Capital Gains Tax (Rates)

Glenda Jackson Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The right hon. Lady is assuming that the economy is static, and that nothing changes in it. We believe that unemployment will fall—that is what the Office for Budget Responsibility says—and that we will therefore create more jobs.

The right hon. Lady’s programme, which we inherited, provided support for the “back to work” element in only two parts of the country. We are extending support to the whole country, and that is where we will get the extra effort. We will continue the programme. We think that we have embellished it and made it somewhat better, and I guarantee that we will keep it under permanent review.

The third thing that we are doing is setting down a strong foundation for long-term reform, which is part of the Budget proposals. Although we must correct the failings of the last Government, we are committed to delivering a better future for Britain, and we have had to make the stability of our economy a priority. I know that it is difficult for many Opposition Members to talk about this, but I also know that it is what they would be talking about if they were in government. There are always difficult choices to be made at a time when we have to draw our horns in.

We have had to prioritise the stability of our economy lest we forget the shambles with which we were left. Borrowing will be £149 billion this year, the second largest amount in Europe, and, as the Prime Minister pointed out before the Budget, it was on course to double in five years to £1.4 trillion—£22,000 for every man, woman and child. As a result of the Budget, however, the debt will fall to £116 billion next year, £89 billion the following year, and £60 billion in the year after that. It will fall to £37 billion in 2014-15, and is projected to fall to £20 billion in 2015-16, with the current structural deficit back in balance. That is the task that we have set ourselves. That was the first test of this Budget: to tackle borrowing and get the deficit down. Our approach has been reinforced by the judgments of the credit rating agencies and the business lobby when they agreed on Budget day that the plan is credible. Measures include reducing current expenditure by £30 billion a year by 2014-15, stronger medium-term growth with more business support to restore UK competitiveness, and reducing regulation and tax rates; and unemployment is forecast to fall throughout the OBR’s forecast period.

[Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State tell the House how many credit rating agencies made that judgment? My knowledge, which I admit is limited, is that there is one individual in Florida and another rating agency company comprising three individuals in the United States of America, and also that they consistently failed to remove the triple A rating from those companies and banks that caused the economic downturn in the first place. Why are the Government listening to people who clearly do not know what they are talking about?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

It is not just the Government who are listening to them; it seems that the rest of the world is as well. I must remind the hon. Lady that if we are not careful—[Interruption.] Whatever she says, if the credit rating agencies downgrade our rating, we would, like Spain and Greece, be paying far more to borrow the money that we are borrowing as a result of the previous Government’s position. Whether or not we agree that the credit rating agencies got it right on the banks is irrelevant, therefore. In this particular case, the question is whether or not we would end up paying more as a result of their bad rating, and that is something we were not prepared to risk. This is a Budget to get the economy back on track. It is a Budget to support the recovery and drive down the deficit, and, most importantly, to get Britain back to work.

Despite facing the tough and unavoidable choices forced on us by the fiscal position left by Labour, we are increasing the threshold for paying the basic rate of income tax, and increasing the child element of the child tax credit by £150 above indexation next year. We are making sure that the most vulnerable do not pay disproportionately.

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[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right that those proposals will have an impact on families and on entire communities. Almost £1 billion will be taken from tenants in the private rented sector—almost 20% of their support. If tenants have on average 20% of their payments cut, how many of them does the right hon. Gentleman think will really be able to carry on paying their rent? People in Wakefield will lose £20 a week; people in Barking will lose £40 a week; and people in Broxtowe will lose £30 a week. That is before they face the cuts in tax credits and the hit from extra VAT.

[Glenda Jackson]

The Secretary of State cited a four-bedroom house in the private sector. My constituency is served by two local authorities, and in Brent the medium price for a four-bedroom house is £450 a week. In Camden the medium price is £1,020 a week. Currently, 42% of people claiming housing benefit in Brent and 18% of people doing so in Camden are in the private rented sector. That represents a sizeable number of families who will clearly lose their homes under the current Government.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right to raise concerns, particularly as many people who receive housing benefit are in work. They work hard, are in low-paid jobs and cannot afford to pay their rent without the extra help that housing benefit brings. So, the Government’s measures will hit people who work hard to support their families and make ends meet. They will find the rug withdrawn from under them.

