Finance Bill

Debate between Owen Smith and Jim Fitzpatrick

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith]

I cannot but agree wholeheartedly. I am sure that that is an apposite intervention. Throughout the Bill and the wider Budget, there are measures about which all the most vulnerable people in our society should be concerned. My constituents are deeply worried about the measures affecting not just pensions, but, equally, housing benefit, the most pernicious effects of which we will not see until much later in this Parliament, and VAT. The VAT increase will not be introduced until next year, but when it is, it will bite on ordinary working people throughout my constituency and throughout the country.

[Jim Fitzpatrick]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. He is being most generous to Opposition colleagues—and perhaps some Government Members will want to engage in debate, too. Does he agree that the changes to housing benefit in constituencies such as mine—Poplar and Limehouse—will have a very damaging effect and could ultimately lead to poorer people being driven out of the centres of our great cities and banished to the suburbs? Surely that will not result in a cohesive society involving all parts of our community.

[Owen Smith]

Again, I wholeheartedly agree. I am not sure what is worse, that measure or the suggestion—the rehash that we heard only last week—that people should get on their bikes, get out of places such as Pontypridd and go to other parts of Britain where, allegedly, work will be created through the magical 2.5 million jobs that we are going to see each year.

I am about to finish, and I shall do so on a highly topical note, by returning to my quotation from Sir Alan Budd’s interview for a documentary programme some 10 years ago. He was asked whether he was worried that economists such as himself were being used to cover the political motives of the previous Tory Administration, and in response he said:

“The nightmare I sometimes have, about this whole experience, runs as follows. I was involved in making a number of proposals which were partly at least adopted by the government”—

the Thatcher Government—

“and put in play by the government. Now my worry is…that there may have been people making the actual policy decisions…who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation.

They did, however, see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes—if you like, that what was engineered there in Marxist terms was a crisis of capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make profits ever since.”

I wonder whether that might be why Sir Alan Budd has decided to leave the service of the current vintage of Tories.