| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Lord): Order. I remind the hon. Gentleman that we are discussing the allocation of time, so it is not appropriate to go into the details of the Finance Bill.
Mr. Page: You are absolutely right, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but I am so enthusiastic about the small business sector that I get carried away. In fact, I had finished my sales pitch on behalf of small businesses.
My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) asked what time would be available to discuss the impact of changes in advance corporation tax on charitable schemes. I declare an interest as I was the honorary treasurer of a large charity. I know what effect such measures can have on charities' incomes. Some charities have already been hit hard by the lottery, and I should have thought that some special allowance could be made in addition to the three years that has been allowed by the Chancellor--
The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Gordon Brown):
It is seven years.
Mr. Page:
Yes, seven years; such an allowance would enable charities to retain more of their income. The subject
I believe that Bills should be sensibly timetabled during a Parliament. Today's motion, however, is not sensible. It is far too rushed and we should be allowed more time for debate. The Budget's iniquities will not be properly debated under the timetable. My hon. Friend the Member for Gosport made the point that Budgets that are lauded to the heights on Budget day often turn out to be stinkers. The aroma of this Budget will linger in the nostrils of the British people--especially of those who will become pensioners--for years to come.
Mr. Viggers:
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I wonder whether you would be prepared to take hon. Members into your confidence. Hon. Members know that those who wish to speak in debates may submit their name to the Speaker's Office and that, if they are lucky, they will be called by the Chair. Will you tell Opposition Members whether you have received any requests from Labour Members to speak? It seems extraordinary that Labour Members have not commented on such an important constitutional measure. Conservative Members have made some good speeches, and we have heard an excellent speech from a Liberal Democrat. I wonder whether something is distracting Labour Members.
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
The hon. Gentleman has been here quite a long time; he is well aware that that is not a genuine point of order for the Chair.
Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough):
I should, if I may, correct a comment made by my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers). There have been two speeches by Labour Members: one by the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, with which I shall deal shortly; and one by the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner). I agree that there were only two speeches by Labour Members, although it is doubtful whether any speech by the hon. Member for Bolsover can be counted as a speech from the Government Benches. None the less, he made one, and he is a Labour Member.
I learnt only a few things from the speech by the hon. Member for Bolsover, the first of which is that he is getting old. The second thing I learnt is that he has only three speeches in his parliamentary locker--today we heard either speech one, speech two or speech three--all of which we have heard before. The third thing that I learnt about him, which may be of some relief to the Paymaster General, is that--based on his discussion on August holiday arrangements with my right hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Brooke)--the hon. Member for Bolsover is deeply out of touch with the modern Conservative party, which, sadly, is no longer necessarily representative of the grouse-shooting classes. It is also quite clear that he will not be asked this summer to the Paymaster General's castle in Tuscany, but may spend a lonely summer holiday in this Palace.
The final thing that I learnt from the speech by the hon. Member for Bolsover is that he does not object to guillotines when he agrees with the underlying legislation.
When he objects to the underlying legislation, however, there is no more principled advocate of the arguments against imposing a guillotine. I should like to compare his speech with the purity and elegance of the speeches made by my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster--which, within a few moments, encapsulated the evil of the motion that we are debating.
The Financial Secretary to the Treasury moved the guillotine measure against the background of a Labour Government who have a huge majority that has allowed them to create a disgusting mixture of arrogance and lack of self-confidence. The lack of self-confidence has been evident in the dearth of speeches by Labour Members supporting the motion. They lack confidence and have not spoken because they do not understand that even bad arguments require support in the Chamber. If they are not prepared to support the Minister who moved the motion, what hope have we for the remainder of this Parliament?
The motion was moved also against a background in which one Labour Member, who is not in the Chamber, was overheard complaining that his sense of democracy was offended by the notion that any Opposition facing a Government majority of 177 should have the right to propose amendments to Government legislation. That is only an anecdote--I am sure that it is not a criticism that I could lay at the door of every Labour Member--but it does rather inform the way in which the new Labour Government exercise their authority over this legislature.
