Taxes

Harriet Cross Excerpts

Tuesday 15th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[John Grady (Glasgow East) (Lab)]

I rise to speak against the Opposition motion. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer has raised taxes. She has done so to stabilise the public finances, because the public finances that the Labour Government inherited were in a shocking state; she has done so to invest in public services, in particular the NHS and schools, because public services were left in a shocking state by the previous Government; she has done so to invest in national security; and she has done so to invest in Scotland. My right hon. Friend has raised taxes because public finances need to be managed carefully. We cannot keep pretending that we have money when we do not.

[Harriet Cross (Gordon and Buchan) (Con)]

On pretending, it seems to me that Labour likes to pretend that the covid pandemic never happened and that the £400 billion that the previous Government spent to protect the country and protect jobs, which Labour supported and asked us to go further on, never happened. Will the hon. Gentleman reflect on that and at least acknowledge what happened in the recent past?

[John Grady]

I am very happy to reflect that the covid pandemic happened, but I also reflect that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mismanagement happened. The Conservatives lost the last election because they made a mess of the economy. They have lost their reputation for economic competence, which is why they have lost so many MPs and suffered an extinction event. I read in today’s Times that it was thought that the common crane had been extinct for more than 500 years in Scotland, but it is now reported that there are six or seven nesting pairs in Scotland—more than we have Conservative MPs, and there may be a reason for that.

The Opposition motion implies a reversal of more than £20 billion in taxes. The Opposition need to explain how they would fund that. What cuts would they make, and what effect would that have on the businesses they claim to support? They need to explain whether they would reverse the investment in the NHS, which is essential to businesses. Many businesses have said to me that they want to see investment in the NHS in order to get the waiting lists down and reform the service. That is exactly what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health is doing. The disruption caused to businesses by NHS waiting lists is significant, but they are now coming down—if only the same could be said for Scotland.

The Opposition must explain whether they would reverse the investment in education, because businesses say to me every week that they want to see investment in skills. They need skilled workers to grow their businesses. It is essential for economic growth.

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[John Slinger (Rugby) (Lab)]

This is all rather desperate from the Conservative party. I had thought that pantomime season was in the winter, but clearly it is not. I will defend the decisions taken by this Government to help working people, grow the economy and fix the mess we inherited from the previous Government, and we are doing so with fairer tax at the core.

I use the term “Government” regarding the last Administration loosely, because they did not believe in government. They ran the tank dry. They were running the factory without maintaining the equipment; they just made last-minute repairs, knowing that things would break down again, and they did. An astonishing 234 schools were found to contain RAAC—reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete—and were almost disintegrating before our eyes; our Army reached its smallest size since the Napoleonic wars; prisons reached capacity; and the Government did very little or nothing. The police saw 20,000 officers cut, and that was reversed only at the last point.

That is what the last Government were: crumbling and shambolic. They presided over a country whose public services were on their knees and whose people had not seen their prospects get better for many years. So woeful was their record that they vacated even the territory that they used to occupy—they became the weak-on-defence Tories, the soft-on-crime Tories and the high-tax Tories.

That brings me to my second point. The Conservatives increased the tax burden to its highest level since the second world war. It was stable at 33% from 2010 to 2019. The 2019 Parliament saw the biggest rise in the tax take in recent history, reaching 36% by 2024. They then engaged in a reckless, unfunded cut to NI, at a time when the economy was still stagnant. They did that deliberately—in my view, it was a poisoned chalice bequeathed to this Government. The Conservatives knew that Labour’s commitment not to raise tax on ordinary working people would mean that we could not and would not reverse that reckless tax cut. They knew full well that they were leaving behind a black hole—Conservative Members may not like to hear it, but they knew that. They knew that the public services were on their knees, but they did not care; they only cared about their electoral fortunes, which did not work out so well.

This Labour Government are not afraid of difficult challenges, nor of addressing those challenges. We actually believe in the concept of government and the responsibility of government—the responsibility to take the difficult decisions necessary to fill the unforeseen £22 billion black hole that we inherited. We therefore believe that we must raise revenue through taxation, as the Chancellor outlined in her Budget last autumn. Despite the accusations of the Conservative party, this has not been to the detriment of working people, nor is it the case that we are not asking the wealthiest in society to pay more. The opposite is true: we have raised taxes on wealth. Private jet passengers now face a 50% tax increase, VAT has been added to private school fees, and we are raising £2 billion more from inheritance tax by closing reliefs used by the wealthiest.

[Harriet Cross]

In his speech, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury said that working people are people who go out to work. Do farmers go out to work?

[John Slinger]

Of course they go out to work. I believe that my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury answered that point earlier in the debate, but I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention.

To add to my list, non-dom status is being largely scrapped, capital gains taxes have increased, and stamp duty on second homes now starts at 5%. These measures help raise the revenue that is required for massive public investment, benefiting working people, not making them worse off. The clue is in the name of our party—Labour. We are the party of work. We are also the party of getting our country, our economy and our public services working.

As such, I ask Opposition Members to look forward to the summer recess with optimism in their hearts. Do not let the doom-mongers and gloom-mongers fill their hearts, for change has already begun. That change is made possible by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor’s Budget and by the spending review. We are fixing the NHS —we promised 2 million additional NHS appointments in our first year, and have delivered 4 million. Waiting lists are down by 260,000, and 1,900 more GPs have been recruited. We are putting more money into people’s pockets; we have boosted the minimum wage for 3 million workers, and wages grew more in our first 10 months than over a whole 10 years under the previous Administration, testifying to the Conservatives’ incompetence and weakness when they were in government. We are fixing the foundations of our economy, with four interest rate cuts, three trade deals and business confidence at a nine-year high. In the first quarter of this year, UK growth was the highest in the G7. We are tackling childhood poverty, opening the first 750 free breakfast clubs, and expanding free school meals. In one day, this Government took action to take 100,000 children out of poverty.

I now turn to the motion in front of us, which implies a reversal of revenue-raising policies worth over £20 billion a year. If Opposition Members oppose the measures we have taken, which of the investments I have just mentioned would they reverse? Is it the free breakfast clubs? Is it the investment in the NHS, with shorter waiting lists, or is it the extra police? Perhaps more pertinently, given the title of today’s debate, how would they pay for it? The Chancellor is not ducking difficult decisions, and I am confident that if people observe her actions, they will see that she and this Labour Government were correct. I call it a “zoom out and dial down” approach. If people zoom out and look down, they will see that the challenges we face as a country—on tax, and on reform of many kinds—require us to take action. If they dial down the endless noise of discontent, whipped up by social media and sometimes in the media and by our political opponents, they will observe a country whose people have—