| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Darling: I am extremely grateful to the Deputy Prime Minister, who has reluctantly given way. Some people read Hansard, so perhaps I should take the opportunity to set him right.
I accept that I criticised the leader of the Scottish National party in 1995, and I stand by every word of what I said. The House will recall that, at that time, the issue before us was whether to support the Labour amendment to reduce value added tax to 8 per cent.; the success of that amendment depended on getting Tory rebels, which we did. What the nationalists did then was cynical, but we are extending our commitment to protect people who have to pay more VAT on domestic fuel as a result of broken Tory promises.
The Deputy Prime Minister:
Any time that I can give way to the shadow Chief Secretary, give me the chance to do so. I have never heard such humbug in my life. It was perfectly all right to try to con the Scottish
3 Dec 1996 : Column 826
The truth is that the shadow Chancellor has gone further in his suggestions about what can be announced by way of policy. He has been quite specific about the 5 per cent. VAT, so why can he not answer the other questions? If he has done the calculations and knows how much he has to allow for by way of lost revenue on VAT, he must know where the balancing figures are to come from. He has done his homework and has the figures, and there is a vast range of subjects on which he could be specific, so why does not he tell us about them?
Perhaps the shadow Chancellor has been talking to the deputy leader of the Labour party, who said that nothing would be announced before the general election--apart from the good news. He was perfectly prepared to announce the 5 per cent. VAT, but any fool knows not to announce the bad news, such as what is to happen with occupational pension schemes, contributions to personal schemes, corporation tax, employers' national insurance and a range of other taxation issues, all of which, I assume, a prudent and cautious shadow Chancellor--as, we are told, the right hon. Member for Dunfermline, East is--must have worked out before coming up with the cynical announcement he made, despite all the vagaries of the shadow Chief Secretary's views.
The House and the country will not be fooled. We all know that every Labour Government increase taxes. Some of my right hon. and hon. Friends were here in 1979 when we went through the Lobbies to force the dying Labour Government to reduce income tax from 34p to 33p in the pound. We have been in power for quite a long time since then, and the standard rate is down to 23p in the pound and falling; today, 7 million people pay only 20p in the pound. Nobody seriously believes for an instant that any of that would have happened under a Labour Government.
I see that the shadow Chancellor has returned to the Chamber. He may be interested to know that the shadow Chief Secretary has just explained why his latest plans to set VAT at 5 per cent. were described as a
Between 1974 and 1979, inflation was on average 15.5 per cent. Today, we have the best inflation record for a generation: less than 4 per cent. for more than four years.
Mr. Robert Sheldon (Ashton-under-Lyne):
The Deputy Prime Minister will be aware that, over the past 12 months, the pound has risen by 14 per cent., which has made imports much cheaper and exports much dearer, creating problems for our manufacturing industry. Cheaper imports will obviously reduce inflation and bring down the retail price index. Goldman Sachs assumes that the reduction will be about 1 per cent., so 2.5 per cent.
3 Dec 1996 : Column 827
The Deputy Prime Minister:
I am trying to work out whether the right hon. Gentleman is complaining. Is he against the pound being strong? Would he like it to be run down? The simple way to depreciate the pound is to threaten people with a Labour Government. Go back to the old days of high inflation and see what that does to our currency. The statistics we use have been common to all parties, and show that we have the best inflation record for a generation. I know that that sticks in the throat of the Labour party, as do all the figures of success.
Our exports are at a record high, despite the pound's appreciation. Does the Labour party favour that? The shadow Chancellor has had to try to find ways to add to his campaign to undermine Britain's performance. The way in which he constantly seeks to undermine British industrial capability and British service industries is an insult. He has to find the worst conceivable examples of any exceptions.
The other day, he found an extraordinary survey that put our education record 42nd in the world. Some of his surveys are interesting. I have done some homework. The survey he cited shows that Turkey is second for equal opportunities, and placed the policies of the French Government ahead of those of the United States for their grasp of economic realities. So that we do not get carried away, the survey put Britain below China for the openness of national culture.
No serious commentator would take a blind bit of notice of such surveys. The Labour party cannot stand the truth about the success of the British economy. Again, these are not Government statistics, but on my desk yesterday I had some figures from the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply, which has nothing to do with the Government or the Conservative party. It helpfully set out the Government's record, right from start to finish, and that of the previous Government.
The figures show that annual growth in manufacturing output under the previous Government was minus 0.5 per cent.; since 1979, it has been 0.7 per cent.--despite the recession. The annual growth in manufacturing productivity under the previous Government was 1.5 per cent.; under this Government, it is 3.4 per cent. The most important test of competitiveness is enhanced productivity.