I am particularly concerned about the combined proposals for lone-parent families, and I ask the Secretary of State to look at them, because he says that lone parents with five and six-year-olds will move on to jobseeker’s allowance and have to look for work. However, his own documents, which were provided at the same time as the Budget, assume that only 10% of those lone parents will leave benefits because of the risk they might be less work ready or need more time to find a suitable job that fits with their caring responsibilities.

Many lone parents need additional support to find work that fits school hours, but as a consequence of these proposals about 90% of them will still be on jobseeker’s allowance one year later, at which point they will suddenly be hit by the right hon. Gentleman’s 10% cut in housing benefit. Lone parents with young children might work really hard to find a job that fits school hours, but suddenly an average of £500 a year will be taken from their incomes because they cannot find work and because, as a result, he wants to cut their housing benefit. That is deeply unfair on families who might work really hard to try to make ends meet. What does he expect people to do? Hundreds of thousands of people will struggle to pay their rent, and parents will have to move house, shift their kids out of school, move long distances and break up communities in order to try to find an affordable home.

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[Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

May I say what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Deputy Speaker? It is such a pleasure to see you sitting in that Chair.

There was a kind of creepy pleasure in listening to the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) because, in a curious way, it was like hearing a really bad horror film, and there is always a great deal of pleasure to be found in a really bad horror film. As for this recalling of Thatcherism in all its glory, dressed up for the 21st century, I love the idea that we can simply get people to work. There are all these people living in Peterborough who apparently have no desire to work and are perfectly happy to stay at home, neglecting their children, but the hon. Gentleman has been their MP for all this time—how long?—so why has he not done something about it? The issue is that in Peterborough, as in the rest of the country, under this—in my view Thatcherite mark 2 —Budget, there will be no jobs. As was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North West (Mr Robinson)—I regret that he is no longer in his place—the only guarantee in the Budget is a massive rise in unemployment.

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

In my constituency, the number of people in receipt of disability living allowance doubled under the previous Government; and not only did it double, it went up every year. Would the hon. Lady not see that as an example of the failure of the policies of the previous Government?

[Glenda Jackson]

Perhaps that is one of those areas—this was briefly touched on in an earlier contribution—that, like our health service, has increased so much because we are all living longer, so that people who might have died many years before are still living, but justifiably claiming disability living allowance because they are disabled. The hon. Gentleman should forgive me for giving him a tiny history lesson, but I would just point out to him that when his party was last in total government—as opposed to being propped up by the “30 pieces of silver” party—it massaged the unemployment figures by putting people on incapacity benefit, and that ran for years.

The hon. Member for Peterborough is also suffering from selective amnesia. Those of us who lived through the first Thatcherite era remember well the levels of unemployment, the destruction of communities, and the throwing on to the scrap heap of the greatest national resource that this country will ever have: its people. Their talent, their ability, their creativity and their capacity for hard work were all thrown away for the same reason that they are being thrown away now. “You can’t buck the markets” was the litany then; it is exactly the same now, even though it has been dressed up and presented in a very different way.

We hear massive arguments from Conservative Members that the Labour party created this fiscal downturn, yet they are all intelligent enough to know that that is grossly untrue. It is easy, in the blame culture that we live in today, to make threats to bankers and to say that they are the most blameworthy people, yet they have not been punished in the Budget at all.

[Mr Gyimah]

What is progressive about leaving the country without any money, as the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury said had happened?

[Glenda Jackson]

You really have to get another club to beat us with. I would have thought that there were a couple, although they are not necessarily to do with the Budget.

The hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George), who is no longer in his place, and the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh) both attempted, in their different ways, to make a salient point—namely, that this is a fair Budget because the richest pay the most. They must know that that is completely and utterly untrue. It is a grossly unfair Budget, because the poorest are the most dependent on public services, which we know will be slashed under the comprehensive spending review, when it eventually happens in October.

