Capital Gains Tax (Rates)

Phil Wilson Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Darling]

What Japan got wrong was snuffing out a recovery at a very early stage and never really getting over it. As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Japanese have had complete stagnation for a long period now. The debt is just going up and up, and understandably they are very concerned about it. The new Prime Minister was the finance Minister until a few weeks ago, and understandably, he has huge problems on his hands.

The tests we need to apply to the Budget relate to growth and jobs, which I remain very concerned about; there is a substantial risk there, and I would like to have heard more said about policies to promote growth so that we do not end up with years of very sluggish growth at best or, even worse, bumping along the bottom for some years.

I have said that one of the tests that needs to be applied to this Budget is its fairness and another relates to the promises made about it before the election. Where better to start, then, than with VAT? During the election there was a lot of discussion about that. The Conservatives, like ourselves, said that they had no plans to raise VAT. I remember having a discussion with the Chancellor when he announced his plans not to go ahead with at least some of the national insurance increases, and he said that he would fund that from efficiency savings. I remember saying that I thought that was highly doubtful, and that they would have to raise money from another big tax. Sure enough, VAT is going up.

Interestingly, for some reason, not much was said about efficiencies yesterday, although they loomed very large during the election. We now know that “no plans” on the Tory side meant exactly what Geoffrey Howe said in 1979 when he said he had “no intention” of doubling VAT. Of course he was factually right, as it only went up from 8% to 15%. It was the same with John Major when he was Prime Minister in 1992, and said he had “no plans” to raise “extra resources from VAT”: of course, VAT went up. Even last year, the Prime Minister said in opposition that putting up VAT was regressive. He said:

“You could try, as you say, put it on VAT, sales tax, but again if you look at the effect of sales tax, it's very regressive, it hits the poorest the hardest. It does, I absolutely promise you.”

I assume he was not absolutely promising to do that, but was trying to point out to the questioner that he thought that VAT was regressive. Yet here we have it—VAT going up to 20%, as I always suspected would happen.

What I find even more curious is how on earth the Business Secretary can back this proposal. He cannot have been unaware of the Liberal campaign which spent two days dealing with the “Tory VAT bombshell”. We saw the posters all over the country. They said a Tory Government would come up with “a secret VAT bombshell”, but the only secret appears to be that the Liberals intended to vote for it when it was introduced. The hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who is no longer in his place, said last week that he thought VAT was

“the most regressive form of tax”

in that it “penalises the poor”. When the Business Secretary said during the election that he would

“hardwire fairness back into national life”,

did he have this in mind?

I see that there are, wisely, only four Liberal Democrats in the House at the moment; the others are no doubt explaining to their constituents why it is that when they said, “Vote for us and keep the Tories out,” they completely misunderstood the position. It seems to me that this is not just a broken promise, as there are real issues at stake. I was criticised for what I did with national insurance, but I wanted to ensure that pensioners would not have to pay the increased tax and I wanted to protect people earning less than £20,000—of course, that has not happened.

[Phil Wilson (Sedgefield) (Lab)]

The Chancellor keeps saying that we are all in this together, but the headlines in The Financial Times today suggest otherwise. Under the headline, “Well paid breathe collective sigh of relief”, the article quotes someone from RBC Wealth Management saying:

“Many high earners will be breathing a sigh of relief.”

Does that not prove that we are not all in it together?

--- Later in debate ---

[Vince Cable]

That was a very strange intervention. It may reflect the fact that the hon. Gentleman—whom I respect a great deal—has rejoined the House following the election, and may not be familiar with the arguments that led up to it. He will know, however, that the last Government were going to phase out their bonus tax. We have reintroduced a stable system of taxation on banks, the incidence of which will increase over time. Of course, many things need to happen to the banking system. We will discuss, as colleagues, how we should deal with such matters as bank lending, on which there is an outrageous record of bank dysfunctionality.

[Phil Wilson]

rose—

[Vince Cable]

I will take another intervention, but then I must move on.

[Phil Wilson]

It seems to me that, to rectify the problems, the right hon. Gentleman has signed up his party to a Budget that represents a massive gamble for the country. What happens if it fails? What is plan B?

[Vince Cable]

The hon. Gentleman says that a gamble is being made. Certainly there is a risk. There are risks in tightening fiscal policy too quickly, but there are also risks in doing nothing, or in doing less. We have had to balance those risks, and we have concluded that we must act.

Since the questions are coming from Labour Members, let me now give the other reason why I feel strongly about the need to act decisively in the way in which the Chancellor acted yesterday. Thirty years ago, as an adviser, I occupied the office that I now occupy as a Minister. It was the end of a Labour Government who had chosen to ignore the build-up to a major financial crisis. As some people will remember, the painful measures—the taxes, welfare cuts and spending cuts—were not taken by choice. They were imposed from outside by the International Monetary Fund. Because I was there at the tail-end of that Government, I saw the consequences, not the least of which were the massive divisions that opened up. People in the Government such as Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and my boss, John Smith, believed that the Government had to be responsible, but there were a lot of others—I sense a growing echo of this feeling on the Opposition Back Benches today—who said, “We don’t need to do anything, we can fight the gnomes of Zurich and drive them underground, we can ignore the rest of the world and we do not need to act.” It was a disastrous alternative strategy, and the Labour party is in great danger of returning to that territory.

That is why I have come to the same position as the Chancellor of the Exchequer. We come from different political traditions; I do not try to hide that. As it happens, my role models as Chancellor of the Exchequer include Sir Stafford Cripps and Roy Jenkins, because they understood the need for sound public finance and they combined tough action on budgets with fairness. That is the tradition that we have continued.

Let me list some of the measures in this Budget with which I am proud to be associated. There is the lifting of the tax threshold by £1,000, towards the £10,000 mark. There is the action on capital gains tax, which is not just a tax-avoidance measure, but is about fairness. We have acted on public sector pay not just by freezing some salaries but by giving special help to people on low pay in the public sector. We have introduced the bank levy. We have done what the Labour Government failed to do in 12 years and introduced a triple-lock to protect pensioners—the shadow Deputy Leader of the House, the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley), could not quite get her head around what the triple-lock is—and in addition supported pensioners through improved pension credit, which is a major cost on the budget going forward. We took action to head off any increase in child benefit, too.

Let me read a comment on child poverty made not by a politician, but by Barnardo’s, one of the leading charities. Yesterday it said:

“There’s some pain in this Budget for the poorest families, but we recognise the government has done what it can to protect the most vulnerable.

Our calls for child tax credits to be redirected away from more wealthy families to the poorest have been heard—an action we highly commend.”