amendment of the law
Debate between Michael Meacher and Lindsay Hoyle(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)
Listening to the Chancellor and then turning to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s analysis of the Budget is like being seduced by “Fifty Shades of Grey” only to be brought down to earth by a harsh and unrelenting textbook on morality and sexual ethics. Leaving aside all the election giveaways, the truth is that the underlying economics of the Budget are truly awful.
The economy is still, after four years of austerity, 1.5% smaller than it was in 2008, while the US economy is 5% larger. To put it another way, the UK economy is today 14% smaller than it would have been if growth had continued in the way already being achieved in 2010, when the then Labour Chancellor’s economic stimulus produced 2.4% growth over 12 months up to the third quarter of 2010. As a result of this Chancellor’s about-turn, in favour of fiscal consolidation and austerity, the UK has lost output totalling £210 billion. That is completely gone for ever, down the drain and irrecoverable, and it is equal to one-seventh of Britain’s entire GDP.
Even the deficit reduction, which was supposed to be the aim of the exercise, has worked disastrously. The Chancellor inherited a deficit of £149 billion and pledged to reduce it by £60 billion now and £20 billion next year. In fact, the deficit is projected to be £108 billion this year—nearly double what he promised.
Even more serious is that the Chancellor predicts a strong and lasting recovery, but the OBR believes that this so-called recovery is built on sand. Unemployment and spare capacity have fallen so quickly that the OBR thinks there is very little scope for rapid growth beyond this current year. Hence, it has cut its growth forecast for next year from 2.7% to 2.3%. That is a very ominous forecast. If the economy is still below the output level of 2008 and unemployment is still 2.4 million, the premature petering out of growth will speak volumes. The OBR also says that, given the current policies, Britain will continue to lose export share steadily over the next five years, although it already has the biggest deficit in traded manufactured goods in its history, at £110 billion 7% of GDP—and rising.
The whole honest OBR scenario is grim. The public finances are still terrible, none of the components for sustainable growth is present, the upswing is largely dependent on excessive consumer borrowing and yet another asset-price bubble boom and bust, and the recovery—such as it is—is expected to fade when it has hardly begun. One has to ask, almost unbelievingly, how the Chancellor could have got it so unutterably wrong.
Part of the answer, I think, is that the Chancellor seems to have genuinely believed, at least for the first two years, the dogma of expansionary fiscal contraction. That is the idea that the less a Government spend, the faster the economy will grow, because the public sector will no longer crowd out the private sector, which will then have the space in which to grow. Well, it is all right to believe that if you are a first-year economic student, but to believe it when you have the power to trash the British economy for three years—as the Chancellor has, in fact, done—is quite another thing. The theory is economic illiteracy, and we have suffered that for two to three years.
What prompts the private sector to invest is obviously the prospect of future demand, and hence the prospect of future profits. When the economy is stagnant or contracting, what incentive have private companies to invest at all? That, of course, is precisely why business investment today is completely flat—20% below the pre-crash level—and what does that tell us? What it tells us is that business itself does not actually believe in this recovery either.
But there is another explanation for all this folly, namely that the Chancellor and the Prime Minister are first and foremost ideologues, obsessed with the idea of shrinking the state to the smallest size they can get away with via the privatisation and outsourcing of everything that moves. For them—as opposed to all the people about whom Opposition Members have been talking—austerity was not a painful instrument of reform so much as a heaven-sent gift enabling them to realise their deepest prejudices. That is why, although the policy clearly is not working, the Chancellor is committed to continuing it, and indeed intensifying it, into the next Parliament.
So what should be done? I think it is obvious that what Britain urgently needs is a big and sustained increase in investment, which can only come—at least in the first instance—from the public sector, as the private sector, like the OBR, regards the recovery as far too fragile and risky. At today’s interest rates, the Chancellor could launch, at a cost of only £150 million a year, a major £30 billion drive of investment in manufacturing, public services and job creation which would bring the deficit down much faster, would shrink the dole queues—which are currently costing £19 billion a year—and would be sustainable. He could even finance it at no cost in public borrowing at all—by targeting a tranche of quantitative easing directly at manufacturing rather than the banks, by instructing the publicly owned banks, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds, to prioritise their lending on British industry and not on overseas speculation, or by taxing the super-rich, who have monopolised more than 70% of the income gained since 2008, and, over the same period, increased their wealth by some—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The right hon. Gentleman’s time is up.
