Amendment of the Law — House of Commons, 2015-03-23
Topic: Macroeconomics
Daniel Grian Alexander (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): It is fair to say that the current Prime Minister also discouraged this policy. In the television leaders debates in 2010 he said it could not be done and could not be afforded. We have shown in this Parliament that we can afford it. The difficult decisions we on the Government Benches have been willing to make in other areas have meant that we have been able to deliver the largest income tax cuts for working people in a generation. That is something of which I am very proud indeed My right hon. and learned Friend also rightly highlighted how much progress we have made in tackling tax avoidance during the course of this Parliament. He was humble enough to admit that progress had not always been as strong during his time as Chancellor. There were many measures in the Budget to tackle tax avoidance and evasion We then had a contribution from the right hon. Member for Edinburgh South West. It is fair to say that there were many things in the Budget that he was not very keen on. He certainly made that clear. He did not like the rollercoaster, as he described it, of the public finances. I have set out my own alternative scenario on that. He did not mention the big dipper that the public finances had been on during his time in office The right hon. Gentleman rightly welcomed the package of measures to support the oil and gas sector, which was a very strong feature of the Budget. The measures will ensure that the sector, which is suffering from a dramatic fall in the oil price, has some confidence in the future. He welcomed those measures, but he rightly pointed out that the oil revenues in the OBR forecast at this Budget were a little more than a 10th of those predicted by the nationalists in the recent Scottish referendum. He made the point that had Scotland voted for independence and experienced the fall in oil prices, the difficult decisions made in this Parliament—I think I quote him correctly—would have seemed like a school picnic in comparison The right hon. Gentleman was too modest to remind the House of the service he rendered to his country with the leadership he showed in the Better Together campaign. I hope that Members on all sides of the House express their appreciation for that. It was certainly something I experienced first hand. It was immensely important in ensuring that the people of Scotland voted the right way in the referendum. The experience of working with him on that campaign, although we may have disagreed on many other matters over the years and will no doubt continue to do so, is one I will always remember. He showed himself to be a man of the greatest statesmanship in his conduct of that campaign Before I respond to some of the other points, I want to respond to the jibes from the shadow Chief Secretary—[Interruption.] It certainly is not—there are another 10 minutes to go. The shadow Chancellor, the shadow chunterer, is in his place chuntering as usual. He doesn’t have many policies, but he sure does like to chunter The Budget, as set out in the Red Book, was agreed by Conservatives and Liberal Democrats working together in the coalition Government. There is no policy measure in the Budget which Liberal Democrat Ministers did not sign off. Are there differences in the way the two parties in the coalition would approach the task of deficit reduction in the next Parliament? Yes, of course there are. I have made clear in this House and outside that there is another way we can meet the fiscal mandate that all parties signed up to when we voted for the charter for budget responsibility in January. Opposition Front Benchers appear to have forgotten about that, but we can do it in a more responsible and stable way. For that reason, last week I published and set out an alternative fiscal scenario for the next five years—a plan to borrow less than Labour and cut less than the Conservatives, a plan to give the UK a brighter future without sacrificing financial prudence. As the independent OBR mentioned in its economic and financial outlook, this profile of public expenditure "is driven by a medium-term fiscal assumption", but "both parties have said that they would pursue different policies if they were to govern alone." The Budget that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor presented last week is a coalition Budget that reflects the hard work the coalition Government have carried out over the past five years to turn the country around from the mess we inherited from Labour and to set us on a path back to prosperity. I do not hesitate, therefore, to speak in favour of it.