Sheila Gilmore
Main Page: Sheila Gilmore (Labour - Edinburgh East)Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
Sheila Gilmore Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Denham
No, because I need to make some progress. In 2010 when the Conservative and Liberal Democrats got together, they agreed on a political strategy that was to blame everything on the previous Labour Government—it was to be their profligacy, their debt and their fault. Never mind that all parties had agreed on Labour’s spending plans right up to the banking crisis; never mind that the banking crisis was global and not national; and never mind that, although the failure of the banks owed a lot to failures in regulation, the Conservative party had consistently called for less regulation. Those facts were not going to get in the way of a clear political strategy of blaming it all on Labour. The political strategy has had some effect—the polls, which people such as Lord Ashcroft tell us are the only glimmer of hope the Conservatives have, tell us that—but the disastrous mistake for Britain is that the Government believe their own rhetoric. They believe that, because the strategy seems to be effective politically, it means it is true and that they should act as though it is true. That is what lies behind the disaster facing the British people.
Mr Denham
No—I would like to make progress.
If the rhetoric were true, the policies pursued by the Government would have worked. If it had been true that all that needed to be done was to get the deficit down as quickly as possible because the problems were simply a matter of overspending, the strategy would have worked. The strategy did not work, because the analysis of what was wrong was fundamentally flawed.
In the first year of the Government, the rhetoric of doom and gloom shattered business and consumer confidence before the first tax increase or the first cut began to bite. It was so important to the Government politically to tell everybody how bad things were going to be that people behaved accordingly. The VAT increase and the cuts then began to bite in the real world. The pessimism deliberately spread by the Government for political reasons began to bite and have an effect—a real reduction in demand.
Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)
It is perhaps not surprising that as a former Chief Whip, albeit one of relatively short duration, I rise to support the Budget set out by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but that is what I do.
It is a considerable tribute to the strength of the Government’s purpose that the measures the Chancellor has announced today will be enacted. The Budget takes place against an extraordinarily difficult background. I cannot remember, in 26 years on and off in this House, a more difficult set of circumstances in which a Chancellor has had to craft the Budget, nor such a heavy volume of advice across all media, much of which has been contradictory. The article in last Saturday’s Financial Times by Terry Leahy, which set out the case for the morality of low taxation, is well worth reading and sets out an argument that we do not hear often enough in this House. The article was blessed with a cartoon that showed the Chancellor in a trench surrounded by mud, blood and barbed wire, and wearing a tin hit. He may well feel, after the past few days, that that is not a bad summation of where he stands.
Sheila Gilmore
Does the right hon. Gentleman really think that that is a good image with which to portray his Chancellor, since the squaddies were in the trenches and the first world war generals kept sending them out to be killed? Surely that is not an image that the right hon. Gentleman wants to portray.
Mr Mitchell
That was not my image, but the image in the Financial Times. Nor was it of a general, but of a soldier serving in the trenches.
Hemmed in as the Chancellor is, he steers between the Scylla of debt that must be paid down and the Charybdis of growth that must be fought for and secured. I believe that today he has made the right decision in the long-term interests of the country, and I want to focus on those two key issues in my brief remarks.
In terms of the Charybdis of growth, I think he has picked up on the excellent work done by Lord Heseltine, particularly in its reference to Birmingham, and on what we can do in local economies to ensure that growth is boosted.