United Kingdom Corporate and Individual Tax and Financial Transparency Bill
Debate between Michael Meacher and Lindsay Hoyle(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
At the outset, I want to say that this is the only time I can remember witnessing a Government Front-Bench spokesperson engaging in a time-wasting filibuster on the scale we have seen today. It was an abuse of the House. The Deep Sea Mining Bill is widely regarded as a Government hand-out Bill and yet the Minister took more than an hour over it—two or three times longer than he would have taken over a Government Bill. The practice needs to be stopped.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. May I say to the right hon. Gentleman that I did stop the Minister at the beginning of his speech over time-wasting? The right hon. Gentleman may remember that I interrupted the Minister to suggest that he moved on to the subject at hand. The Chair did its job. The right hon. Gentleman is in danger of questioning the Chair if he is not careful.
Mr Meacher
I was not in any way referring to you, Mr Deputy Speaker; I was saying that the regulations and procedures of the House need to be examined in a way that prevents an abuse of that kind.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I will help both Members. We are not going to carry on in this vein. I want to hear about Mr Meacher’s Bill, and I am sure he wishes to get on with it. I want to hear about its content.
Mr Meacher
I am entirely of the same mind, Mr Deputy Speaker.
Tax avoidance and financial transparency, or perhaps I should say the lack of financial transparency, have of course been high on the Government agenda for the past two years. They even led Prime Minister to make tax transparency and trade his central international focus at the G8 at Lough Erne in June. However, having marched his troops up the hill, rather like the Grand Old Duke of York, the Prime Minister has since proceeded to march them down again. Rather little of significance—that is being generous—has happened on the tax and transparency front since then.
At the G8, the UK published an action plan on tackling some of the issues involved, but it is not unfair to say that it was decidedly modest in its ambition. The same can certainly be said of the scope of the subsequently announced consultation on disclosing the beneficial ownership of companies. The Government have, of course, published the general anti-abuse rule, but as has often been said, it will cover only the most egregious forms of tax abuse and is consequently in danger of appearing to legitimise lesser forms. The GAAR is rather like the lobbying Bill that is currently before the House—the Government are extremely keen to be seen to be doing something, but they have no intention whatever of actually doing much. If we are really serious about tackling tax avoidance and the financial opacity of our tax system, a more robust approach is needed. That is what my Bill is intended to offer.
The Bill was drafted by Richard Murphy, who is the founder and director of Tax Research UK and, I think everyone will agree, one of this country’s foremost tax accountants. I am extremely grateful to him, as I believe the whole House should be.
There are two drivers behind the Bill. One is the demand for fairness and social justice. The country is in the middle of a deep economic recession caused by the bankers, yet the Government have imposed on the victims the liability for meeting the ensuing very high national debt and budget deficit.
The Economy
Debate between Michael Meacher and Lindsay Hoyle(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)
I think this is the most extraordinary rewriting of economic history I have ever heard in the Chamber. The hon. Gentleman has not once mentioned the banks and the financial crash. Does he not realise that the public sector deficit in 2007, just before the crash, was about 3%? It only rose—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The hon. Gentleman will have no time to answer you, Mr Meacher, and I am sure that you want an answer.
Phone Hacking
Debate between Michael Meacher and Lindsay Hoyle(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Meacher
I would love to give way to my right hon. Friend, but I am under instructions not to give way.
In particular, the idea cooked up by News International that putting Sky News into a separate company somehow preserves media plurality is utterly spurious. Newco, the company that will run Sky News, will be dependent on News Corporation for 85% of its revenues and for access to the market, and the safeguards for editorial independence are weak and of the kind that News International has repeatedly undermined before. Neither Ofcom nor the Office of Fair Trading regards this arrangement as a sustainable solution, the two-week consultation period was clearly inadequate, and the arrangement puts far too much power in the hands of the Secretary of State rather than independent regulators. Those are all very strong reasons why the Secretary of State has to look at this again, after a pause, which the whole House is asking for.
