Autumn Statement Resolutions

Jon Trickett Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

Thank you for your guidance, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I will try to be brief.

The first point I want to make is that the Chancellor and the Chief Secretary, who spoke at the beginning of this debate, seem to have omitted certain important facts. I do not want to suggest that they deliberately misled the House—that would be totally inappropriate—but perhaps they had memory problems, so I will try to assist those on the Government Front Bench with some things that seem to have been forgotten, but are quite important. First, right hon. and hon. Members on the other side have suggested that Labour has a problem with borrowing, but look at the figures. Since 2010, the Government have borrowed £1.5 trillion, and they seem to be heading towards borrowing of £3 trillion, an increase of 28% of GDP since Labour left office: they are the borrowers.

Look around: where has the money gone? Our services have collapsed in many cases, including schools, hospitals and the police force. Our people are living in increasingly difficult times. There is an increase in poverty and the necessity to use food banks. Our growth is more or less static. Okay, there is a small percentage increase, but over the medium term we are not looking at any growth at all. Where has all this money and all this borrowing gone? It has been spent by a profligate Government who do not have any sense of the country’s priorities, and that worries me. One section of the population has done well—the big corporations and the wealthy—and I might return to that if I have time.

The Government forgot to mention that the OBR has said that the plans published today require £19 billion worth of expenditure to maintain our public services, but the Government have provided only £4 billion. A spokesperson for one of the larger well-known think-tanks has said that the cuts that the Government are proposing are “completely implausible”. I looked at the figures. Schools are looking at a cut in real terms. There is no attempt to match inflation. The Government are going to reduce the amount of money going into schools. How will those cuts be made? Services, after 13 years, are almost beyond repair without a new Government.

The Government seem also to have forgotten that the OBR has said that working people are facing the worst cut in living standards since records began. That is shocking, when we reflect on the levels of difficulty that we see in our constituencies. The other thing that the Government seem to have forgotten, while they have been claiming that inflation is going in the right direction, is that inflation as a whole is one figure, but the cost of food is increasing by 10%. I looked at the figures to see where we are with food poverty. The bottom four deciles—that is, two fifths of the population—spend more than 40% of their total household income on food and housing. Food prices going up are driving people further and further into destitution and poverty. All those facts seem to have been forgotten by those on the Government Front Bench.

I will not speak for too long, but I will make a couple of other points. Ministers have said that this is a Budget for working people. I represent large numbers of working people—we all do, I guess—and the average salary or income in my constituency is £29,200, which is way below the national average. With wage increases needing to match food inflation, I calculated the result of today’s announcements for people on £29,200. The amount of income tax they pay will increase by £456, because the Government have not increased the thresholds. That is £9 a week. Okay, the Chancellor announced a reduction in national insurance of 2p, but that will still leave people in my constituency on the average salary more than £2 a week worse off. What the Government pretend they are giving with one hand with a cut to national insurance is then taken with the other hand, as they have not increased the thresholds. Effectively, people are falling further into poverty.

The people I represent and the people of Britain as a whole are not fools. We might see tomorrow’s right-wing newspapers bellowing out a great triumph for the Conservative Government, but people will look at their pay packets, and they will see that the Treasury is still taking £100 more than it would have had thresholds changed. That is an unfortunate situation to be in. It is what the economists call fiscal drag, and it is estimated that next year alone, the Treasury will take back £8 billion from working people, which is £270 a person a week. The faulty memory of Government Ministers—let us put it no stronger—has resulted in a rather rosy picture of what will happen to our country, but the people will see what has happened to their families, their households and their neighbours, and they will understand that this Government are simply for the rich rather than for the rest of society.

I return to inflation. The right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), who is not in his seat, talked about how we should explain inflation and said it was produced purely by external forces. Of course, external forces have made a difference. But I have covered 40 separate financial statements since I was first elected 28 years ago, and I remember sitting here and seeing the faces of Conservative Members when the Budget was introduced—they started off rosy and finished up pale, even white and ashen—but what did they do? They voted for it—all of them, I think. We know what the consequences have been since.

Was there another option for the Government to try to protect working people? I think there was. Spain, for example, with the same spending pressures from oil costs, harvests, the wars and so on, has managed to keep inflation down to 2% while ours was roaring away at up to 11%. What did Spain do? It removed VAT from basic foodstuffs, capped prices, made payments to households, and reduced VAT on electricity and gas. The thing is, we left the European Union in part because we supposedly wanted to be free to adjust our VAT rates, but we have done none of those things, really. We let inflation rip.

My final point—again, this was not mentioned in the statement—is about the asymmetric way we deal with income. As we have heard, we tax earnings from work to a significant amount—part of that is just to pay for the debt that we have incurred while this lot have been in government—so someone who earns £50,000 will receive £38,400 after tax and national insurance. Someone who earns £50,000 from dividends will take home another £8,000 and receive £46,250. If we were a Parliament for working people—one that valued work and labour as a way of contributing to our society—we would not tax work more heavily than income from wealth. I will leave the House with that point. There is money in our society that could be used for public services and to help working people, which the Government pretend they are trying to do but have failed to do.