Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Bell Ribeiro-Addy Excerpts

Tuesday 9th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Streatham) (Lab)]

There are three aspects of this Budget that I want to address. The first is the short-term emergency measures to mitigate some of the economic effects of the pandemic, bearing in mind that the persistence of the virus is itself the fault of Government policy. Today Australia celebrates 10 straight days without a single domestic case of covid-19. All across the world, billions of people are living, effectively, without the virus. Cases and deaths have been reduced to a handful, or even zero, because they took effective measures to suppress it. This Government did not. So we have a public health disaster and an economic disaster. Countries that suppressed the virus have seen a relative hiccup in their economy and are now on their way to recovery. We, on the other hand, will suffer surging unemployment of up to 5.9%, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. This Government deserve no plaudits for being obliged to spend hundreds of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on measures to address a crisis they caused. We do not praise an arsonist because they called the fire brigade. This Government were even worse. For example, the second wave is widely seen as being the impact of the misconceived and reckless Eat Out to Help Out policy.

The second aspect is the long-term or structural elements beyond the emergency payments. These structural elements can be summed up in two words: vicious austerity, from every angle, that reduces the living standards of ordinary people, deepens existing inequalities, and provides unnecessary subsidies to big business. It is Robin Hood in reverse. Consider these elements of the Budget: a £4 billion cut to public spending on services, following a 5.7% cut in last year’s Budget; a £2 billion hike in council tax payments; a freeze on income tax thresholds, which makes poor people pay more tax; and a public sector pay freeze, not to mention the exception of nurses’ pay—the insult of just 1%. Ministers tell nurses that there is no money left, but that is false. In the Budget there is a £27 billion tax giveaway to businesses, which the OBR says will have no lasting effect, and £37 billion spent on a useless private test and trace system.

The third and final insult is a Treasury Red Book that barely mentions inequality—in fact, just once. Yet again, no equality impact assessment was published alongside the resolutions, because even though equality is our law, to this Government it is expendable—an add-on—and policy after policy adversely impacts the most disadvantaged in our society. This Government are responsible for the scope of both the public health and the economic disasters, and this Budget widens both even further.