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Mr. Brown: The shadow Chancellor has yet to answer my five questions. Can the hon. Member for Buckingham,
the junior employment spokesman, help us by committing his party either way on continuing with the new deal, the working families tax credit and the minimum wage?
Mr. Bercow: That was a nice try but the Chancellor must do better than that. Will he answer my question? Is he aware that, since the new deal for young people was introduced, at least 50,000 have left the scheme for what the Government euphemistically describe as destinations unknown?
Mr. Brown: Does the hon. Gentleman support the new deal and want it to work better, or does he oppose it? Some 500,000 young people and long-term unemployed have gone on to the new deal, and 170,000 of them have got jobs. Does he or does he not support that? Does he now agree that the windfall levy on the utilities was the right thing to impose, or does he not? Why cannot the shadow Chancellor answer one serious question about the fundamentals of his economic policy?
I studied the Conservative amendment in great detail, and I now have great glee in reading it out. On the day that Conservative party finances are under scrutiny and in the week that Lord Archer is under scrutiny, the Conservative party's amendment has the audacity to call for honesty and openness. Conservative Members accuse other people of saying one thing and doing another, but the amendment was tabled by a party whose ethics and integrity committee has never met. Conservatives probably think that "Ethics" is the name of the county that includes Basildon and their leader's judgment is so bad that the first and last words that he uses about Jeffrey Archer are integrity and probity.
Let us consider the Conservative party's membership list. We need only begin with the letter A, and Aitken, Archer and Ashcroft--its A-list of candidates. These days, what does one call a Tory candidate whose name starts with the letter A? The accused.
Mr. Brown:
I shall take one more intervention, but I shall offer it to the shadow Chancellor, so that he can answer the questions about the Bank of England, the minimum wage, the new deal and the working families tax credit. He can tell us what his policy is. If I cannot persuade him to intervene, I shall take an intervention from what I suppose is a surrogate for him. Will the shadow Chancellor answer those questions now, or is the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies) going to reply? No, so I shall have to give way to the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Sir P. Tapsell).
Sir Peter Tapsell:
Although some of us have been here long enough to recognise that the right hon. Gentleman is relatively inexperienced in the affairs of the House, when a Chancellor does not want to defend his measures, it is one of the oldest tricks in the parliamentary book for him to ask a series of questions of the Opposition and to talk about everything else except what was in his Budget statement.
Mr. Brown:
I have asked five fundamental questions of economic policy. I have asked a question about the Bank of England, which the Opposition cannot answer; a question about the future of the minimum wage on
Mr. Michael Jack (Fylde):
Will the Chancellor give way?
Mr. Brown:
I have said that I want to make progress. I shall outline the measures that are in the Queen's Speech.
Our domestic policy is built on five foundations--stability, employment and no return to the unemployment that we saw under the Conservatives, help and not harm for working families, investing billions more in the public services rather than privatising parts of them and support for engagement in Europe against isolation in Europe. We have made the Bank of England independent--
Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough):
The Chancellor has wasted 15 minutes.
Mr. Brown:
I have not wasted 15 minutes. We have discovered from the Conservative party that it has no answers to the central questions of economic policy. I do not think that anybody listening to this debate will be in any doubt that, after two and a half years in which Conservative Members have been talking to themselves, issuing press releases, and when they now think of themselves as dissidents who are being persecuted, they have been unable to answer any serious questions of economic policy.
Mr. Brown:
I have been very generous in giving way. However, each time that I seek to give way to those on the Conservative Front Bench, they refuse to intervene. They then ask me to give my full speech, and that is what I propose to do. We made the Bank of England--
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. I am not presiding over Opposition Question Time. I invite the Chancellor to follow his better instincts and to progress with his speech.
Mr. Brown:
I hope that you are enjoying the debate, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
We made the Bank of England independent, and we ensured that interest rate decisions are taken in the long-term interests of the economy, and not for short-term political considerations. We now have a sound and credible platform of stability, low inflation, and low long-term interest rates. Growth is forecast this year to be 1¾ per cent.--stronger than expected at the time of the Budget--and next year to be between 2½ and 3 per cent. Opposition Members would have been proud of such a record had they achieved it.
Mr. Jack:
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Brown:
I shall give way once more, because the right hon. Gentleman is a former Conservative Treasury
Mr. Jack:
Following your advice to the Chancellor, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I should like to ask him a fundamental question. In response to the points made by my right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor about tax levels, the Chancellor quoted certain figures from table B7 on page 150 of the pre-Budget report, which shows tax as a percentage of gross domestic product. Will he confirm that that table shows that, in the current financial year, net taxes and social security contributions total 37 per cent. of the gross domestic product, and that, by the next election, that figure will have risen to 37.2 per cent? The bottom of that table also shows rising Government receipts as a percentage of GDP. That table conclusively shows that taxes are rising.
Mr. Brown:
I have the table in front of me, and ask the right hon. Gentleman to look at it carefully. Table B10 shows--
Mr. Brown:
The table on net taxes and social security contributions is table B10. That shows that, for the 1998-1999 outturn, the figure was 37.4 per cent., and that the 1999-2000 estimate of 37 per cent--
Mr. Jack:
I referred to table B7.
It is easy to see why that is so. We have cut corporation tax and income tax, and we have created a 10p starting rate of tax and set a 10p rate for capital gains tax.
Mr. Jack:
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Is it in order for the Chancellor to choose to answer a completely different question from that honourably posed by another hon. Member?
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
The right hon. Gentleman has sufficient experience to realise that those are matters for debate and not for the Chair.
Mr. Brown:
I repeat that the table in the pre-Budget report on net taxes and social security contributions shows--[Interruption.] It is not what the Opposition want to hear, but these are the facts that are stated in the document. They do not want to believe them because the share of tax next year will go down--and that is the truth. The reason is that the basic rate of income tax has been cut, a 10p tax rate has been set up, capital gains tax is falling to a 10p long-term rate, business tax has fallen--and is falling--from 33p to 30p and small business tax has fallen from 23p to 20p. Those are Labour tax cuts.
The Conservatives pushed tax up to the highest burden in history. Under the Conservatives, there was the fastest rise in taxes. They misled the people in 1992 when they said that they would not impose VAT on fuel, but then did so ruthlessly, punishing pensioners.
We have locked in not only action against inflation through the Bank of England--[Interruption.] If hon. Gentlemen on the Opposition Front Bench want to explain Conservative party policy, they may ask me to give way so that they may offer some answers instead of talking from a sedentary position as though they have something to say, although they have no policy to announce.
We have locked in fiscal tightening; we will not relax our discipline. Having moved from the ad hoc piecemeal approach in the old Conservative annual spending rounds, we have a three-year, long-term system of public expenditure planning, to which the 13 interdepartmental reviews that we have announced today will contribute.
"Net taxes and social security contributions"--
I do my homework, even if the Opposition do not--shows figures of 37.4, 37 and 36.8 per cent. The corollary--what the Conservatives would have done--is 37.2 per cent., rising to 37.7 and 38.1 per cent. That is the true position of what would have happened under a Conservative Government.
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