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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I am grateful for the opportunity to make my final speech as a Member of Parliament before the general election. I wish to concentrate on three dominant themes of the Budget statement. The first is the recession, its consequences and how we can best ensure the recovery. The second is the massive budget deficit that we have as a nation and how we can try to get to grips with it. The third is what the Budget and the political debate say about what sort of society we wish to create. A Budget is not just a bloodless exercise in accountancy; it is also about creating the type of structures and the type of society that we think will make Britain a better place. I should like to address those three points in turn, but before I do so—if you will momentarily indulge me, Madam Deputy Speaker—I want to talk about the one issue in the Budget that has been raised by far more of my constituents than all the rest put together. That issue is the highly invidious extra taxation on cider, which many of my constituents regard as little more than a tax on being a Somerset person. I know that the fashionable metropolitan elite who rise so effortlessly through the ranks of the Labour and Conservative parties do not regard this as a particularly serious issue. I readily concede that, contrary to the stereotype, there are some people employed in Somerset who do not work in the cider industry. Nevertheless, that extra tax is a serious matter for my constituents for two reasons. First, there is an economic case for the people who work in the industry. For instance, there is a small, family-run company in my constituency called Sheppy's Cider, run by David and Louisa Sheppy, which employs about 10 people. It is part of the local economy, and we would not wish to see those jobs or that enterprise put at risk. However, there is also a symbolic importance, which is perhaps equivalent to the importance that people from Scotland attach to whisky or that people from Ireland attach to Guinness. Cider is an emblematic drink that signifies Somerset and other parts of the west country throughout the world. For that reason, a number of people are upset by what the Government announced in the Budget, and we urge the Government to reconsider.