Income Tax (Charge)

Paula Barker Excerpts

Thursday 4th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Paula Barker (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab) [V]]

The Chancellor has claimed that the hard choices made by his predecessors over the last 10 years have served our economy well going into this current crisis. A decade-long squeeze on living standards, the rise in insecure and precarious work, and beleaguered public services have in every sense made his unenviable task every bit harder than it needed to be. Our economy has been shown to be particularly vulnerable and less resilient than other comparable economies of similar size, and the much deeper contraction in our own demonstrates exactly that. Alongside this, chaotic decision making and the poor timing of restrictions, all to appease Tory Back Benchers, meant that there were very real economic consequences to the Government kicking the can down the road—that is, until they eventually ran out of road.

The eye-watering sums being spent by the Treasury mean that, for the time being, the taps are on, and the Chancellor is right when he says that we need an investment-led, jobs-rich recovery. While the measures embarked on last year and this year may have just averted devastation for many, I remain unconvinced that the measures announced yesterday will secure a recovery that, crucially, all our people can share in.

The think-tanks are alive with the chatter of levelling up, and yes, there were piecemeal announcements about moving part of the Treasury to Darlington, about the investment bank in Leeds and about the collection of freeports across the land, including one in my own city of Liverpool. But despite the odd headline to help fill Tory election leaflets in marginal seats across the north, it is the poverty of ambition that will perpetuate the poverty that we see in our towns day in and day out. I have to ask: do Conservative Members think that moving the odd civil servant out of London or a one-off fund to help a struggling high street in the midlands will match the requisite scale of ambition to address the deep underlying structural inequalities that exist in modern British society between people and places and between my own north-west region and the south-east of England? If we do not fundamentally address those inequalities of opportunity and outcome, the levelling-up rhetoric will remain exactly that: rhetoric.

There was very little in yesterday’s Budget in respect of targeted sectoral support for our manufacturing base, despite the potential job losses for skilled workers at Vauxhall in Ellesmere Port. There was even less on public sector spending, as the public sector workers who have kept this country going during the pandemic once again get only insulting claps from this Government and are again bracing themselves for the continuation of pay freezes. And disgracefully, there was not a jot on social care.

Priorities are the bedrock of our politics, and it is those priorities that tell us what life looks like for people, their families and their communities. While we remain a society defined by spiralling household debt, insecure work and fire and rehire tactics, and a nation where it is normal to hand over vast amounts of your income to your landlord; where life expectancy is falling in parts of the country and the retirement age continues to rise; where the forgotten and excluded are ignored again; where the queues at food banks are getting ever longer; where children are going hungry and where our elderly are selling their homes to cover the cost of their care, we will never be the happy, confident, outward-looking nation the Government claim to be building. Importantly, this tells us that the priorities of this Tory Government are the wrong ones.