Finance Bill — House of Commons, 2015-07-21
Topic: Macroeconomics
Thomas Sheppard (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): I rise to speak in support of the SNP amendment and, hopefully, to persuade the House to deny the Bill a Second Reading Before I go into the details of the Bill, I want to deal with a question of overview. Over the years, we have grown used to hearing glib statements from the Government, and soundbites rather than substance. Many of us marvel at the fact that the Conservatives manage, without smile or grimace, to get the words "working people" out of their mouths quite so often, given that, we suspect, some of them rarely meet the working people of this country, let alone have their best interests at heart. We have also grown used to the phrase "long-term economic plan", although the plan has been going for five years and has so far failed to meet every single objective that was set for it by the Chancellor. The latest mantra we hear consists of six words: the Conservatives believe in "high wages, low taxes, low welfare". That is the type of society that they want to see I think it was the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) who, at an early stage in the debate, asked the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood), whether she agreed with the general direction indicated by those six words. I do not want to misrepresent the hon. Lady, but I did not hear her response, and I think that she tried to dodge the question. Well, I do not want to dodge the question. I want to say that I consider that statement to be facetious, glib and shallow, and that it is not a statement with which my colleagues and I agree I want to see a society in which there are high wages, fair taxes and decent welfare provision for everyone, and that is what I think we should be aiming for. I believe that prosperity is not just about what we have as individuals, and the wealth that one family gets through a wage packet, but about the things that we have together, in our society and in our communities. I believe in the whole concept of the social wage. If we know that we have well-funded, adequate, strong public services in respect of, for instance, health and education, and if we know that we have a strong system of social insurance that gives us a safety net should we fall ill, suffer disability, or find ourselves between periods of employment, we are much richer as a result. That is our attitude, and that is the philosophy in which we believe. Let me now deal with some of the provisions in the Bill. So far, no one has discussed the tax lock provisions in clauses 1 and 2. The Government are saying that, for the remainder of the current Parliament, they will take upon themselves a legal obligation not to increase VAT or income tax. I made some inquiries about that, because I thought it a strange thing for the Government to want to do. After all, they are the Government now, and they will be the Government next year and for the following five years. If these provisions are included in what will become the Finance Act 2015, it will only take a clause in the 2016 Finance Bill to overturn them. They are therefore literally not worth the paper on which they are written. That is another example of a Government who prefer public relations to concern about the public finances The second detailed issue that I want to raise is that of the personal allowance. Members on both sides of the House will probably welcome the increase in the allowance and, as we are told, the ability of people to keep a little more of what they earn; but let us not kid ourselves.