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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Look, we set out a proposal for a levy on non-domiciles that was also copied immediately after I had given that conference speech. We also set out plans for inheritance tax which were copied by the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time. As for the increase in stamp duty to 5 per cent., there are going to be lots of Labour tax rises that we are going to have to deal with if we become the Government. Our priority is going to be to avoid the tax rises on the many rather than the tax rises on the few. Our No. 1 priority will be to avoid the national insurance rise that the Labour Government have pencilled in for millions of hard-working people across this country. So that was one idea that the Government took from us. Then, yesterday, the Chancellor said that he was taxing the drinks that caused the binge drinking problems. That also struck a chord with me, because the Conservatives had announced that at our conference last autumn. It seemed, then, to have been adopted by the Government, but, when we look at the small print, we see that they have not exactly copied our idea. They have used it as a cloak for a huge duty rise on all cider drinkers, instead of just on the super-strength white ciders that are linked to problem drinking. That will hit the industry hard and it is something that we oppose. Then there were the 20,000 new student places. When my right hon. and learned Friend the shadow Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills announced that proposal at the Conservative conference, it was attacked. The Minister responsible for universities said that it was elitist, and it was denounced by the Labour party. Now, of course, we are hearing about it in the Budget. But again, there is a catch. The Chancellor said yesterday that the Government would provide funds to""create 20,000 more university places...starting in September this year."—[Official Report, 24 March 2010; Vol. 508, c. 262.]" We all thought, "Well, that's good of him to have found the money." Then we looked at the detail, and it turns out that only 10,000 full-time undergraduate degree places are being created, not 20,000. When we looked on the website of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills—this is not in any Treasury document—we found that the funding for those three-year courses is for one year only. So they are going to fund the students' first year, but not their second or third years. The funding for those years has to be found by the universities themselves. There were lots of other things that we proposed and the Government adopted, such as the green investment bank. We do not mind this pathetic Government, in their dying days, adopting our policies. But let me say this: we will never again listen to their lectures about how we do not have anything to offer the country, when the only things that they have to offer the country are the things that they have taken directly from us. Stealing Conservative policies is not going to hide the fact that the Labour party has nothing of its own to say to the British people any more. That is the extraordinary thing about this Budget. It is more interesting—if that is the right word—for what it does not say than for what it does, and that is what I want to focus on. What was not in the Budget, but should have been? Let us start with the things that were not in the Budget speech itself. How on earth did the Chancellor think he could get away with freezing the personal tax allowances of 30 million working people, and not mention it at that Dispatch Box yesterday? One would have thought that, having watched all those Budget speeches from his predecessor, the Prime Minister, in which the stealth taxes were not mentioned and the spending was double-counted, and having seen the damage that that did to the reputation of the Treasury, he would have learned the lesson. Apparently not. Did he really think that no one would turn to page 123 of the Red Book and see what he was doing? When the allowances were frozen last autumn, retail price inflation was negative. That was the excuse that the Chancellor used for freezing the allowances. Today, retail price inflation is 3.7 per cent., yet he is going to freeze the allowances from April. That is, in effect, a tax rise for 30 million working people, and it was not even mentioned in the Budget.