The figures then consider annual growth in manufacturing exports--the test of what foreigners think of our products. In 1974-79, it was 2 per cent. per annum; under this Government, it is 4.6 per cent. per annum. That is the clearest possible indication of the success that we have enabled British men and women at work to achieve in the marketplaces of the world, despite the toughening competition that everyone knows exists.
The challenge we face today is to preserve the economic disciplines that enable our economy to grow faster than those of our European competitors and faster than it has characteristically grown in the post-war world, and to pursue policies that will contain inflation and enhance our competitiveness. Everyone who has
3 Dec 1996 : Column 828
We now have the highest inward and outward investment, relative to gross domestic product, of any G7 country. Since 1979, business investment has increased by more than 50 per cent. Whole-economy investment under the previous Government grew by 0.3 per cent. a year; it now grows by 1.7 per cent. a year--six times as fast, and faster than any other major European Union country.
That achievement is, of course, greatly reinforced by the remarkable success of the nationalised industries now that they are in private hands. In one case after the other, there have been massive improvements in investment: British Telecom, £27 billion since privatisation; the regional electricity companies, £1 billion a year; and Railtrack, the new success of privatisation, expects to spend more than £8 billion on infrastructure to April 2001.
The answer of the Labour party is to give us a publicly owned, publicly accountable British Rail. The leader of the Labour party said that only a month ago. Nothing is more calculated to restore indifferent services and inadequate investment in the railways than taking them back into public ownership. Of course, we all know that they could not dream of affording to do it. It is only another sop to the unions upon whose support Labour depends.
So the story continues. I have talked about the need to keep the disciplines necessary to preserve our economic success. Equally, in other vital areas of the economy, on which the Budget has concentrated, we must preserve disciplines to improve standards. That is nowhere more true than in respect of our education system.
The Labour party cannot face the simple but inescapable truth that we can improve education only by accepting that the same head teachers, in the same schools, with the same teachers and the same children, have to improve their performance. We have shown that the right, and only, way is to insist upon a national curriculum, testing and the publication of results, and to give teachers and parents maximum discretion over their own budgets.
Of course there are people in the education world who resist the changes; of course the Labour party resisted every one of them. Labour does not like the publication of results, because it foresaw, with precisely the clarity that we did, that, once we let the public in and trusted people with information, the public would insist on raising standards in our schools. That is why standards are rising.
Everyone knows that one in three of our young people today go into higher education, against one in eight when Labour was in power. People know that a record 53.7 per cent. of pupils achieved five or more GCSEs at grades A to C this year, and that the A-level pass rate this year was nearly 86 per cent.--up from 68 per cent. in 1980. But the Labour party proposes to reverse all the proposals that have brought about those changes by putting local authorities back in charge: the very people who presided over the decline in the first place.
Labour wants to abolish the assisted places scheme--one of its most vicious proposals. It is a piece of social engineering in keeping with its decision to abolish choice
3 Dec 1996 : Column 829
No one knows that better than the leader of the Labour party, because he is the epitome of what happens if one tries to imprison children in schools that their parents believe to be of inadequate quality. Parents take their children away, just as he did; but now he wants to stop other parents doing precisely what he believed to be right.
It is characteristic of the Opposition that, on every gesture and policy, they are hellbent on reversing the changes that have made Britain the enterprise centre of Europe.
They are going to put Labour councils back in charge of the business rates. We all know what will happen: up will go the business rates. They are going to impose new, unwanted, unnecessary costs on local taxpayers and local industries in authorities in Scotland, Wales, London and the English regions.
The Labour party has no concept of the increased global competition to which the British economy and all others are increasingly subject. To meet that competition, we have delivered a Budget that is another courageous step forward in building the most exciting economic prospects that any of us have seen for Britain.
We as a Government deliver what we promise. We said that we would deliver higher standards. As promised, the average family has £700 more to spend after tax and inflation this year than at the time of the last election. We said that we would get inflation down. As promised, the underlying rate of inflation has been below 4 per cent. for longer than at any time in the past 50 years. That has helped us to bring mortgage rates down to their lowest for 30 years.
"cynical ploy from an increasingly opportunist and desperate party."--[Official Report, 23 January 1995; Vol. 253, c. 49.]
I believe that he was the shadow Chancellor at the time, so perhaps he will want to have discussions later behind the Speaker's Chair about his future relationship with the hon. Member for Edinburgh, Central.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |