Budget Resolutions

Peter Dowd Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

Mr Deputy Speaker, in the light of the point of order from a Government Member earlier, which I thought was rather churlish, will you pass on my thanks to the Speaker, your fellow Deputy Speakers, the House of Commons Commission and the House staff for all their help and support, and the safety in which they keep us in the House?

Bootle is one of the most deprived towns in England and has five super-output areas in the lowest 1%, so how can it be right that our levelling-up fund bid has been rejected? In the light of that type of Government approach, it is becoming apparent that the Chancellor’s financial statement was pretty shallow and a sort of economic whistling in the dark. Inflation is on the rise; interest rates are on the rise; taxes are on the rise; the deficit is on the rise; the national debt is on the rise; inequality is on the rise; billionaire incomes are on the rise; profits from dodgy covid deals are on the rise; covid infections are on the rise—the Chancellor is taking the rise.

The Chancellor’s statement came three months after the Prime Minister’s levelling-up speech, in which he committed to working

“double hard to overturn…inequalities”—

inequalities that the Prime Minister and other Tory Governments have exacerbated. I am afraid the Prime Minister working “double hard” does not fill me with much confidence: 100% of nothing multiplied by two is still nothing.

What about the Government’s fiscal rules? They have missed so many targets that they have stopped counting. On 18 October, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said:

“There are currently no active fiscal rules in the UK. The fiscal rules adopted in the 2019 manifesto were abandoned just four months later with the onset of the Covid pandemic.”

The Chancellor did announce some fiscal rules, but they are unlikely to be met, like those of other Tory Chancellors, although hope does spring eternal.

How about the national debt? In May 2010, the Tories inherited a national debt of just over £1 trillion, or 63.2% of GDP; in August 2019, it had gone up by three quarters to £1.7 trillion, or 78.4% of GDP; in February 2021, just pre-covid, it had gone up again to £1.784 trillion, or 81.9% of GDP; and by September 2021, it was at £2.218 trillion, or 95.5% of GDP. So the Tories have added £16,000 for every man, woman and child in this country. That is why—to respond to the question from the hon. Member for Warrington South (Andy Carter)—you cannot trust the Tories with the economy. The party of fiscal rectitude has more than doubled the national debt in just a decade—more wrecked than rectitude.

[Jesse Norman]

Will the hon. Gentleman remind the House what the national debt as a percentage of GDP was in 1997 and then what it was when the financial crisis—to which Labour had allowed the country to become enormously overexposed through increased debt in the banking sector—had struck? I will tell him: it went from 46% to 84% while Labour was in government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Dowd]

As the phrase goes, I will take no lectures from the right hon. Gentleman, who served on the Treasury Bench while I served on the Opposition Front Bench. He was there when the OBR confirmed that the UK was suffering the slowest recovery of any major advanced economy, with GDP at the end of this year further below 2019 levels. That was on his watch. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor do not have the self-awareness to acknowledge it, saying it is everybody else’s fault, as the right hon. Gentleman just repeated. The blame game starts and there are the usual tactics of diversion.

What is the latest diversion? Well, unlike Nelson, the Prime Minister sees ships everywhere—preferably French ones. “Vive la France!” he whispers under his breath. What about his handling of the pandemic? The time is not right, he says, to hold anyone—that is, him—to account through a public inquiry, as he needs to get on sorting out the pandemic, yet in the middle of that pandemic he initiates a major reorganisation of the NHS, so clinical and support staff, who are under huge stress, are being distracted from the real job at hand. That is the perversity of this Government.

The Prime Minister seems to forget that, in cahoots with the Chancellor, he implemented a massive cut to aid to the poorest nations during a pandemic. So much for global Britain.

How are the Government going to sort out the country’s economic travails? Another slogan will help out: levelling up. I am not sure whether the Prime Minister shared the levelling-up speech with the Chancellor; if he did, the Chancellor obviously did not bother to read it. In fact, I am not even convinced that the Prime Minister bothered to read it before he delivered it. In his levelling-up speech in July this year, the Prime Minister referred to the scale of the task that faced the German nation on reunification. Does he know the scale of the problem in this country? The Germans actually did something about it: they invested over decades. I suggest that the Prime Minister checks out what they did. Rumour has it—it is a rumour—that he is not a details person, but on this occasion he may want to make an exception.

If the Prime Minister is going to mention German reunification, he would be well advised to look at the scale of the intervention that was undertaken. The Centre For Cities analysed what putting the words of his levelling-up speech into action might mean. The analysis was entitled “What can German reunification teach the UK about levelling up?”; the answer, as it happens, is a great deal. The cost of this scale of levelling up would be at least £1.7 trillion today, which is around 75% of a year’s UK GDP. Closing the north-south divide would cost hundreds of billions of pounds over decades, if done properly. The Government have come nowhere near that level of investment or commitment.

England’s biggest cities, including Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, have the lowest productivity and life expectancy in western Europe—on the Prime Minister and the Chancellor’s watch. In Liverpool, life expectancy is four years below the European average. All major cities outside London are at the bottom of the western European league table for productivity, after 10 years of Tory control. The evidence of social and economic inequity across the country in terms of health, education, region, environment, cities, towns, countryside, age and gender is there for all to see.

What is depressing is the insouciant—there’s the French again—attitude of the Chancellor to it all. The scale of the task that faces the country is in inverse proportion to the Chancellor’s lack of action. In sum, on the bridge, the Prime Minister sees ships everywhere; meanwhile, below decks, the Chancellor is scuttling HMS UK.

[Several hon. Members rose—]