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Mr. Brown: I have committed the Labour party to one measure: the employment and training programme. We would fund that measure--just as the Chancellor should have--with a windfall tax charge on the profits of the privatised utilities. When the Chancellor speaks at the end of the debate, he will have to explain why the Conservative party is always a soft touch for the privatised utilities.
Let us be clear that what the Chancellor gave yesterday he also took away. The tax cut will be paid for by a council tax rise of 11 per cent.--if our calculations are correct--in some parts of the country. Water charges and rents have increased and there are hidden taxes. Rail fares are up, as are prescription and dental charges. The Chancellor and the Deputy Prime Minister have claimed that we are £9 a week better off. Some people will be better off by £9 a week, but the Chancellor will have to scour the country looking for a whisky-drinking, vintage-car-owning pensioner who is looking for community care and who has assets of between £8,000 and £16,000. Very few people are better off in real terms as a result of the Budget.
On the fairness of the Chancellor's proposals, it has been reported today that--after all the benefits that they have received--the richest 10 per cent. will gain £7.30 per week and the poorest 40 per cent. will gain only £1.04 per week after the Budget changes.
Mr. Malcolm Bruce (Gordon)
rose--
Mr. Brown:
I shall give way to the hon. Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce) because he is a Liberal Democrat.
Mr. Bruce:
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He says that he is concerned about the rise in
Mr. Brown:
When the hon. Gentleman makes his contribution to the debate this afternoon, I should be grateful if he would confirm whether he agrees that the assisted places scheme should be scrapped and the money used to reduce class sizes. That is an important change. I should also be grateful if he would tell us whether the Liberal party will go to the next election promising a rise in the basic rate of income tax, as he hinted in his speech yesterday.
Mr. Bruce:
We will tell the hon. Gentleman at the general election. I asked him a simple question. He and his colleagues have said that they want to put money into education and that they do not wish to increase council taxes. We have pledged to vote against the 1p reduction in income tax this year--has he?
Mr. Brown:
Never has an intervention been more telling. The Liberal party spokesman is not prepared to say whether he will go to the next election promising a tax rise. That would be the honest position of a party that has pledged to vote on Monday against the tax changes.
Let us examine what the changes mean for ordinary people throughout the country. Hon. Members will recall that the Chancellor told us that the tax rises since 1992 should not be exaggerated. He said that, for most people, they amounted to little more than the price of three pints of beer a week. Staying with the pub economy--which the Chancellor finds so congenial and of which he is an acknowledged master--and using the same equivalents, we find that the weekly sums from the tax cuts that he announced yesterday will amount to fewer than two or three packets of peanuts. That is the equivalent of what the Chancellor has done.
Let us recall what the Chancellor told the Conservative party conference only a few weeks ago. Do hon. Members remember what he said to earn the traditional crouching ovation that he gets at such events? He said:
Mr. Barry Legg (Milton Keynes, South-West):
The hon. Gentleman said that nothing that the Chancellor did yesterday was worthy of support, but I remind him that his leader pledged his support for the 1p reduction in
Mr. Brown:
I will tell the hon. Gentleman what we shall do. We shall not vote against the 1p cut in income tax; and I will tell him why. People have suffered enough; they have been punished enough by the Conservative Government.
I find it interesting that Conservatives--not only Conservative Members of Parliament, but Conservatives in the country--now spend all their time writing to the Labour party. One of my colleagues received his Budget representations, not from his local Labour club, but from Middlesbrough Conservative Club Ltd., founded in 1883. The letter started:
What of the fundamental problems that should have been tackled in the Budget, the original causes of the tax increases--the neglect of investment and the failure to get people back to work? After 16 years of promises of economic miracles, what has been done about the central challenges to arrest the decline from 13th to 18th place in the world prosperity league? Where is the investment-rich economy that the Government promised? There has been only a 1 per cent. increase in investment this year, in spite of a promise of a 6 per cent. increase in the summer.
Mr. Andrew Robathan (Blaby):
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Brown:
I will not give way again. I have given way a dozen times to Conservative Members and none of them--[Interruption.] In spite of their barracking, none of them has acknowledged that they should be returning to their constituents to apologise for what has happened as a result of the Budget.
We have the slowest increase in investment out of recession since the 1930s, yet there was not one measure, apart from those previously announced, that the Chancellor could genuinely say directly gives attention to spurring investment forward.
If the Government had been serious, they would have introduced the investment allowances that we proposed in our pre-Budget submission. If they had been serious about infrastructure investment and helping the housing market, they would have considered the phased release of capital receipts to allow local authorities to build. Instead of improving the prospects for investment, however, they have cut public investment.
Mr. Brown:
I will not give way again.
What do the Government offer in its place? The private--
Mr. Legg:
Will the hon. Gentleman try to answer one question?
Mr. Brown:
I have given way many more times than most Ministers are prepared to, and Conservative Members are intent on not allowing me to make my remarks; they are simply trying to disrupt them.
What do the Government offer in place of the cuts in public investment? They offer the 10th relaunch of the private finance initiative, and not a plan or a programme but a wish list.
The Chancellor should listen to this. He failed, during three years of the private finance initiative, to deliver projects worth the original sum of £15 billion and delivered only £1 billion--a fraction of what was promised. Having failed to deliver his promise, the right hon. and learned Gentleman simply makes more promises and announces the possibility of 1,000 projects, at a cost of £25 billion. Is it not typical of the Government to seize on the manifest failure of their private finance programme, declare it a resounding success and move it right to the centre of their plans for the future without any sign of how they will repair the failures of the past three years?
The small print reveals that this is not a programme but an open-ended list of unlikelihood, offering not a plan but what the Budget press statement calls
Where has that taken us? A car park in Eastbourne; the unpopular Skye bridge. The jewel in the crown appears to be a hospital incinerator built in Hillingdon, which is now the subject of complaints about toxic emissions and is being used by Blue Circle Industries plc more than by local hospitals. Beyond that, we are given castles in the air, when people want projects on the ground.
"It is a Budget I'm looking forward to a lot more than the last two.
Many of you feel, I know, that the time has come for some reward in the Budget.
So far this Parliament we have given you the hors d'oeuvres and not the main course, the trailer not the film, the warm-up not the main performance".
I can tell the Chancellor that, as a result of yesterday's Budget statement, we have gone straight from the hors d'oeuvres to paying the bill without receiving the main course. We have gone from the trailer to the end credits. People are walking out and there is still no main feature. We have gone from the warm-up to the final curtain, and nothing that the Chancellor has done is worth a single round of applause.
"The Management Committee of this club are becoming increasingly concerned about the falling trade which has been apparent for some months now. We know that we are not alone in the immediate vicinity. Trade is down by some 8 per cent. throughout the licensing trade in the region. My Committee will be obliged if you will bring this matter to the attention of anyone you think can influence the situation."
So little faith do they now have in Conservative Members that even Conservative clubs find it necessary to write to the Labour party with their Budget representations.
"an illustrative list of projects"--
merely a list of potential partnerships that have been identified. What started as an initiative, followed by the formation of a panel and then a panel executive, has now become simply the announcement of an action plan that will come later.
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