Budget Resolutions

Debate between Peter Grant and David Linden

Monday 1st November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

The sad thing is that no matter how much anyone in this House presses the Scottish Government on their decisions, a record amount of that money coming back to Scotland has already been decided not by the elected Members of the Scottish Parliament, but by Members of the UK Parliament who could not get elected in Scotland. Record amounts of that money come with strings attached and conditions attached that tell the Scottish Government how they have to spend our money.

In response to the hon. Gentleman’s specific question about the amount, if he looks carefully, he will see that, yes, there are welcome increases for capital spend, but the day-to-day service provision budgets of the Scottish Government will continue to be under intense pressure. While we welcome the increase in capital spend, the Departments of the Scottish Government—just like the Departments of this Government and the departments of local authorities the length and breadth of England and Wales—will find that the resources to meet the ever-growing demand on their day-to-day services will be as tightly pressed as ever.

While the Government will try to pull the wool over our eyes and say, “It is all covid’s fault”, we cannot and will not let them forget that the British Government’s management of the economy during covid has been among the worst of the world’s major economies. The International Monetary Fund has predicted that the long-term economic damage from covid in the UK will be worse than in the other G7 economies. Even that does not tell the whole story, because while the Secretary of State rejoiced in the fact that we hope the long-term economic damage of covid will be restricted to 2%, he forgot to tell us that Brexit is twice as bad as that. I wonder why he forgot to mention that the long-term, self-inflicted damage of Brexit is likely to be twice as bad as the long-term damage of covid.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

In talking about the self-inflicted damage from this British Government, whom people in Scotland have not voted for by majority since 1955, does my hon. Friend accept that when Government Members talk about how kind the UK Government have been in giving money to the Scottish Parliament, more often than not the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government are having to use their resources to mitigate bad decisions that come from this place, such as the cut to the universal credit, which renders the Scottish child payment, described by charities as a “game-changing” child payment, as utterly useless?

[Peter Grant]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Giving spending powers and in some cases tax-raising powers to the devolved Parliaments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland was never supposed to be a way of making up for the cuts to those same budgets coming through from Westminster, but all too often that has been happening.

To return to the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, his response to the Budget was:

“This is actually awful. Yet more years of real incomes barely growing. High inflation, rising taxes, poor growth.”

How can anyone think that is something to celebrate? The IFS also said that someone on median earnings might see their pre-tax pay just about keep ahead of inflation, but after paying the higher income tax that the Government are imposing, plus the higher national insurance tax, that median earner will be worse off in real terms. An analysis published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that many of the worst off—people on universal credit who do not have a job—will be poorer as a result of this Budget. Even the reduction in the universal credit taper, welcome as it is, does not make as much difference as the Tories are claiming. For 40% of universal credit claimants in Scotland it will make no difference at all, because they have not got a job. [Interruption.]

The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North thinks it is funny that many people will not benefit from the Budget. I do not see what he finds funny at all. While 40% of universal credit claimants in Scotland will get no benefit at all from the changes to the taper, 100% of his constituents on universal credit will be £1,000 a year worse off. I look forward to him defending that to his constituents—I would not try to defend it to mine.

All of that prompts a question: if people on average earnings will be worse off, and if the worst off—the lowest earners in our society—will be worse off, who really benefits from the Budget? The Chancellor’s banker buddies will benefit, thank you very much. Many of them will be raising a glass to toast a 5% cut in the corporation tax they pay, while the customers who pay their wages—individuals and small businesses alike—will struggle to cope with increased taxes. As my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) alluded to last week, the Manchester Uniteds of this world who think it clever to take a 10-minute flight to go to a football match will gain, and the champagne quaffers in the members’ enclosure at Ascot will have something to cheer, but very few of my constituents will have anything to cheer at all.

I welcome the news that alcohol excise duties are to be reviewed at last, but let us see the result of the review before we welcome it unconditionally. As I said in a Westminster Hall debate, it cannot be right that the duty on a glass of whisky is 16% higher than the duty on a glass of wine that contains exactly the same amount of alcohol. I make no apology for reminding the House that, over the summer, all those people in the enclosures at Ascot, Henley or wherever almost certainly enjoyed the product of the skilled workforce of the Cameronbridge distillery in my constituency. It is the biggest grain distillery in the whole of Europe, and it swells the Treasury’s coffers to the tune of about £3.6 billion a year in excise duties alone. That is £3.6 billion a year from one manufacturing establishment in my constituency. The fact that for decades many people in the towns of Methil, Buckhaven, Methilhill and others have been living on or below the breadline close to a distillery that generates such massive wealth for the coffers down here in Westminster is testimony to the failure of successive British Governments to put the wellbeing of the people front and centre of their taxation and spending plans.

