Amendment of the Law

Debate between Harriet Harman and Mary Macleod

Monday 26th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Ms Harman]

I am very sad indeed to hear that. Although the Government have squeezed councils, Labour councils up and down the country are determined to do what they can to protect the arts in the community against a Government who are cutting while telling them that philanthropy can step in and take the place of funding, which it will not.

[Mary Macleod (Brentford and Isleworth) (Con)]

Will the right hon. and learned Lady give way?

[Ms Harman]

I am going to get on with my speech now, because I know that many other Members wish to speak.

Key to a regional strategy is a truly national broadband strategy. There is a growing digital divide between the haves and have-nots—between urban areas with superfast broadband and rural areas with none. That is from the party that said it cared about rural areas. In Labour’s digital Britain strategy, we guaranteed 2 megabit broadband speeds to the whole country by 2012. The Tory Government scrapped that, and now it will not happen until at least 2015. The Government boast of the £100 million for its super-connected cities, re-announced from the autumn statement, and the £50 million for a second wave of smaller towns and cities, but that will not happen until 2015, if then. The Government can talk about ultrafast and superfast and hyperfast and megafast all they like, as the Ministerdid, but what is happening is the creation of a digital underclass—those in rural areas, the unemployed, and older people, who are already so squeezed by this Budget and by this Government.

For many, broadband access will be made all the more difficult by cuts to libraries. According to the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, almost 600 libraries are threatened by this Government. Where does that leave the Government’s “race online” campaign, which is supposed to be about libraries playing a key role in getting people online? The Government should tread carefully here: it is a well-known fact that libraries are very popular with many older people—unlike the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

This was a Budget that failed on jobs, failed on growth and failed on fairness, especially for older people. How can it be fair to give a £40,000 tax cut to millionaires and pay for it by taking £3 billion from pensioners? There is no justification. There can be no excuse. The Government’s claim that this is not a cut but a “simplification” is an absolute joke. They have invented a wholly new meaning for the word, but perhaps we should all go along with it: when I went to the hairdresser on Saturday, I asked for a simplification and blow dry, and yesterday I failed to persuade my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) to simplify the lawn. But when it comes to simplification, the Culture Secretary had better watch out—I have heard that there are many on his side who would love to simplify his Department entirely.

Despite the fanfare ahead of this Budget, it has turned into a disaster. They wanted the centrepiece of the Budget to be “Downton Abbey”, but it turns out to be more like “Titanic”: the rich get the lifeboat, the rest sink or swim. This was a Budget that rearranged the deckchairs but did nothing for jobs and growth; a Budget that was based on economic failure and grossly unfair. Goodbye to detoxification: this Budget tells us everything we need to know. The clocks may have gone forward yesterday, but this Government have turned the clock back: wrong choices, wrong priorities, wrong values—same old Tories. The only people to benefit from this Budget were those rich enough to buy access to the Prime Minister.