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Finance Bill

I remind the House that I have declared in the Register of Members' Financial Interests the fact that I advise an industrial and an investment company. This is a disgraceful end to a dreadful Parliament. Tonight, we are invited to hasten through the large and contentious Digital Economy Bill, which we were able to debate only briefly yesterday, revealing the degree of disagreement about it. At the same time, we are given a very short time to debate Second Reading of the Finance Bill, and several other Bills have been rushed through today. Of course, Ministers are right to say that any Government coming to the end of their term or seeking re-election in springtime may need to put a Finance Bill through Parliament quite quickly, but the convention has always been that if they need to do that, they put through a short, basic Bill, just to keep the revenues flowing in, and they make the big decisions in a later Budget, when there is proper time for a big Bill and proper scrutiny. It really does beggar belief that we have been placed in this invidious position yet again. Most people in this country who are interested in politics have had 6 May in their diary as the general election date for many months. It appears that the only person in the country who had not got that clarity of view was the Prime Minister, but he got there in the end, and decided that the election would indeed be on the date that everyone else had put into their grids, plans and media schedules. So why on earth did the Government not hold the Budget at the beginning rather than the end of March? Why on earth, having held a late Budget, did the Government not get on with a more rapid preparation of the Finance Bill? In the past couple of weeks, when the House has not been that busy, we could have had a stab at debating it properly. I do not object to having a Finance Bill that keeps the revenues coming in over the election; of course I understand the need for that, given the amount that the Government are spending and having to borrow. But I do object to being given 167 pages of Finance Bill on almost the last day of serious parliamentary business, and to being told that there will be just a few hours in which to debate all its stages. My hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban) and his Front-Bench colleagues wisely said to the Government that they must strike out three of the nasty little tax increases and new taxes that they wanted to place in the Bill, and I am delighted that the Government have agreed to do that; that is an improvement to the version of the Bill that we have in our hands for this debate. So recent was the agreement that we do not even have the right document to debate; the one that I have still does not have the necessary changes or amendments to the Government's line. The Government must have known that the Opposition would not let through the new taxes or tax changes, which would have had adverse effects on important groups in our country, yet we are still given a text that implies that those measures will be introduced. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Fareham, I welcome lowered bingo duty, the exemption from stamp duty and the other few crumbs in the Bill that recognise that Britain is now a grossly overtaxed country, and that high taxes are now an impediment to enterprise, growth and success—things that all Members here surely want. However, we had to listen to the Minister wandering off the subject and saying, in his opening remarks, that the Government got every economic call right, and I find that very difficult to accept. This is the Government who said that they had abolished boom and bust, but they put the economy through the biggest boom and bust that any of us have ever seen in our lifetimes—a boom and bust far bigger than anything inflicted on this country since the great recession of the 1930s. This is the Government whose calls included building a debt mountain in the public and private sectors with easy money and low interest rates up to 2007, and who then decided to trigger an avalanche of debt collapse and collapsing asset prices by withdrawing all the money and restricting the banks too late in the cycle. That threatened the banks themselves and brought the system almost to its knees. This was the boom-and-bust Government to beat all boom-and-bust Governments. This is the Government who did unparalleled damage to our economy, yet the Minister dares to come here this evening to make party political points about how they got everything right. He should be concentrating on this mean and miserable Finance Bill, which he wishes to rush through without proper scrutiny. Why do we need proper scrutiny of a Finance Bill? We need it because many people's livelihoods and working futures depend on the tax legislation that this and other Governments put through Parliament. Every one of the clauses could create joblessness, difficulty for a business, or problems for someone trying to wrestle with the complexities of an economy scarcely out of recession and performing very lamely and badly. The Bill ranges extremely widely. We are asked to agree to items on income tax, corporation tax, capital gains tax, stamp duty land lax, inheritance tax, alcohol and tobacco duties, vehicle excise duties, fuel duties, environmental taxes, gambling, new taxes, losses and capital allowances, charities, the remittance basis relating to taxation, and international tax matters—and I am not even halfway through the list that we are invited to consider. It is an insult to the people we represent, to the House of Commons and to democracy that the Government say they wish to strengthen that we are given this very shortened time when most colleagues wish to be back in their constituencies, starting to dust down their campaign plans, or carry on with the campaigns that some have already started, for obvious reasons, particularly those who worry about how their electorate might respond to the way that the Government whom they support have been handling events. It is difficult to allow all this to go through without proper scrutiny because it means that none of these clauses has been properly tested. We have not had the chance to consult experts outside on whether each of the clauses will do what the Government intend, and we have not been able to consult people who will experience the impact of those clauses to see whether what the Government intend is fair and reasonable, given the parlous state of the British economy as we meet here this evening.