If the Chancellor is genuinely concerned about improving living standards for people on low incomes, he should start by reversing some of the savage cuts that he has made and reinstating the election manifesto promises that he has broken. He should reinstate the pensions triple lock, reverse the £20-a-week cut to universal credit, reverse the hike in national insurance that penalises small businesses for each and every new job they create, and scrap the two-child limit and vile rape clause. If he really believes in a guaranteed living wage for all, let us hear him—or, at least, the Minister in summing up—commit to increasing the legal minimum wage later this month and every November to match the real living wage, measured not by how much the Government are willing to ask employers to pay but by how much independent analysis shows human beings in these islands need to live on.

The Secretary of State asked what we might do as alternatives. If the Chancellor is looking for ways to save money, he could look at the gross inefficiency in the Government’s own Departments. Recent National Audit Office reports show that eye-watering sums of money have been wasted in delays and inefficiency. In the Ministry of Defence, nuclear infrastructure, Crossrail, High Speed 2 and the national criminal intelligence database, hundreds of millions of pounds—billions of pounds—are being thrown away through waste and inefficiency. He should get a grip on that; then we could improve services without necessarily having to increase taxes.

If we want to see where we could stop spending money, we could start by scrapping the programme of new nuclear power stations that are designed to rig the system in favour of nuclear energy that, when it finally comes on stream, will cost more than twice as much as offshore wind power. Sooner or later, our constituents will be forced to pay that price increase. We should scrap the monstrous white elephant that is the nuclear weapons programme: a programme whose only purpose is to commit the worst crime in the history of the planet. The Government should ditch plans to spend a quarter of a billion pounds on a new royal yacht Britannia, although, given whose ego it is clearly designed to satisfy, perhaps we should rename it the good ship Borisannia.

This is a Budget that has been imposed on Scotland by a Government we did not elect and who will never have the consent of our people to rule over us. It is partly the result of a covid pandemic, which could perhaps have been predicted, but was not. We all have to live with the consequences of that. It is largely the result of a Brexit that our people did not vote for.

The Budget seeks to level down Scotland’s status to something approaching that of a forgotten English county. I want Scotland to be levelled up. I want Scotland’s status to be levelled up to that of an equal partner of our friends in Europe and elsewhere.

The Chancellor claimed that his Budget would strengthen the Union, but what he has done is increase the pace of Scotland’s journey to a true levelling up, and bring forward the day when the sovereign people of Scotland reassert our inalienable right of self-determination, the day when our place in the world is levelled up to match that of the other prosperous, outward-looking, inclusive, democratic and independent nations. If Conservative Members think that it is not coming, why have the Government given a 20% budget increase to the Secretary of State for Scotland, whose only purpose is to peddle the myths—[Interruption.] Why do they need to spend 17.5% to 20% more on a Department, the only purpose of which is to campaign for a no vote in a referendum that they say is not coming, but that we say is coming very soon?

European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 5) Bill

Debate between Peter Grant and David Linden

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 3rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

Well, how do I sum that up in 10 minutes or so? I think that “a pile of mince” would do it, in a handful of words.

I want to address some of the absolute nonsense that we have heard from the no dealers across the Chamber, but let me first welcome the fact that they are finally coming out for who they really are. These are the people who campaigned for the various leave campaigns, promising us that we would leave with a good deal—that we would still remain part of the customs union and the single market. That is what the leave campaign was saying. As for the story that there has been no leave campaigning recently, has the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) not seen the revelations in the media in the last couple of days about intensive, targeted social media campaigning, funded from who knows where? SNP Members do not know, but I wonder how many people on the Conservative Benches know where that money is coming from.

As for those who complain that we have not had enough time to debate the big issues of Brexit, these are the people who did not want Parliament to have any say at all. They went to court to prevent Parliament from being allowed to see the Prime Minister’s deal before it was too late to change it, and now they come along and complain that there has not been enough time to scrutinise it. These are the people who allowed 19 minutes of debate before the biggest power grab from Scotland ever seen since the introduction of the Scottish Office—19 minutes of listening to one Conservative Minister droning on, and then the measures were pushed through. How many Conservative Members complained about the lack of time then?

