Finance Bill

Richard Graham Excerpts

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to the three maiden speakers whom we have just listened to: the hon. Members for Ipswich (Ben Gummer) and for North East Cambridgeshire (Stephen Barclay) and my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin). I am always struck by how confident, forthright, quite often amusing and, on occasion, even inspiring maiden speakers are. I am sure that we shall hear a great deal more from them all. I also noticed that they all touched on issues of policy. When I first came to the House, it was a custom that maiden speakers talked about their constituencies and their predecessors, but skirted round any question of policy. I am pleased that that rule is obviously now more honoured in the breach, and I hope that we shall hear much more about policy from all the maiden speakers whom we have heard this evening.

On the Finance Bill, let me start by agreeing with what I can—this part of my speech will be very short. I agree that the deficit is too large and that it needs to be reduced. On every other issue—the size of the cuts, their composition, their impact on growth, the balance between tax increases and spending cuts, and the whole question of fairness—I think that the Budget judgment, as expressed in the Finance Bill, is fundamentally and manifestly wrong.

First of all, as some of my hon. Friends have also said, the Chancellor made great play of the idea that his Budget to eliminate the structural deficit within five years was unavoidable. That is absurd. Balanced budgets are the primitive 1920s economics of Montagu Norman in this country and Herbert Hoover in the United States, and in both countries they led directly to the great depression. Capitalism is driven by cyclical forces that need constant regulation, not balanced budgets irrespective of the economic cycle. The truth is that the Chancellor has gone overboard on austerity. The cuts are as tough as those that the IMF is imposing on Greece, which is on the verge of bankruptcy, which we certainly are not. They are also twice as tough as the Canadian measures that the Chancellor has repeatedly prayed in aid to justify what he is doing, three times as tough as Sweden’s measures in the mid-1990s and much tougher even than the IMF measures in 1976.

Then there is the question of how the deficit should be reduced—as I have said, no one disagrees that it needs to be. There are three ways of reducing the deficit: not only through tax increases or spending cuts, but through economic growth as well. Before the Budget, the OBR estimated that UK growth this year and over the succeeding four years would be slightly less than 2.5% on average. As each 1% of growth adds an annual £15 billion to UK income, the OBR forward projections of economic growth imply an increase in UK income over the next five-year period—the perspective of the Bill—of between £150 billion and £180 billion.

Because all Governments take roughly 40% of any increase in UK income, those figures imply an increase of revenues to the Government of around £70 billion to £75 billion over this five-year period. That would be enough virtually to halve the current budget deficit over that period, which hugely reduces the need for spending cuts. I do not say that I am against spending cuts totally. Indeed, when it comes to Trident, ID cards and some of the extraordinarily wasteful Government IT databases, there is plenty of room for cuts. However, the figures that I have quoted raise starkly the question of whether the Chancellor’s enormous spending cuts will squash out the growth-generating potential of the economy—something that, frankly, would make the cuts simply counter-productive.

Indeed, those figures also raise the central issue, which had something of an airing between those on the Front Benches in the earlier debate, of where the Chancellor expects the growth to come from over the next few years. Household consumption, which accounts for two thirds of national output, is now almost certain to fall, particularly with the increase in VAT. Any growth in wages after inflation is already weak and is likely to weaken further as unemployment rises, which it will. According to all surveys, consumer confidence is fading, while some 60% of UK exports go to the eurozone, which as we all know is in considerable disarray. So where exactly is the growth going to come from?

I give the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) credit for being the one Government Back Bencher who tries to make a case for the Budget, but he seems to have forgotten the prime rule of computer projections, which is: garbage in, garbage out. If we feed in dodgy premises, we get out dodgy conclusions. Government Members keep quoting the OBR as though it is independent—I do not think that Sir Alan Budd is actually independent, and the OBR is next to the Treasury, so it is not exactly independent—but that is not the point. The key point is that the OBR projections are based on certain premises that are––I say this without exaggeration—fantasy.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

Given the strength of the right hon. Gentleman’s views on the neo-Keynesian economics that effectively advocate keeping on spending because that is the only way to grow the economy, what does he think of the performance of the Irish economy? In 2009, Ireland managed to reduce state spending by 7% as a result of stringent measures involving public spending and public sector salaries, yet, in the first three months of this year, its economy grew by almost 3%. Does that not demonstrate to him and to other Labour Members that it is a false assumption to say that reducing public sector pay will shrink the economy, and that cutting back can in fact provide an opportunity for the private sector to grow again?

[Mr Meacher]

The opposite conclusion should be drawn from the Irish economy. The Irish Government made huge, swingeing cuts of 12% to 15%, which absolutely decimated that economy. Sooner or later, of course there will be a revival in all economies, but at a fearful cost. We shall very much be going down the route of the Irish economy if this Budget goes through. If the hon. Gentleman were to go to the Republic of Ireland and ask people’s view of the finance budget of three or four years ago, I think that he would get a very different impression.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

Let me begin by congratulating the new hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) and expressing some solidarity with him, given what he said about his background and experience of growing up on a council estate. I am sure that his constituents will be very well served by the effective way in which he makes his remarks.

In a few days it will be my birthday, and as I inch towards the fourth decade of my life, it occurs to me that the economic downturn that we are experiencing now is also my fourth. The truth is that I do not remember the first recessionary period in the early 1970s, but I have strong memories of the recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s. I think back to what it was like growing up poor and black in my present constituency in Tottenham, and the hardship experienced by my family and many others at the time. I remember my father losing his business in the early 1980s, and the depression and the booze that followed.

Children do not always quite understand these things as they are growing up, but I remember, in about 1982 or 1983, coming to understand that there was far less money in the home. The fridge seemed much less full, and—although I do not want to suggest that my parents were not generous—the presents at Christmas were not what we might have seen in the commercials on television, and not what we might have liked. I think that the VAT rise had something to do with it. Although Margaret Thatcher had said that she would not change the rate before the election, she raised it from 8% to 15%. I also vividly recall the freezing of child benefit for successive years, and how hard that was for my mother. More than anything, however, I remember the restlessness, the fecklessness and the worklessness of the broader community and the explosion of violence that we experienced in my community as a direct result of that, leading to some of the worst images that this country has ever seen or experienced.

[Richard Graham]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that, in that context, it is particularly regrettable that the Government of the last 13 years left us with more than 1 million unemployed young people—an absolute record?

[Mr Lammy]

Unemployment at that time in my constituency was running at 20%, and in some communities, particularly the black community, the rate was double that. It is because of the situation then that young people like me, growing up in constituencies like Tottenham, forged such a huge solidarity with colleagues and friends in different parts of the country. Although those areas seemed very different from Tottenham, the assault on manufacturing industry and the attitude to former mining and steelworking towns led us to forge a solidarity that remains on these Benches today.

In the 1990s I qualified as a young lawyer, but I did not go straight into employment because, yet again, the country was in recession and the employment was not there. I went to the local unemployment benefit office hoping that I might become a barrister, but not sure whether that would actually happen. My mother was now struggling on her own with a 15% interest rate, and the shops up and down Tottenham high road were boarded up because of bankruptcy. That was the backdrop in the 1990s. We experienced two recessions that had huge social consequences—social consequences that I deeply fear could be repeated as a result of this Finance Bill.

[Richard Graham]

The right hon. Gentleman is very generous in giving way. Given his experience in the early 1990s, is it not an absolute tragedy that he was part of a Government who, having promised to abolish boom and bust, landed us with the largest recession not just in his lifetime, but in the lifetimes of three generations?

[Mr Lammy]

The hon. Gentleman paints a fantasy picture of history, and takes the banks out of context. I will return to that in a few moments.