National Insurance Contributions Increase

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

I thank the Leader of the Opposition, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), and the shadow Chancellor, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), for selecting this extraordinarily important debate. A long and bitter winter is at last coming to an end, but while my constituents look to Westminster for a helping hand to see them through the enormously difficult months ahead, this Government are instead planning to deal millions of hard-working people and small businesses a cataclysmic tax hike at the very worst time. Even before Putin commenced his barbaric onslaught on the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine and sent shockwaves across the global economy, thousands of my constituents were grappling with spiralling inflation, rising food costs and soaring energy prices.

Time and time again, I have warned this House about the devastation being inflicted upon constituencies like mine in Birkenhead, with parents going hungry so that their children can eat, old-age pensioners who have worked all their lives freezing in their homes because they cannot afford to put the meter on, and kids without even a mattress to sleep on. That is the grim reality confronting our country today. Now, Britain’s billionaire Chancellor is threatening to shove millions of hard-working families off the precipice and into the deepest depths of destitution with this senseless hike in national insurance contributions.

While Ministers are asking my constituents, some of the poorest in the country, to dig deep to pay for the mess that the Conservatives have made in health and social care, the Chancellor and Prime Minister have been quick to assure their friends in the City—those with the broadest shoulders of all—that they will not be called upon to play their part. There should be absolutely no doubt about whose side this Government are on. Let us be clear about exactly what this tax hike will mean for the people I represent. A single-parent family earning minimum wage in my constituency will be forced to hand hundreds of pounds more over to the taxman each year, while the landlord who charges them extortionate rents for damp and draughty houses will pay exactly zero pence more.

For 12 long years, Government Members have turned their eyes away from the immense human suffering that austerity has inflicted upon my constituents in Birkenhead and on communities across the UK, but they can plead ignorance no longer. This historic cost of living crisis will spare no corner of our country, and however they vote later today, they will do so in the full knowledge of what this catastrophic tax hike will mean for the people who elected them to this place. The country will not soon forget the fact that when they were given the opportunity to stand up for working people in the midst of the worst cost of living crisis in recent memory, Tory MPs shrugged their shoulders and slinked away.