Philip Davies
Main Page: Philip Davies (Conservative - Shipley)Department Debates - View all Philip Davies's debates with the HM Treasury
(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Mel Stride
As usual, my right hon. Friend makes some very insightful observations. I have no news, I am afraid, as to where the shadow Chancellor is. Perhaps he has his nose deep in the little red book, but my advice to him is to read my speech and to learn, because there is much to learn from what I have already said and what I am about to share with the House.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
It might well be that the shadow Chancellor is trying to cause insurrection outside the Chamber, to try to cause misery to the general public, but does my right hon. Friend agree that he does not seem to be doing much of a job of causing insurrection with his own party in this House, because none of them can be bothered to turn up to this debate?
Mel Stride
That is a fair observation—[Interruption.] That is a fair comment from my hon. Friend—[Interruption.]
Philip Davies
Does my right hon. Friend agree that we have actually received more income since cutting corporation tax and the highest rates of tax, meaning more money to spend on public services? If we had followed the advice of the Labour party and increased taxes, we would have received less tax revenue and therefore would have had less money to invest in our public services.
Mel Stride
My hon. Friend is entirely right. The amount of onshore corporation tax that we took in the last financial year is close to £50 billion—50% more than in 2010. As we have brought taxes down, the tax revenue take has increased. We can draw only one corollary from all this: if the Labour party gets its way and starts to put those rates up again, some of that tax take might be damaged.
Peter Dowd
I saw a few tumbleweeds on the Government Benches last week. If there is a shiver looking for a spine to run up, it need not bother looking on the Government Benches. After last night’s vote, there were none to be found. The national interest is not synonymous with the interest of the Tory party, as most Conservative Members would like to think, although the word “arrogance” is.
Philip Davies
The shadow Minister says last night was an outrage. Does he agree with his friends and acolytes in Momentum who said on Twitter that the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner) is a “scab” for voting with the Government last night on the EU (Withdrawal) Bill? Does he agree or disagree?
Peter Dowd
Thank you, once again, Madam Deputy Speaker.
In the Financial Secretary’s enthusiasm to explicate the Government’s record on the economy, he made no mention of a number of important elements that the 72 clauses in this Bill do nothing to deal with.
Philip Davies
The hon. Gentleman has been asked twice whether or not it is still the Labour party’s policy to clear all student debt—a policy on which the party garnered a great deal of votes at the last election—but I did not hear an answer. Will he tell us, in clear Yorkshire terms of yes or no: is that still Labour party policy? Many people want to know these things. Just a yes or no will do.
John Redwood
Let us move on. Let me summarise the situation by saying that what we have learned today is that the Opposition have no intention of honouring what we thought was a pledge and what they say was not a pledge. Labour does not want to retire the student debt. It does not have a clue how to do it, and it even admits that £100 billion is too big a sum to raise in this Finance Bill to honour that pledge.
Philip Davies
My right hon. Friend is being a bit unkind to the Labour Opposition, because they have given us some indication of how they would go about raising the money that they need for their fantasy policies. They have told us that they would adopt the policies that were used in Venezuela. Was my right hon. Friend as surprised as I was when the shadow Minister mentioned how appalled he was at the rate of inflation, given that he wants to adopt the policies of Venezuela? Perhaps my right hon. Friend can tell us what those policies led to in Venezuela.
John Redwood
I have written and spoken about that in other contexts. I fear that I might be straying a bit far from the strict words of the Finance Bill, but my hon. Friend tempts me. I do remember that the leadership of the Labour party was full of praise for the two last leaders of Venezuela, but we now know that that very expensive experiment has ended in terrible tears with a lot of civil dispute, an inability to buy simple foods in shops, complete chaos in getting in basic supplies, a country near bankruptcy, having run out of foreign exchange, and a country that cannot even run its own oil resources properly because it does not know how to invest, to balance its budget and to run finance prudently. It is very sad that the Labour party backed this particular wrong horse. It is even more bizarre that it will not now distance itself from it and admit that the experiment failed badly. However, it does tell us something very interesting.
When the Venezuela experiment began, it was great. The Government gave more money to the poor, which was extremely popular. In the first instance, the policy just about worked—people had a bit more money to spend—but shortly the Government ran out of other people’s money to spend and they ran out of borrowing capability. Instead of helping the poor, they crushed the poor. Instead of making a prosperous economy, they bombed the economy and they are now all much worse off as a result of their policy of generosity.
I am grateful that the Government understand that we need to have a prosperous and growing economy and to run our finances sensibly in order to pay for the attractive programmes for better public services and to create less inequality of income by giving more money to those who, through misfortune or for other reasons, cannot earn as much as others.