Lastly, I want to say something about the Press Complaints Commission, which is surely one of the most ineffective performers in the regulatory landscape. It played absolutely no role whatever in uncovering the phone hacking revelations; indeed, it far too readily dismissed The Guardian’s original warnings nearly two years ago. I really do think that the PCC has been so poor that the public inquiry should look again at the future of self-regulation after so many cautions, including David Mellor’s warning 20 years ago—
Amendment of the Law
Debate between Michael Meacher and Lindsay Hoyle(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)
The Government’s main jibe at the Opposition throughout this debate has been, “What is the alternative to the cuts?” I will spell out what I think that alternative should be. Of course the deficit has to be brought down —we all agree on that—but slashing public expenditure by £80 billion in four years is probably the most risky and counter-productive way of doing that. The Chancellor has largely ignored the other three ways.
First, there are the proceeds of economic growth. The estimate of the independent Office for Budget Responsibility for growth over the next five years, albeit recently scaled down, has growth at 1.7% this year, 2.5% next year, then 2.9%, 2.9%, and 2.8%. That means that, on the Government’s own estimates, there will be an increase in the national income of £185 billion. Governments always take about 40%. That means that there will be extra Government revenues over the next five years of £74 billion. That is half the current Government deficit of £146 billion, and nearly three quarters of the Government’s estimated structural deficit of £109 billion. Therefore—on their own estimates, I repeat—the Government would halve the budget deficit in five years without making a single public expenditure cut. I am not against such cuts, and I think there should be some, but I am simply pointing out that there are alternative and far better ways of dealing with the problem.
The reason why the Government have chosen to focus obsessively on benefit and public expenditure cuts is not because they are economically necessary on the scale that they say, but because of their overriding ideological objective of chopping back the welfare system and shrinking the state. That is what it is really about.
The second way to reduce the deficit is obviously through tax increases, but the Government have chosen to minimise that option and maximise the cuts option—the balance between the two is 77% and 23%. Thatcher never went beyond 50:50. The Chancellor has ostentatiously avoided any tax rises that might disturb the rich. The non-dom loophole has not been closed; it would bring in an extra £3 billion. The promised £2 billion to be saved in tax avoidance is really pretty small beer, given that even Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs admits that avoidance will cost £16 billion this year and most independent experts think that the figure will be £50 billion. The tripling of the Government’s bank levy, which was recommended by the International Monetary Fund and would bring in another £6 billion, has simply been passed over.
Moreover, the Chancellor has simply turned his eyes away from any fiscal innovation that might produce a fairer Britain where all of us are in it together. A financial transaction tax at a modest rate of 0.05% would raise about £30 billion. An empty property tax would raise £5 billion, and a land value tax, which would be a great deal fairer than the council tax, which it could replace, would raise more than £30 billion. A minimum tax levy on high earners would put a cap on avoidance and raise more than £10 billion.
The Chancellor really ought to be less timid. The public want taxes that will hurt the rich, and particularly bankers. I do not think the Government realise that. Any permutation of the taxes that I have mentioned could raise at least £30 billion a year—probably rather more if the Chancellor chose, but of course he will not, because the Tory party gets half its funding from the bankers.
Then there is the third option for reducing the deficit, which is a jobs and growth strategy. The cost of putting a million people on the dole, which is what the Government are planning to do, is probably about £6 billion depending on the level of benefits involved. Instead of throwing a million people on the scrapheap, which will substantially worsen the deficit, the Government could invest in a million jobs to provide the social housing and transport infrastructure that are so desperately needed; to develop the green technologies that the green investment bank was supposed to fund if only the Government had not shrivelled its powers; to deal with the rising child protection case load; to train a more skilled work force; and to care for a growing ageing population, to mention just some of the service jobs that could be provided. There would be a significant net gain in deficit reduction for many reasons, not least because of instead of a million people being a drain on the Exchequer, they would contribute to it.
The real cause of the financial crash has not been addressed at all. It is astonishing that three years on, nothing has been done to address the massive flaws in the banking system’s structure and its use of derivatives, bonuses, lending practices, offshoring and speculation. The Budget sets out £80 billion-worth of spending cuts that are not economically necessary on such a scale, will do lasting damage to the social fabric and do not deal with the real—