Finance (No. 3) Bill

Debate between Jonathan Reynolds and Richard Graham

Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Monday 19th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Richard Graham]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As she knows well, the truth of the last Labour Government—during their 13 years—was that although they promised no more boom and bust, they gave us the biggest bust in peacetime history as a result of wildly overspending. I am afraid the net result of that is, as always, that the poorest feel the effects worst. In my constituency of Gloucester, 6,000 people lost their jobs during the great recession under Labour. Only since the Conservative Government came back have we seen employment rise sharply and youth unemployment and unemployment fall sharply.

[Jonathan Reynolds]

I will not repeat the debate that we always have about a global financial crisis not being solely contained in the UK, but on the earlier intervention that the hon. Gentleman took, the shadow Chancellor is not on the record as saying that his sums do not add up and that that does not matter. Let us remind the Committee that the only party that published costings of its policies at the election was Labour. It is genuinely misleading the Committee to claim that the shadow Chancellor said anything other than that.

[Richard Graham]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but will he confirm to the Committee what I heard the shadow Chancellor say earlier in answer to a question from one of my colleagues? He said that there would be zero additional cost to the taxpayer from the enormous, widespread renationalisation policy of Labour; will the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds) confirm that there will not be a single penny of additional cost?

[Jonathan Reynolds]

The shadow Chancellor did not speak from the Dispatch Box. I think the hon. Gentleman is thinking of the shadow Chief Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd)—the two should not be confused. On nationalisation, I think the point that my hon. Friend was trying to make is that we can simply look at British history to see how this works. If we take an asset into public ownership and the return from that asset is greater than the cost of the borrowing to take it on, there is no net cost to the taxpayer, and certainly, income tax will not have to rise to cover that.