---

Finance Bill

Exactly, Madam Deputy Speaker, you anticipate my every word. Thirty years ago, Margaret Thatcher took action to get our country back on its economic feet. This Finance Bill stems from a Budget that does not add up, and as a result it will be some 30 years from now before we are able to get back to where we should be, having got rid of this enormous overload of debt. The figures are mind boggling. They show that the Government will borrow £175 billion this year, and £1.4 trillion—a figure with 12 noughts at the end—over the next four years. In last year's Budget, public net debt was expected to be 39 per cent. of GDP this year, but it is now estimate at 59 per cent. and likely to increase to 79 per cent. by 2013-14. Those debts are unaffordable. The question raised by this Finance Bill is whether the imbalance between expenditure and income should be met by further taxes on the people, or by reductions in Government expenditure. I have no doubt that the Government have got the balance in the Bill wrong. They are delaying the expenditure reductions and saving some of the taxation proposals for a rainy day, so that in the run-up to the general election they will not be so apparent as they would otherwise be. I believe that this Finance Bill is so fundamental that we should have had a general election, so that it could be brought in by a new incoming Government. That is what has happened in Iceland: the Government there made a horlicks of the Icelandic economy—probably not as great as the horlicks that this Government have made of our economy—but at least they had the guts to go to the people and have a general election. That is exactly what should be happening here. There is a big gap between income and expenditure. One of the more important documents that I have seen over recent days is an article in last Thursday's Financial Times written by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis). I am not going to refer to the whole article, but his conclusion is apposite to what we are discussing today. He said:""The public are not fools and they are ready for politicians to think the unthinkable—70 per cent. see the need to bring public spending under control. They know that these issues will determine whether we slip unhappily into a miserable future in the economic second division, or find a route back to the vibrant and competitive economy we once were. They do not believe this government has the courage to tell them the truth. They are waiting for one that will."" That sums up very succinctly the situation that we are in at the moment. When people ask us what we would do to reduce public expenditure if we were in government, it is only fair that we should be able to give them answers. Earlier in that same article, my right hon. Friend did just that. Ultimately, the way to reduce public expenditure is to create a climate in which the affordability of public expenditure can be questioned. In last week's press, we saw a commentary from a former Labour party adviser suggesting that 20 per cent. cuts in public expenditure should not be unthinkable. If we could create a climate in which people thought along those lines, we really would be able to make an impact on public expenditure and thereby reduce the taxation burden. Ireland is another country that has had a bit of a tough time in this economic downturn. There, they are reducing civil service pay by 10 per cent., and I think that Members of Parliament in the Irish Republic have also voluntarily taken a 10 per cent. reduction in pay. That might be saying the unsayable, or thinking the unthinkable, but that is exactly the kind of thing that is going on in the private sector at the moment. I have visited firms in my constituency where the workers are unable to work the hours that they used to, because they are on short-term working or losing their jobs altogether, and where the basic rates of pay and salaries are being reduced. Meanwhile, we have a burgeoning public sector and the Government are saying very little about how they are going to make the public sector affordable. A lot of the proposals dealing with tax in the Finance Bill will create unaffordable tax burdens on the British people. My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham referred to fuel duty and vehicle excise duty. Before the Budget I had hosts of letters—as I am sure many hon. Members did—saying that there had already been an increase in fuel duty in April and that the Government must surely recognise that that was an additional burden on the hard-pressed motoring public, for whom vehicle use was a necessity rather than a luxury. What did we get in return? This so-called listening Government have announced a further increase in fuel duty on 1 May, followed by a further one in September—or is it October?—another one in April, and so on. It is totally unacceptable that the Government should fleece the motorist in an attempt to find a solution to the imbalance that they have created for themselves in the economy between public expenditure and income. Increasing fuel duty does not correct that imbalance. I hope that my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench will give us the opportunity to vote on some of these issues through amendments to the Bill in due course. The Government are proposing to burden the aviation industry a bit more, and to burden local taxpayers by increasing by a large margin the tax on waste products going into landfill. All those taxes have consequences—burdens on ordinary hard-working families.