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Finance Bill

It is indeed an honour and a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr. Newmark) in his expert exposition, and demolition, of both the Budget and this Finance Bill. If one conclusion has emerged from the debate this afternoon—I have listened to many of the contributions, despite not being able to be in the Chamber, for which I apologise—it is that every contribution has revealed a remarkable level of expertise. I commend the Members who have contributed. In my view the Government's answer to the recession that, fundamentally, they have created in this country should be in both the Budget statement and the Finance Bill, but both are sadly lacking in the measures that are required to set this country back on to the recovery path. The Government have fallen into the trap that opened up in the South Sea bubble, or before the great crash of '29. When we say that this is the worst recession since the second world war, I would point out that what immediately preceded the second world war was the great depression, so in essence we are comparing 1929 and 2009. I do not think that the Government have grasped that, and the scale of the problem that they face, given the proposals in the Bill. My belief is that the Government are still—I say this politely—in cloud cuckoo land or even never never land, but I actually suspect that, as many have said, they are still in denial. Or perhaps No. 10 and the Treasury are surrounded by an impregnable wall of arrogance, and nothing anyone says about the problems that our country faces can get through to them. The other problem that we face, which has also emerged time and again from the contributions, is that this Finance Bill has been written very hastily. The Budget was written hastily, as a response to the G20. It was meant to be a financial triumph. It has turned into a mish-mash of proposals that were a reaction to what happened at the G20 meeting and in the events leading up to it. The Finance Bill was produced very rapidly—uncharacteristically rapidly—thereafter. Sadly, as a result of the measures that the Government have taken in the past 12 years on how the House examines legislation, this Finance Bill will not get the scrutiny that it deserves, and which it needs if it is to deliver the sort of recovery that our people deserve and need. It was a dereliction of duty on the part of the Government to have put in place the forms of examination that they did. As my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond) pointed out, the Finance Bill should be setting us on the path to competitiveness for when we move out of the recession. We should also be building in improvements in productivity. Sadly, without those two bases, we will not even begin to be able to recover our position in the world—the position to which Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Government of the '80s restored us after the calamitous '70s. The challenge that any incoming Government will face is to get us back up the competitiveness and productivity tables, so that we can deliver a better lifestyle for our people.