A point that has already been made by my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills is that this guillotine is not the first one proposed by the Government, although we are only six or eight weeks into this Parliament. He and I spoke for some little while in the debate on the Government's first guillotine, which was on the Referendums (Scotland and Wales) Bill. On that occasion, we heard the same arguments--if they can be so described--from the Government. Both that Bill--which my hon. Friend rightly said was a major constitutional Bill--and the Finance Bill are major Bills. The Finance Bill has an equal if different significance.
The Finance Bill is already suffering from truncation, and the period between its Second Reading and Committee stage will be far shorter than that allowed for any previous Finance Bill. As Conservative Members have said, the time between a Finance Bill's Second Reading and its Committee stage is the very time when the financial services and pensions industry and those who will be affected by the Budget must lobby their Members of Parliament and the Treasury to explain the difficulties that they and the taxpaying public might suffer.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster mentioned some of his constituents who are in the property business and who wrote to him about an aspect of a previous Budget that dealt with property taxation. That was an extremely germane example of the value of a long period of consideration. No one will be allowed such a period of reflection on the Finance Bill. In passing this type of legislation, Ministers owe it to us all to reflect on what they are doing.
I will not say what I think of the speech made by the Financial Secretary. Nevertheless, she said that it was not her or the Government's fault that the Finance Bill and the Budget have been introduced one third or halfway
through the financial year. No one asked the Government to introduce a Budget at any stage of the year, and no one asked them to delay their Budget from 10 June to 2 July. It is also no good for them to complain to us when we complain that they are so drastically cutting time to debate the Bill.
Another point that has not yet been mentioned but that is worthy of mention is that, in the other place, the same scrutiny does not occur on Finance Bills as occurs on other types of Government legislation. As the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr. Stunell) correctly said, in previous Parliaments, it has been a matter not only of Governments having to amend their own legislation but of the other place amending Government Bills, which it has done most effectively and in a rather more deliberative atmosphere. This Bill will not have such an advantage.
Ministers are fond of using the expression "the people's"--as in the people's money, the people's Government, the people's this and the people's that. The Government have proposed 17 tax rises to take more of the people's money, yet they are not prepared to allow the people's representatives adequately to discuss those proposals.
The few arguments offered by the Financial Secretary, who is temporarily absent, were as follows: first, she said that there was a need for certainty for the taxpayer; secondly, she said that the guillotine motion provided for better scrutiny of the Bill; and, finally, she said that there was adequate time. I think it was Humpty-Dumpty who said, "What I say it means is what it means," although I paraphrase inaccurately. The Financial Secretary was following his words closely when she sought to prove that adequate time had been allocated. The time available is wholly inadequate.
As for providing certainty for the taxpayer, if the Financial Secretary is concerned that old-age pensioners with heating bills to pay this winter need to know before the autumn what they will or will not be getting from the Government, surely it is open to her to sever that issue from the Finance Bill and legislate separately while we consider the other aspects of the Bill with greater care.
The Financial Secretary said that there was adequate time. One has only to read the table set out on page 852 of the Order Paper to see what that means in her view. On the first day, we have until 7 pm to deal with clause 1 which relates to the windfall tax. We all know that, even with the best will in the world, it is not often possible to start Committee stage deliberations on the Floor of the House at exactly 3.30 pm. It is therefore likely that there will be less than the requisite time to discuss the windfall tax. At 7 o'clock, we are to move on to discuss mortgage interest tax relief, dealt with in clause 15. That debate must be finished by 10 pm. There will no doubt be a Division at 7 pm, or shortly afterwards and, in view of the number of Members--659, of whom perhaps 640 will vote--we shall not start debating clause 15 until about 7.30 pm.
The following day, we debate clause 17 which deals with medical insurance, or the removal of tax relief on it, and we follow the same procedure. Also on the second day, we debate clause 19, which deals with pension funds and tax credits, for a little under two and a half hours.
Those debates cover four big subjects which deserve rather more than two and a half hours each--
5.21 pm
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |