The Economy
Debate between John McDonnell and Kevin Hollinrake(4 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
John McDonnell
I said that I would limit interventions, but I accept that they can often be a job application, so I do not want to limit this job creation scheme that we are creating here—I wish the hon. Gentleman well in his future career.
The scale of human suffering and hardship inflicted on our people over the last nine years is never mentioned by the Government. The reason is that they would have to explain why our people have endured so much. They would have to admit that austerity was never—as we have said, and let us repeat it—an economic necessity; it was always a political choice. The choice the Tories took was that the bankers—their friends, many now populating the Government Front Bench—would never have to pay for the crisis that they had caused through their speculation. Instead, they determined—[Interruption.] The Chancellor of the Exchequer says, “You caused it”—this is the man who was selling the CDOs through Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank was a major contributor to the economic crisis that we faced—they have a nerve coming here blaming others, when they caused it. They determined that they would not pay for the crisis, but that the rest of our society would. They also took the view that they would never let a crisis go to waste, so they used it as the excuse to cut the taxes of the corporations and the rich. They have made £47 billion in cuts to our public services and, on their plans, they will have given away £110 billion in tax cuts to the corporations by 2022.
Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman pointed to the fact that it was this Government who bailed out the banks when, actually, the Asset Protection Agency was set up by the Labour Government.
John McDonnell
I say to the hon. Gentleman, who I have a lot of time for: it is best to listen to what I have said before he intervenes, because he did not, I think, accurately report what I said.
John McDonnell
No, I will press on. I understand that we are short of time.
The Tories will indeed protect their own. Under them, it will always be the people who are burdened with cuts in services and pay and benefit freezes. What people need now is real change. They need real change in our economy, so that we can face up to the existential threat of climate change through Labour’s green industrial revolution; real change to provide the scale of resources that our NHS, our schools and our police services need, funded by a fair taxation system in which we will tackle tax evasion and avoidance; real change to bring forward the scale of investment that our infrastructure needs to compete in the global economy and meet the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution; and real change to ensure that our people share in the prosperity that we will create through decent wages, ownership and an end to the rip-off of privatisation.
Only a Labour Government can bring about the real change that our country needs after a lost decade under the Tories. What does that say? It says that it is time for a Labour Government.