strengthened, and is continuing to strengthen, against the dollar—an indication, perhaps, that the United States has not got its fiscal situation as well sorted out as we have here.

Let us consider some of the specific things that the Government are doing in this Bill. I particularly welcome, as does my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West (Stephen Williams), the increase in the tax threshold. A wonderful pamphlet produced by Lord Saatchi and Peter Warburton a few years ago asked why poor people pay tax and why we have this merry-go-round whereby we take money out of someone’s pocket and put it back into their other pocket having taken some element of it to finance our bureaucracy along the way. The more the Government can raise the tax threshold, the less of that money will be wasted as the machine churns through and the more people will be taken out of tax.

I will add one point that may not be deemed helpful. My hon. Friend mentioned that over a couple of years 2 million people are to be taken out of tax, but Her Majesty’s Government might like to know that the Chinese Government have just succeeded, by increasing the income tax threshold from 2,000 renminbi a month to 3,000 renminbi a month, in taking 76 million people out of tax. That is something for the Treasury to aim for, because that number exceeds the entire population of the United Kingdom.

The increase in the tax threshold is extremely welcome, as is the reduction in corporation tax. Being competitive on corporation tax is something that the Irish were so clever about, and may we wish them well in their fight against the European Union’s attempts to make them increase it. By reducing corporation tax we attract businesses that could otherwise go anywhere in the world. We know that businesses can move and that WPP is thinking of moving back to the United Kingdom because of the right trend in taxation. In that regard, I encourage Her Majesty’s Government to avoid any of this nonsense about a Robin Hood tax. Robin Hood was not as good as he was made out to be—particularly for the sheriff of Nottingham—but even if such a tax were as heroic as the late Robin Hood, it would still be a very bad tax for this country.

[Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

I was just wondering whether my hon. Friend would agree that Robin Hood actually took from the state to give back to the people.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am not entirely sure that that is what he did. I think he also stole from the Church, which is why I have my doubts about him; I am not really in favour of people pinching things from holy mother Church.

The other great thing about this Budget—this is why it should be welcome—is that it recognises the limitations of governmental power. Let us consider what has happened in Japan since 1990. The Japanese Government have tried loose monetary policy and loose fiscal policy, sometimes at the same time and sometimes at different times, and they have managed to take the fiscal debt to 200% of GDP without managing to achieve any growth in this period. Governments cannot command economies in the way that some socialists think that they ought to be able to do. Governments can only set the right terms for business to be done, and that is where the deregulation programme is so important.

If the Government can follow through on that programme and sweep away the burdens that stop business doing business, that is how we will be able to get economic growth. It will not be Government expenditure that leads to the economy recovering rapidly because—let us return to Ricardian equivalence—people will recognise that there is great waste in Government expenditure. It will not necessarily even be very low interest rates that will do that, although I am in favour of a loose monetary policy, because eventually we reach the point where there are no borrowers there to borrow—we may be in that position. The Red Book points out that total private sector debt is 450% of GDP. If that does not make your blood run cold, Mr Deputy Speaker, I do not know what will, because that is an extraordinary level of private sector debt and it is very hard to pretend that an economy can grow by further private sector debt being taken on. So we are back with the real opportunity being a deregulatory one for the Government to push that agenda as hard as they possibly can so that businesses can do business, investors can invest and people can work. That will then lead to the tax coming through at lower tax rates and the expenditure being made that the Government wish to make, and we will be back to the glorious time that we had when Nigel Lawson was Chancellor of the Exchequer.