I am disappointed—although I obviously accept the decision—that the amendments that would have given some kind of firm reason for extending article 50 have not been selected. The House will need to come back to that in due course. I hope that at some point the House will agree not only that article 50 needs to be extended, but that whatever deal the United Kingdom intends to leave under is put to the people, so that they can confirm whether it is what they thought was meant by Brexit. I can tell the House what most of them did not think was meant by Brexit: they did not think that Brexit meant no deal, because even the leave campaign never said it was campaigning for that.

I will not go through all the individual amendments, but we will oppose anything that says that the extension can only be for a matter of days or weeks, because it is nonsensical to think that the Prime Minister’s bad deal will get significantly better in a matter of weeks. If there is going to be an improvement to the deal, it can come only if we get a longer extension and reset the whole process. The Prime Minister can then do what she should have done almost three years ago, as soon as she became the leader of a minority Government. She can act like a leader of a minority Government, and talk to politicians and parties across the House to find areas of agreement and consensus, before she starts to draw her red lines and paint herself into a corner. Let us remember that the EU has never said that the current agreement is the only one possible; it has said that it is the only one possible given the Prime Minister’s red lines.

The hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) was so enthusiastic about his amendment 6 that he spoke to it for over half an hour—and it felt like just as long again when he intervened or raised points of order—but he forgot to mention that its real purpose is not to give Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland a chance. If he was that bothered about giving the devolved nations a chance, he would have moved similar amendments to all the legislation that is leading to us being dragged out of the European Union in the first place.

The crux of amendment 6 comes right at the end, when it proposes that, consent having been given by the devolved Assemblies—including the one that does not exist at the moment—the Act will come into force on such a day as a Minister of the Crown may decide. Even if Parliament imposes its will on the Government, the Government could completely ignore the Act simply by not bothering to bring it into force. The amendment has some sugar coating to try to fool the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish, but we are not going to be conned by that. We will not support the amendment.

I also have a big problem with new clause 13, which would effectively allow the Government to change the date unilaterally. I hope that the Minister can offer some kind of assurance on the circumstances in which that power would be used. We know that instruments have previously been prayed against by hundreds of right hon. and hon. Members, yet their objections have been ignored and the instruments have been implemented anyway. Can we therefore have an assurance that if the instruments are prayed against by any of the major Opposition parties, or by a given number of individual Members of Parliament, the Minister will guarantee, on his honour and that of the Government, that they will not be proceeded with? We need something as firm as that. It is one thing to get promises from this Prime Minister, but we do not know who will be Prime Minister when the provisions will be considered.

One amendment is intended specifically to ensure that we cannot take part in European parliamentary elections, which have been described as a waste of time. Who on earth is scared of taking part in elections? Who would want the entire nature of our future relationship with the European Union to be defined purely by the fact that we had to get out before—horror of horrors—we gave our people a chance to participate in its democratic processes? Brexiteers have been telling us for 10 years that those democratic processes do not exist, because they deny that the European Union is a democratic institution.

[David Linden]

Brexiteers say that the 2016 referendum was about giving back control to the people, yet we see the Conservative party running scared of the electorate. Is that not just going against the wishes of the people in 2016?

[Peter Grant]

Absolutely. As for the idea that we should not take part in the elections because we do not know how long our MEPs will be there, let us remember that some of them are never there anyway. I remember the Scottish regional elections in 1994, which we knew were for councils that would exist for a very limited time, but they actually had a higher turnout than was previously the case, because people were energised and motivated and understood what they were about. If the hard-line Conservatives do not want to take part in European parliamentary elections, that is entirely up to them, but I do not want my constituents to be denied an opportunity to vote for their representatives in Europe, whether that is for two days, two years or a full parliamentary term.

We will certainly support the drafting amendments tabled by the right hon. Members who introduced the Bill—given how many Lords amendments are often required to sort out the mistakes in Government legislation, despite all the resources that the Government have at their disposal, it is a bit much to be nitpicking about the fact that there were a couple of drafting errors in this Bill. It would have been nice not to have to rush the Bill through the House in such a hurry. It would have been nice if the Government had actually listened to what Parliament has been saying, in Back-Bench business debates and Opposition day debates, for the past three years. They have refused to listen, which is why the only way to make them listen is by Act of Parliament. That is why we will support the two amendments I have mentioned, and I hope to see the Bill go through to Third Reading.