[Maria Eagle]

Did my hon. Friend see the analysis in The Observer at the weekend that suggested that the Chancellor’s

“budget cuts will hit Britain’s poorest families six times harder than the richest”?

Does she believe that that is in any way a definition of “progressive”?

[Glenda Jackson]

It is neither progressive nor fair. What is depressing about the path that the coalition Government have gone down is that they have learned absolutely nothing from the lessons of history. This is always the case: it is always the poorest who pay the most; their health suffers, they live in the worst possible housing, and their job opportunities are nil. I love the Secretary of State’s wonderful idea that they can move out of their social housing to another part of the country and find a job. This is coming from a Government who have already destroyed the regional development agencies. Sheffield Forgemasters has also been mentioned. There is absolutely nothing in the Budget that will help to create employment. One of the worst aspects of the Budget is that it will slash the confidence of those people who need it the most in order to get out there and compete in an ever-shrinking jobs market.

[Mr Ward]

Does the hon. Lady believe that it was a question of 30 pieces of silver when Clem Attlee, Herbert Morrison, Hugh Dalton and Ernest Bevin joined a coalition Government at a time of national disaster?

[Glenda Jackson]

This is a kind of psychobabble. When we get to the age of 18 and become adults, we really cannot blame everything on our parents, and, at his age, the hon. Gentleman really should not be blaming all those grandparents and great-grandparents for anything. The Liberal Democrats made their choices: they campaigned and they spent money on posters that warned of the VAT bombshell, but they have now signed up for it.

I want to go back to my point that it is always the poorest who pay the most. It will not be the richest who will feel the pain of the VAT increase; it will be the poorest. We have only to go round the supermarkets to see the kind of changes that are being brought into play. The special purchases of particular products that are cheaper than the branded product—or even, in some instances, than the supermarket’s own product—will be the products that the poorest people will have to buy.

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Glenda Jackson]

No. The idea that you have allowed children to languish in that state in Peterborough for all these years and done nothing about it—no, I am sorry, I cannot give you time. You voted against Sure Start. You voted against the new deal. You voted against every single policy that the Labour Government brought in over our 13 years to give every child a chance and to ensure that we as a nation invested in our greatest national treasure: our people.

[Mr Brian Binley (Northampton South) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Glenda Jackson]

Oh, go on then.

[Mr Binley]

I am most grateful to the hon. Lady. Does she not have any regrets at all about the massive rise in the number of young people who are not in education, employment or training? That can be laid at no one else’s doorstep but the Labour Government’s.

[Glenda Jackson]

May I just point out to the hon. Gentleman that, when his party was last in government, it was not children who were not in education, employment or training? In Birkenhead, the city in which I was born—admittedly, I have not lived there for a very long time—there were men who were entirely fit, healthy and capable of work, but the only way for them to earn a living was to pick over the rubbish dumps to see if they could find anything to sell.

[Mr Binley]

I am a working-class boy.

[Glenda Jackson]

You did not have to go through a rubbish dump to find things to sell. And I am a working-class girl.

There is a fantasy about a big black hole of debt that is resting on the shoulders of every man, woman and child in this country. I have lived all my life under the debt incurred by this country fighting and winning the second world war. We paid that debt off about five years ago, but I had not even been aware of its existence. During those decades, I and millions like me were given opportunities to move forward, to develop our talents and to create work that had not been dreamt of by the preceding generations. That could have happened again, but it will not happen under this Budget. This Budget is quite deliberately following the good old Conservative rule of divide and rule, and blame the poor—

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

indicated dissent.

[Glenda Jackson]

Don’t shake your head. In every soundbite you give, you are running with the idea that the people who are claiming benefit are scroungers, and that they have no job because they do not want to work. That is classic Conservative party doctrine. This Budget is a disgrace, because it attacks the most vulnerable in our society, and they are the people, regardless of their party political colour, whom everyone in the House should be committed to defending and protecting. You are simply destroying their opportunities.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—