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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Harry Cohen), who made what I guess was a valedictory speech, like that of my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton). The House will miss them. I am not quite ready for the concept of the hon. Member for Leyton and Wanstead as one of Parliament's saviours through advising the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, along with President Obama, the Chancellor of Germany and others. However, I am prepared to see him as Robin Hood. First, I declare my interest as a director of the family retail store in which I am also a shareholder. The details are in the Register of Members' Financial Interests. Normally, I try not to speak in the Budget debate because I know that interests outside this place always attract the attention of the media and Labour Members. However, having been involved in retail since 1979 and even before that, I must speak now because I want to tell the House what it is like out there on the high street. We have had history lessons from various hon. Members. I shall be brief, but I want to say that my business has existed since 1888. Even in my time, the cycle—the way things come around—is one of the things one learns. Budgets always used to come at Easter time, as they still do, and I remember as a child sitting in a car on a windswept sea front, often in Wales, on our Easter holiday, with my father listening to the Budget on the car radio. My father was a wonderful man, but I knew that after any Budget, particularly a Labour Budget, it would be wise not to go near him for about 12 hours —possibly 24 hours after a Labour Budget—because Governments never seem to understand businesses. They talk about them, but they never really understand. We have been talking about history—the hon. Member for Leyton and Wanstead gave a vignette from a past era. I can remember hearing about the selective employment tax and asking my father what it was. He explained it to me. Younger Members may not realise that the Labour Government imposed a tax which meant that every business was taxed on the number of people it employed. We all understand today that that was not an incentive for job creation. I still believe that Governments, particularly Labour Governments, do not understand what is going on. Other hon. Members referred to the balance of payments and the fact that it does not seem to be mentioned in the media nowadays. We seem to have gone past all that, perhaps because of globalisation. The Budget will disappoint people in business. Business, not Government, creates jobs. Government can try to devise schemes—as has been said, many schemes involve creating jobs for people who like to be on schemes, not real jobs in real businesses. I am thinking of people I know very well—my employees. Some of them have been with us for many years, and we have members of same family working for us. They are hard-working, loyal people, but they cannot necessarily get the benefits of those on low incomes. They are not well off and measures in the Budget, such as freezing allowances and the provision on national insurance, will make them worse off. They are struggling to keep their families going and enjoy a reasonable quality of life. There are masses of such people around the country, and they are forgotten. Those hard-working people are just above the thresholds for help from the Government or from various schemes. I want to speak about them because I have every sympathy for them, and I wish that economic conditions were better so that I could pay them what they deserve. The hon. Member for Leyton and Wanstead talks about socialism. When I started examining the business, I learned socialism is a great idea which simply does not work in practice. In a previous recession, we decided that we would take a pay cut. Every member of staff and I took a percentage cut. However, that was not actually fair, because someone who worked flipping hard and had a family to bring up took exactly the same cut as someone who might well be described—frankly—as a passenger. That is why I decided that that model does not work. I wish it would, but humanity is not designed for socialism.