Income Tax
Debate between Jeremy Browne and Chris Leslie(10 years ago)
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Chris Leslie
The hon. Gentleman nods and says, “Quite right” from a sedentary position, but of course he is not seeking re-election and so he is brave enough to say that. I wonder whether his Liberal Democrat colleagues would also say that about the cut from 50p to 45p. I will give way if Liberal Members want to defend the way they voted on that.
The hon. Member for Colchester (Sir Bob Russell) raised the issue of the personal allowance, and I expect the Minister will do the same. But the public out there are not going to be fooled by Government Members saying, “Just look over here at this particular change”, because they know very well by now that Tories and Liberals give a little with one hand but take away far more with the other. On the tax burden, there is a sense of people being worse off year after year, and they know the truth.
Chris Leslie
I sometimes get the impression from Ministers that they would not understand fairness if it hit them in the face. They certainly do not get it when it comes to the moral imperative as well as the economics of ensuring that we have a fair tax system that ensures that those with the broadest shoulders contribute a fairer share.
A Labour Government would reduce the deficit in a fairer way than the approach that we have seen from the Government. Of course, we have not seen much deficit reduction in recent years. We want to balance the books as soon as possible in the next Parliament, but to do so in that fairer and balanced way. We will reverse this Tory and Liberal Democrat tax cut for millionaires. We have to make some tough choices.
Chris Leslie
No, we have heard enough from the hon. Gentleman.
We will stop paying winter fuel allowances to the richest pensioners. We will have to raise child benefit by just 1% for two years, and Ministers’ pay also should be restrained. But we also have to cut out the waste and incompetence of this Government —£3 billion wasted on an NHS reorganisation; the universal credit debacle; the pointless exercise of a worse than useless Work programme. A fair plan to balance the books in the next Parliament would reverse this obscene tax cut for the top 1% of earners. We will have to finish the job that this Chancellor has so patently failed to deliver, and we will do so with a plan that will create sustained and balanced growth, 200,000 homes by 2020 and a British investment bank; cutting business rates for small firms; providing a jobs guarantee and child care to help people back to work; reconnecting the wealth of our country with the finances of individuals and families; and, above all, ending dogmatic trickle-down Tory economics, which hits lower and middle income households while the Government lavish tax cuts on the rich.
Mr Browne
Let me finish this point. The crucial philosophical problem I have with a 50p tax rate is the underlying presumption that the state co-owns your income with you, and that when you work you are in a 50:50 shareholding relationship and for every extra hour of work you do, half the money belongs to the former Member for Shipley and half belongs to you. It is as though it is good of him that he is letting me keep half my cash; I do not accept that as a basic philosophical argument.
Chris Leslie
The hon. Gentleman’s conversion to Conservatism is now complete. Let me ask him a clear question. He is implying that the 50p rate is on the entirety of somebody’s income. Does he accept that it applies on earnings of more than £150,000 of income or has he totally abandoned any notion of progressivity in our tax system? Is he arguing for a flat rate of income tax?
Mr Browne
I will finish in a moment, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have not abandoned that, which is why people earning up to £10,500 pay no income tax under this Government, whereas under Labour the relevant figure was £6,500. Of course there is then a standard rate and a higher rate. The hon. Gentleman made a mistake in his speech when he talked about tax cuts for millionaires. Let me give an example, which is party political. The Leader of the Opposition is a millionaire who does not pay this top rate of tax, but somebody who has just got a job earning £160,000 a year is not a millionaire but does pay his 50p rate of tax. It was deliberately misleading from the hon. Gentleman and it reflected badly on him.
Police
Debate between Jeremy Browne and Chris Leslie(11 years, 9 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Home Department (Mr Jeremy Browne)
I beg to move,
That the Police Grant Report (England and Wales) for 2013-14 (HC 876), which was laid before this House on 4 February, be approved.
I am very grateful to those hon. Members who have joined me in the Chamber to take part in this debate on the 2013-14 police funding settlement. In addition to seeking their approval of the police grant report (England and Wales) 2013-14, I also want to focus on how we are reforming the police to make them more effective, more efficient and more responsive to local needs.
On 19 December, the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice laid before the House a written ministerial statement and a provisional police grant report that set out the Government’s proposed allocations to police and crime commissioners in England and Wales. We have decided that force level allocations will remain as announced on 19 December.
Before I go into the details of that announcement, it is important to set this debate in context. When our coalition Government came to office in May 2010, Britain had the largest peacetime deficit in our history. For every £3 the Labour Government raised in tax, they spent £4. The gap was being plugged by the Treasury borrowing almost £500 million every single day. It was the economics of the madhouse. Labour has had two periods in office during my lifetime, and on both occasions it presided over a budgetary catastrophe.
Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)
I have in my hand a copy of the Liberal Democrat 2010 manifesto published in, I think, April 2010. I presume the hon. Gentleman knew what his party was saying at the time. The manifesto says that the Liberal Democrats would pay
“for 3,000 more police on the beat, affordable because we are cutting other spending”.
What happened in those few weeks before the hon. Gentleman became a Minister?
Mr Browne
I would be the first to acknowledge that we should have said in our manifesto, “Vote Liberal Democrat and crime will be at the lowest level in recorded history”, but we were insufficiently bold. We were too modest, actually, about the contribution that we would make to the well-being of our country.
The only two conclusions that can reasonably be drawn from Labour’s two catastrophic periods in office in the past 40 years are that we here in Britain have been particularly unlucky to have had especially inept Labour politicians, in which case it seems strange indeed to be enlisting the most culpable Cabinet Ministers from the previous regime to run the show for Labour today, or, more fundamentally, that socialism is completely incompatible with competent economic management. Either way, when we came into office in 2010 there was, in the immortal and shameless words of the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne), “no money left.”
Mr Browne
I want to make a bit of progress and will give way later. I have given way several times to Labour MPs, who all seem to want to make the same point, which is that they are upset that crime is falling in their—[Interruption.] If any Labour MP wants to intervene because crime has risen in their area since the general election, they can get up. Anyone? Go on.