Budget Resolutions

Debate between Jesse Norman and Peter Dowd

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

Mr Deputy Speaker, in the light of the point of order from a Government Member earlier, which I thought was rather churlish, will you pass on my thanks to the Speaker, your fellow Deputy Speakers, the House of Commons Commission and the House staff for all their help and support, and the safety in which they keep us in the House?

Bootle is one of the most deprived towns in England and has five super-output areas in the lowest 1%, so how can it be right that our levelling-up fund bid has been rejected? In the light of that type of Government approach, it is becoming apparent that the Chancellor’s financial statement was pretty shallow and a sort of economic whistling in the dark. Inflation is on the rise; interest rates are on the rise; taxes are on the rise; the deficit is on the rise; the national debt is on the rise; inequality is on the rise; billionaire incomes are on the rise; profits from dodgy covid deals are on the rise; covid infections are on the rise—the Chancellor is taking the rise.

The Chancellor’s statement came three months after the Prime Minister’s levelling-up speech, in which he committed to working

“double hard to overturn…inequalities”—

inequalities that the Prime Minister and other Tory Governments have exacerbated. I am afraid the Prime Minister working “double hard” does not fill me with much confidence: 100% of nothing multiplied by two is still nothing.

What about the Government’s fiscal rules? They have missed so many targets that they have stopped counting. On 18 October, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said:

“There are currently no active fiscal rules in the UK. The fiscal rules adopted in the 2019 manifesto were abandoned just four months later with the onset of the Covid pandemic.”

The Chancellor did announce some fiscal rules, but they are unlikely to be met, like those of other Tory Chancellors, although hope does spring eternal.

How about the national debt? In May 2010, the Tories inherited a national debt of just over £1 trillion, or 63.2% of GDP; in August 2019, it had gone up by three quarters to £1.7 trillion, or 78.4% of GDP; in February 2021, just pre-covid, it had gone up again to £1.784 trillion, or 81.9% of GDP; and by September 2021, it was at £2.218 trillion, or 95.5% of GDP. So the Tories have added £16,000 for every man, woman and child in this country. That is why—to respond to the question from the hon. Member for Warrington South (Andy Carter)—you cannot trust the Tories with the economy. The party of fiscal rectitude has more than doubled the national debt in just a decade—more wrecked than rectitude.

[Jesse Norman]

Will the hon. Gentleman remind the House what the national debt as a percentage of GDP was in 1997 and then what it was when the financial crisis—to which Labour had allowed the country to become enormously overexposed through increased debt in the banking sector—had struck? I will tell him: it went from 46% to 84% while Labour was in government.