Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation — House of Commons, 2015-07-14
Topic: Macroeconomics
Geraint Richard Davies (Labour, Centre-left): It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), who made an excellent speech underlining the cruel regressivity of this awful Budget. She particularly mentioned the impact on child poverty, families and women, and the inter- generational poverty that will scar families for life. It is also a pleasure to follow excellent speeches by colleagues from the Swansea Bay city region, my hon. Friends the Members for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock), for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) and for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), and a number of maiden speeches, particularly that of the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mhairi Black) This was a Sheriff of Nottingham Budget, robbing from the poor and giving to the rich. In fact, The Economist has commented that taking from the very poorest through tax credit changes and giving to the very wealthy through inheritance tax changes is "indefensible". That is not some sort of left-wing ragbag but a keenly focused magazine that says it as it is We have the Sheriff of Nottingham, the Chancellor, living within his castle walls and feeding his fat noble friends with inheritance tax reductions, while the ordinary people just outside are being hoaxed. With one hand they are being given higher tax thresholds, but with the other they are being pick-pocketed, with something like £16 billion of stealth taxes on things like insurance for housing and cars, and with the vehicle excise duty changes. Even the withdrawal of climate change subsidies will come back and hit them through energy prices, and the withdrawal of BBC funding will hit them through the licence fee The Sheriff of Nottingham is also trying to persuade the ordinary people around the castle walls that the poorest people in the forest will not be painfully abused by the tax credit cuts. Instead he is trumpeting the minimum wage increase, which of course will not compensate families on tax credits. In 2012 the Chancellor gave a speech describing the "strivers" and the "skivers" and asking whether it was fair for a shift worker to get up in the morning to go to work and see the closed blinds of his neighbours who live off benefits. Of course, skivers are not eligible for working tax credits and child tax credits, because they are only given to people in work. They are based on the American earned income tax credit, as an incentive to work. Their withdrawal will undermine not only the individuals who are paid the money but business start-ups. The change is thoroughly regressive and counterintuitive to economic growth The Budget was more about politics than economics. On the minimum wage, the Chancellor has taken the Labour party’s clothes and hoped that people will not notice what he is doing to working families, and the Opposition cannot support him in that. Of course, the cost of tax credits has grown to something like £30 billion, but that is because productivity in the British economy has been so woefully poor that wages have gone down, leading to tax credits going up. In fact, 800,000 fewer people are earning more than £20,000 than was the case in 2010, which is an appalling failure. That is why this Government have borrowed more in five years than Labour did in 13. The Government should have focused on productivity growth in the Budget, rather than on fiddling around with tax and spend so that the Chancellor can position himself against the flamboyant part-time Mayor of London as the next Tory leader There is also the appalling situation whereby the third-born in each family will have their tax credits taken away. I wonder if that will be extended to education and health. When the third child, Johnny, has a broken arm and goes to the NHS, will he be told, "Sorry, we can’t treat that, you’re the third-born. Oh, don’t worry, your oldest sister has just died—so it’s alright now"? What is the change about? Is it an incentive for poorer people in society not to breed? Is some sort of positive eugenics returning to the Tories? It really is appalling.