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Finance Bill

We have had an object lesson today in the problems relating to the necessity for radical parliamentary reform. We all know that during the American revolution, it was a case of "No taxation without representation". Tonight, with no one at all on the Labour Back Benches, we have a situation of plenty of taxation but no representation, and I am extremely worried about the taxation proposals before us, for reasons that I have already identified. I am not being critical of those on my own Front Bench when I say that I am deeply worried that this Finance Bill is somewhat unprecedented—to my mind, at any rate, but I have been here for 26 years. To my knowledge, we have never been through this procedure before. There have been proposals that have gone through rather rapidly in the wash-up stages, but I have never before witnessed what we have seen today. The most important thing is to tell the British people the truth about the economy in the context of the public expenditure commitments, the cuts that will be required and the taxation that will be needed, which will supposedly be derived from the provisions in the Bill and other legislative measures, the effect of which the Government claim will balance off the deficit and reduce the debt. My hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) pointed out that the most important thing is to regenerate the economy, and that in order to do so we must take an enterprise approach to manufacturing as well as to the service industries and to small businesses, to give them a chance to get up off their knees and to get the economy going again. I cannot see anything in the Bill—apart from one or two measures that our Front Benchers have identified—that would assist the small business community. The national insurance issue is not even in the Bill, yet we know that it will cause immense damage to small and medium-sized businesses and to the people of this country at large, as hundreds of commentators have already said. I understand why it is not in the Bill, but its omission will have an impact on the Bill because there will be a greater requirement to raise more revenue as a result of what the Bill does contain. The real problem is that not a single penny—not one farthing—of public expenditure to pay for public services comes from anything other than private enterprise. We all understand that public services are important and essential in their own way—no one on the Opposition side is advocating the abolition of public services; we are just asking for a proper and efficient public service sector—and the pensions that go with the sector are also important. As the CBI has commented over the last few days, public sector pensions are out of control. The right hon. Member for Wokingham, my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr. Newmark) and myself call ourselves—or at least I call us—the Three Musketeers, as we have hammered away on the subject of the net debt for the best part of nearly two years. The reality is that the true debt this country carries has a huge significance for the amount of money that needs to be raised by taxation to fill the gap—and the amount of tax raised is woefully inadequate. According to the Office for National Statistics, it is in the order of £3 trillion. I received a letter from Sir Michael Stoner the other day, confirming my figures, as I had raised with him certain matters relating to this issue, and the House of Commons Library also confirmed them. The figures vary between about £2.65 trillion and £3.21 trillion, but that is the minimum, as it gets worse if we add in the hidden costs of public sector pensions, Network Rail, private finance initiatives and nuclear decommissioning, on which an announcement has recently been made—and it is pretty horrendous. These amounts can be aggregated with the amount of debt to which the Government admit. Then there is the business of whether we include or exclude the financial sector interventions. If we include them, the situation becomes dramatically worse.