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8.49 pm
Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough): Following the hon. Member for Shipley (Mr. Leslie), I wonder whether his mother knows that he is up this late. I am sure that the Government Whips do, because it is they who have enabled him to read out that fascinating speech. There are some speeches that those in the Whips Office do not need to read in Hansard the next day because they have read them beforehand.
However, there are other speeches that those in the Government either will have listened to, or will read tomorrow, with interest, and they were made by two Labour Members from the north-east--the hon. Members for Blyth Valley (Mr. Campbell) and for Newcastle upon Tyne, North (Mr. Henderson). From those two we heard the voice of sceptical Labour, uncontrollable Labour--a voice that the Government should listen to as they continue their Teflon march to the end of the debate on the Queen's Speech.
I usually approach economic debates with considerable diffidence, especially in the presence of people such as my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin), who has spent both his academic and his professional life studying economics in some depth. However, today I have been emboldened by the performance of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I use the word "performance" because, if he fails to impress the Prime Minister as a leading politician in the Labour Government, the right hon. Gentleman has a good career ahead of him on the stage--but I am not sure from which end of the pantomime cow his speech came.
That speech was a classic of its sort, and I trust that the right hon. Gentleman will repent it before long, because it failed to address any of the points made either by my right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor or in any of the interventions. Worse than that, the Chancellor must have been suffering from some form of physical, if not mental, exhaustion, because he kept having to sit down, perhaps to have a little rest, from time to time. I was sufficiently puzzled to think that he had given up speaking, and I began to address the House myself--but the right hon. Gentleman recovered himself and managed to complete his speech, such as it was. I then had to wait from about 3.30 until now to make my short contribution.
I shall concentrate particularly on the part of my right hon. Friend's amendment to the Loyal Address that mentions the
Over the past few months, in the pre-Budget statement and in the right hon. Gentleman's speech today, as well as in what his supporters have said, we have heard a series of gimmicky statements that reflect the gimmicky business tax reductions that the Government have been pleased to shower upon us.
Those tax reductions are reduced to total insignificance in comparison with the £30 billion-worth of tax increases on business that the Government have already announced. Although I say that they have "announced" those increases, they have not, of course, stood up in the House of Commons and said up front, "Here we are, business community, here's £30 billion in increased charges that you will have to pay." No, they sneaked the increases in through the back door.
Ms Ruth Kelly (Bolton, West):
Will the hon. and learned Gentleman give way?
Mr. Garnier:
I would love to, but unfortunately, owing to the 15-minute deadline--
Mr. Garnier:
I do not wish to be injured by thehon. Lady. However, there is a 15-minute limit; she undoubtedly has ready a speech that the Whips passed to her earlier, and I know that she will read it out most capably in due course. If she would like to respond to what I have to say during her 15 minutes, I am sure that the House would be pleased. It is--[Interruption.] No doubt the Leader of the House, who is chattering from a sedentary position, will give the hon. Lady full praise--
The President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mrs. Margaret Beckett):
I would be happy to intervene, but I understood that the hon. and learned Gentleman was not giving way.
Mr. Garnier:
If the right hon. Lady would have the courtesy to listen to the end of my sentence, she would perhaps understand that she leapt to her very dainty feet rather too early. I invite her to resume her seat. She will have an opportunity to reply on behalf of the Government to the criticisms made of their economic policies by my right hon. Friends the Members for Horsham (Mr. Maude) and for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young). I suggest that she has a difficult task ahead of her. None the less, that is what she is paid for.
I draw to the attention of the House the Government's failure to understand the difficulties in which they have placed the business community, and especially the small business community, which is in trouble. I cite the example of my constituency which, like that of my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Ruffley), is based upon an ancient market town with a population of between 20,000 and 25,000. It is the hub of a rural and agricultural hinterland and, in the town and in some of the villages and other larger communities, including the area
called Oadby and Wigston, are to be found small family businesses. I suggest that none of them will have a turnover of much more than £500,000.
We do not have the big industries that are prevalent in the north-east, such as coal, steel or shipbuilding, which the hon. Members for Blyth Valley and for Newcastle upon Tyne, North were keen to tell us about. As I say, there are small family businesses that are reeling under the imposition of regulations and business burdens that have been placed upon their shoulders by the Government. That is in addition to the interest rate rises and exchange rate problems with which they have to deal.
Light engineers, shoe manufacturers and the firms that make parts that go into shoes and the products that form parts of other products, such as clothing, are--I have conducted a survey to establish this--suffering from an excess of regulation and interfering fussiness from the Government, which inhibits them from getting on with what they want to do, which is to expand, to employ more people, to export outside the United Kingdom and to export within the east midlands and the greater United Kingdom. Nothing that the Government are doing is assisting them.
I complain also about the Government's failure to do anything positive to support the business culture. They only listen to their own rhetoric. They are slack on innovation and they are failing to introduce procedures and a culture that will allow small start-up industries, especially in information technology. We have had exchanges about IR35, and I regret that interventions from Labour Members have been deeply unconvincing. We have heard nothing intelligent from the Government that would produce a climate of innovation. We shall be the poorer for that, and our constituents and their businesses will be the worse. In other countries, especially the United States, the culture of innovation and the culture that allows people to spend huge sums on research and development are not encouraged by the Government.
Kali Mountford:
Will the hon. and learned Gentleman give way?
Mr. Garnier:
I have already expressed regret that I could not give way to the hon. Member for Bolton, West (Ms Kelly). I repeat my regrets to the hon. Member for Colne Valley (Kali Mountford), who had 15 minutes earlier to educate us.
In respect of training and education, the promotion of young and new businesses, and the promotion of enterprise zones in the sense mentioned by the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, North, the Government have produced a catalogue of failure. Businesses need to be left alone to trade, to employ and to earn the money out of which the Government can take their due tithe in taxes. What is not needed is Mr. Whitehall sitting on the shoulder of the small company, telling it how to behave or what to do all the time. Small firms are desperate for the Government to get off their back.
I am acutely worried that, for all the Chancellor's talk about enterprise, he believes that he is cleverer and wiser than the market, and that that entitles him to intervene and interfere to a large extent to produce his desired micro-income. His so-called cleverness leads to damaging results for my constituents, for their small businesses,
and for the economy of the country as a whole. While the Chancellor fiddles with the tax system, making it increasingly complex and difficult to understand, he has nerve to come to the Treasury Dispatch Box and announce that he is the friend of the business world.
The Queen's Speech contains an extraordinary paragraph, which states:
I do not know what measures the Government propose to introduce to
"huge rise in burdens on business"
and the absence of
"proposals to reverse the decline in Britain's productivity growth".
I regret the fact that, despite his sometimes amusing performance, the Chancellor failed to deal with those criticisms and let down his office, if not himself. In his jokey performance, we saw a man more impressed by
gimmicks and theatricality than by substance. He is a man of huge intellectual ability and political success, but he disappointed us all this afternoon. In particular, he disappointed his two hon. Friends from the north-east, whom I mentioned earlier.
"As part of my Government's drive to address inappropriate and over-complex regulation, legislation will be introduced to increase the effectiveness of the power to remove regulatory burdens."
My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Mr. Loughton) mentioned the figures, which speak loudly for themselves of the huge increase in regulations and secondary legislation that bear down on the ability of our constituents to earn a living and benefit the country.
"increase the effectiveness of the power to remove regulatory burdens",
but if the Government's current performance is anything to go by, that paragraph of the Gracious Speech is just part of the great Labour lie. It is high time that the public were treated--
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