Budget Resolutions — House of Commons, 2017-11-27
Topic: Macroeconomics
Matthew Toby Perkins (Labour, Centre-left): This Budget was a huge wasted opportunity as well as an acknowledgement of failure. Those of us who listened to the Foreign Secretary’s speech today were staggered that he spent longer talking about penguins and plastic bags than he did acknowledging Brexit, the most serious threat to our economy. I was one of those MPs who campaigned for remain but found that their constituents voted leave. I am willing to go out there and say to my constituents that I will support their vote, but we need to have a sense from the Government that there is a plan and a basic competence in the negotiations that they are carrying out on Britain’s behalf. The Government need to seize the moment—as huge as it is—and show us that they are on top of the opportunities that exist. They are now making ludicrous claims, for example, that we could not nationalise the trains if we stayed in the EU. Such claims are utterly discredited and suggest that they have nothing left to say about how to make Brexit work. I was elected in May 2010 on a programme that promised to halve the deficit by 2015 and to eradicate it by 2020. That plan was ridiculed by the Tories as inadequate—they said that it would consign our children to a lifetime of paying down debt. That now seems wildly optimistic compared with the performance of this Government. This evening, we heard the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) talking about debt as though he was not a member of a party that has increased our debt by half a trillion pounds since 2010. The Government have no credibility on the deficit or on debt. In 2010, they told us that it would be gone by 2015. By 2014, it was going to be gone by 2018. Now we are told that it might be gone by 2025. I am willing to bet my house that, by 2025, this country will still have a deficit. The Tories have no credibility when talking about the deficit. Now we have a Budget that fails to address any of the key questions that might see our economy moving in a more positive direction There was nothing in the Budget about social care, the local government crisis, and the inadequate investment in the NHS. Schools in deprived areas are facing a real funding crisis. This Budget could have championed a real growth programme, with infrastructure investment of the sort that we will need to make Britain a more attractive place in which to invest in future. We could have had that at a time when apprenticeship starts are collapsing. The Budget has failed the test of the moment There was also a failure to recognise the need to make universal credit work for people who are not close to work. I welcome some of the measures that have been taken to alleviate organisational failures, but universal credit does not work for the self-employed and it is positively cruel for the disabled. In questions last week, I heard the protestations of the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), who recognises that his legacy is being tarnished. The actions on housing and homelessness were also utterly inadequate The tragedy of this Budget is the tragedy of this Government. They are out of ideas, more interested in their own survival than the national interest, and unable to grasp the size of the moment that a combination of the tides of history and their own ineptitude has brought upon us all. When we needed investment and innovation, we got obfuscation and confusion. When we needed decisive action to rescue universal credit, we got a partial tidy-up of failures that never should have happened. There was nothing on social care and nothing on the NHS. The Budget is a catastrophe for our schools and the deficit will now last till the end of never. This was a failed Budget from a failing Government who really have run out of ideas. It is time for them to step aside for a party that has not.