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Finance Bill

There are two main ways in which a Member of this House can judge a Finance Bill, a Budget or, for that matter, a Government. The first is to ask whether the measure has a vision, a sense of purpose and a direction. The second is to ask whether it has what the Prime Minister calls a moral compass. That is the issue that has occupied us to the greatest extent so far today, and the one to which I will devote the largest part of my speech. It is the specific issue of the doubling of the 10p tax rate that is causing the greatest amount of grief and unhappiness among my constituents and among people right across the country. First, however, I want to touch briefly on whether the Budget had a vision or a sense of purpose, and whether it told us what the Labour party seeks to achieve and what drives the Government. In this debate, we have been discussing a change that was made in the Budget of 2007. The 2008 Budget has escaped without being given much attention at all because it was the most puny, unambitious Budget in living memory. During the parliamentary recess, I had the opportunity to attend a commemorative service in my constituency to mark the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968. During the service, I reflected that he had been a man of huge vision. He was an inspirational figure who had a dream and who had stood on the mountain top. He had seen the promised land. How diminished our politics seem by comparison today. The Labour party, which was founded just over a century ago, was founded for entirely noble reasons. Many people in this House, not only those in the Labour party, will conclude that the formation of the Labour party was to the benefit of the politics of this nation and the many people who live in it. The Labour party was out of government from when I was eight years old until just before my 27th birthday. During that period—from the earliest that I can remember through to my mid-twenties—many people worked in the Labour party to try to make it fit to govern this country again. Many people, including those on the Labour Benches, when they heard this year's Budget, will have been entitled to ask, ““Is that it? Is that what it was all for? Is this what our great party has become?”” It was the thinnest, most unambitious, managerial Budget that I can remember. Another notable American politician, Barack Obama, is fond of saying that politics is becoming smaller just as the issue are becoming bigger. That is particularly true in relation to this Government, who seem to have no purpose or sense of direction left. Yet there are a number of visionary causes that they or any UK Government could adopt. After a massive expansion over the last decade, the Government are now spending £1,700 million every single day—in fact, the Government's daily expenditure is now more than the entire expenditure of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for a whole year. As I say, there is no lack of issues for the House and the Government to get to grips with; the question is not ““How much?”” but ““How?”” We are no longer in the area of talking about whether taxes and public spending can be endlessly raised; rather, we are in the area of talking about how we can spend that money more efficiently and achieve better value for money on behalf of all our constituents in order to achieve the objectives that we all share. The primary domestic objective must be to make public services more accessible and more accountable. How can we, as a group of politicians, ensure that people of all incomes can be empowered to shape their own lives? The big domestic challenge of the 21st century is to create health and school systems that are fit for our times—not just through extra public spending, but through meaningful reform. Of course, the greatest challenge of all facing politicians of our era is how we can protect our planet from ruinous climate change. There is clearly an agenda there for a Government who have vision, a sense of direction and a sense of purpose—a Government who can grasp the scale of the threat and the opportunities and who have the imagination to respond.