Charter for Budget Responsibility
Debate between Pete Wishart and Chris Leslie(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)
It is worth recapping at the end of this debate why we are here and why we are having this debate at all. We are still talking about the deficit because the Chancellor of the Exchequer has failed to fulfil his promise to get rid of that level of borrowing—the difference between our expenditure and our income as a nation. This charter, of course, is a device designed to distract from the Chancellor’s failure, making out as though the Tories still have a plan as they originally set out. As my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Bain) correctly pointed out, this debate was also supposed to provide a party political opportunity to smear the Opposition and to set up the Conservatives’ election tactics.
Chris Leslie
No, I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman.
The trouble for the Chancellor is that this debate gives us an opportunity to draw attention to his colossal failure to fulfil his promise to tackle the deficit. In his eagerness to trip up the Opposition, he has caught himself in a series of contradictions and entangled himself in his own spin.
We should remember that it was only nine months ago that this charter was changed. It keeps changing because the Government desperately have to pretend that they have a grip on things and that they are somehow on top of the deficit issue. The deficit after the next general election, however, is predicted to be a massive £76 billion. Revenues have collapsed over the lifetime of this Parliament, and we have seen rising tax credits and rising levels of housing benefit to subsidise low pay and the high-rent economy that the Chancellor has been fashioning. The Government now find themselves with an extra £200 billion-worth of borrowing over what they originally set out.
The Tories love to talk tough. They publish their documents—[Interruption.] I am delighted to see the Chancellor back in his place. He loves to bang that Dispatch Box and was getting very shouty and loud in his earlier contributions, but the reality is that his strategy has failed. The Chancellor and the Chief Secretary do not have a clue about what they are doing.
The debate was revealing, however, and I would like to ask the Chancellor about it. He said in his opening remarks that his deficit plan had not gone any slower than he had planned. I have taken the opportunity to look at the Hansard record of what the Chancellor said. He said:
“What we have done is cut the deficit by a half. We have neither gone faster than we said we were going to go, nor gone slower than we said we were going to go.”
The Chancellor has got himself into a terrible muddle if he thinks that he did not promise to eradicate the deficit back in 2010. The Prime Minister himself said:
“In five years’ time, we will have balanced the books.”
That was the Prime Minister’s solemn promise to the country.
The Chancellor did become a little bit over-excited. Perhaps he found this rather a difficult occasion, given that the situation was blowing up in his face. Not only did he get into a tangle thinking that he had not changed his deficit reduction plan, but he got into a terrible muddle with the charter. That is quite embarrassing for the Prime Minister in particular. At 3.30 pm on 15 December, the Prime Minister said in a speech that targeting the current budget deficit would be
“a great, black, ominous cloud”
—that it would be a total disaster—but by 4.30 pm, the Chancellor had tabled a Charter for Budget Responsibility that actually supports a current budget process, which is, of course, the correct strategy.
Perhaps the Chancellor needs to be reminded what he said originally, in his 2010 Budget speech. He said that the mandate was current—[Interruption.] Does the Chancellor want to deny that he said, back in 2010, that the mandate was
“current, to protect… productive public investment”?—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 167.]
If so, let him correct the record now from the Dispatch Box. He will not do that, however, because he knows that targeting the current budget is the right thing to do.
At no point does the Charter for Budget Responsibility commit itself to a fixed deadline for 2017-18. The Treasury would like to pretend that it does, but it does not. Instead, it goes for a “rolling horizon” and year 3 of a five-year rolling forecast. The Chancellor needs to understand properly what that means; he did not quite get it earlier. It means that the target moves forward by a year each year. Perhaps the Chancellor does know that. Perhaps he did this because he wanted to wriggle out of any responsibility to which he might be held now, ahead of the approaching general election. However, if he feels that this is somehow a firm commitment to 2017-18, he is wrong. Labour Members believe that we shall need to get the current budget into surplus as soon as possible in the next Parliament, and nothing in the charter is inconsistent with that view. The Chancellor, incidentally, did not really talk about the charter at all.
Income Tax
Debate between Pete Wishart and Chris Leslie(10 years ago)
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Chris Leslie
No, we believe that instead of having the married couples break, which does not actually help many married couples, it would be far fairer to introduce that 10p starting rate of tax, because it would help many, many more people. The hon. Gentleman has hit upon yet another example—perhaps this is one for an Opposition day debate on a different occasion—where the Government constantly choose the route of unfairness, limiting the help to those who need support and assistance. Labour believes that everybody should have a share in growth and prosperity, which is precisely the opposite of the trickle-down economics that we have had so far from the parties in the Government.
Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)
Getting back to the 50p tax rate, does the hon. Gentleman have any explanation for the fact that when we voted on it in March 2012 only two Labour Members voted in that Division and the rest abstained? What is the explanation for that?
Chris Leslie
We have consistently opposed this outrageous change to dish out a tax cut for the very privileged 1% in society. The hon. Gentleman should join us, and I hope he will, in voting for today’s motion, as it is about a key divide in British politics and in Scottish politics. It is very important that we expose the fact that by cutting the top rate of tax on earnings above £150,000 from 50p to 45p Ministers have wilfully accelerated the divide between the majority and the richest 1%.