Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Matt Hancock and Tom Clarke

Thursday 24th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

Absolutely—that is an excellent point. Indeed, I wish now to compare the Budget’s response to local government, and to people applying for disability living allowance, with the way in which the Government have treated the banks. They have certainly not done so in a way of which my constituents, or the disability and local government organisations that I know of, would approve.

What the Government have done to local government is to cut, cut and cut again. They have offered the public a freeze in council tax but failed to explain that the services that they and the House have imposed upon local authorities cannot possibly be carried out without other services being slashed, including social services and social work for the most needy. That is clearly missing from the thoughts of coalition Members. I invite them to compare that with their approach to the banks, which I was heckled for mentioning.

What about those who seek to live on DLA? We are told that one by one, they are going to be recalled and re-examined. I was a Member of the House in the early 1980s when we had that version of Thatcherism, and I want never again to see men who have worked in the mining industry, and who have to be helped into my surgeries because they can hardly breathe, being cut off from benefit because they are told that they can walk 50 yards. If that is the type of policy that the so-called coalition Government are planning, which I believe it is, they can expect the utmost opposition.

At a time when there is a clear demand for housing, what the Government have done to housing support is simply disgraceful. I say that as somebody who was in local government before coming to the House. Even the Evening Standard had to point out last night that because of the Government’s approach to housing benefit, more poor people would be made homeless. I predict that local councils faced with the financial challenges that that represents will build fewer and fewer social houses, which the Liberal Democrats told us before the election were one of the important issues for them.

[Matthew Hancock]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Clarke]

I will not, because I know others want to speak. I wish to conclude now for that very reason—many hon. Members wish to speak about the situation in their constituencies and the Budget’s impact on ordinary people and communities. They want to do so partly because we have seen this situation before—not in this generation, but certainly in the 1930s and the ’80s, and we do not want to see it again.

This is a regressive and dangerous Budget that will hit the poor hardest. Yesterday, my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson) referred to Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, and I wish to conclude by quoting some words from that work:

“Twelve voices”

—I look at the mixture of Liberal Democrats and Conservatives on the Government Benches—

“were shouting in anger, and they were all alike…The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

But the British people can see through that.