Finance (No. 2) Bill

Sajid Javid Excerpts

Monday 11th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid (Bromsgrove) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on her new position. The emergency Budget to which she referred was absolutely necessary considering the train wreck of an economy that we inherited. The country’s debts were spiralling out of control. That Budget calmed the debt markets and allowed the country to look at its finances and to bring economic competence back into the Treasury.

[Ms Eagle]

The hon. Gentleman is even more melodramatic in his rewriting of history—his historical revisionism of what was going on in the UK economy—than the Chancellor. I had thought, having watched that performance, that that was impossible, but perhaps the hon. Gentleman should try out pantomime this year as Christmas approaches.

I was about to say before I was so rudely interrupted that, rather than encumber himself with the tedious technical detail in this Budget, the Chancellor decided to start behaving like the Liberal Democrat student activists we all come across at university and to take it in parts. This is part two. As a result, we have in today’s Bill what can best be described as the technical innards of a Budget; I think that the Exchequer Secretary used other words. In fact, most of the clauses, as he pointed out, are the technical innards of the last Labour Budget, which was presented in March 2010. However, it is the duty of the Opposition to scrutinise the detail of all Budgets, and we certainly intend to fulfil that obligation tonight.

Measures included in the Bill are important to the workings of the taxation system—the Minister did the House a service by going through them in great detail—but they have failed to inspire much interest or controversy in the outside world, perhaps because they have been signalled for a long time. The measures were subject to consultation under the previous Government as well as the current one when they were in development. Some might even say that they were prototype proposals, because that is the way that things tend to be done in the Treasury. That is attested to by the lack of much comment on or reaction to the proposals even among the taxation professionals who usually pore over the technical details of Finance Bills with fine-toothed combs. In respect of this Finance Bill, those professionals have been strangely unmoved—I might even say indifferent.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Eagle]

My hon. Friend is right on both points, but he also raises an important issue about what Keynes called “animal spirits”. It is fair to say that all the signals are that the animal spirits are somewhat more depressed now than they were a few months ago and that the things that have depressed them are the decisions that were announced in the June Budget.

Ominous noises are coming out of the recent International Monetary Fund meeting about currency wars and competitive devaluations, and they offer worrying echoes of conditions that led to the great depression in the 1930s. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was not joking or exaggerating when he warned the IMF meeting about the dangers that the huge increases in unemployment will pose for our democratic institutions. Yet none of this is referenced in the measures before us today.

[Sajid Javid]

rose—

[Ms Eagle]

I have given way to the hon. Gentleman before and I want to get on, because I know that other people wish to speak.

In many ways, we find ourselves in a kind of pre-spending review phoney war. We know that something truly awful is coming but it has not arrived yet, so we are whistling to keep up our spirits as the winter approaches and the long nights draw in. The Prime Minister himself has taken to using wartime phraseology. For some strange reason, in his conference speech he was moved to invoke the spirit of Lord Kitchener and his famous “Your country needs you” first world war Army recruitment slogan, not once but twice. Quite why he did that is beyond me, since Lord Kitchener was the general who created the world’s first concentration camps in the aftermath of the Boer war. They inflicted appalling suffering on innocent women and children in order to quell any Boer resistance. As Secretary of State for War, he supported the disastrous Dardanelles operation and was widely blamed for the shortage of shells in 1915, which, incidentally, precipitated the formation of a Tory-Liberal Government.

Of course, Kitchener has become best known for the famous Army recruitment campaign and its memorable slogan, which our Prime Minister saw fit to borrow the other day. In 1914, that plea resulted in the creation of what became known as “Kitchener’s Army”, and I suppose we should refer to the attempts to create a “big society army” to fill in the gaps that the cuts will create. Unfortunately, however, that Army was destined to go into action in the Somme, where 60,000 of them were slaughtered on the first day of the offensive. By its end, 600,000 had been lost to gain just 6 miles of territory, and overall casualties in the offensive as a whole reached an almost unbelievable 1.2 million men—