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Finance Bill

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would like to intervene. I think he was shouting about the 10p tax rate. There were problems with that, and I will tell the House what they were. I will be quite frank. The 10p tax rate did not direct enough money to the poorest people in our communities. When we hear about the uprating of the lowest tax threshold from the Benches opposite, what we do not hear about is the clawback from the poorest people, who will lose housing benefit and other benefits. We never hear the full story from the Liberal Democrats when they are spinning on a pinhead to try to protect themselves from the charge of having said one thing and done another. I could go on. The Liberal Democrats are such an easy target that I could be here all night. However, I will end by saying this. It is clear that what is before us tonight is not about the deficit, whatever excuses we hear from the Government Benches. This is an ideological change. Either Members believe that the state should intervene and assist, in particular, the weakest in our communities, or they do not. A stark choice is involved in terms of what Members support in this Bill. There are 61 million people employed in the public sector. Some 3.9 million work in health, education, defence and social work, and roughly 2 million are employed in other services, including 530,000 civil servants. Those figures are huge, and those people are essential to many of our communities and to our economy. Moreover, 25% of public sector expenditure goes on private sector goods and services. The private sector will find it impossible to fill the gap left by the reduction in the public sector, as those who support the Budget try to claim it will. That 25% that feeds the private sector will be taken away from it when it is trying to grow. Expecting the private sector to grow at a rate that would enable it to fill that gap is just a pipe dream. In its document "The Jobs Gap", the Work Foundation predicted that the private sector could possibly absorb 500,000 job losses in the public sector, but that any plausible private sector recovery would be overwhelmed if the number approached 1 million. According to the predictions, it will considerably exceed half a million. The foundation also warned that it was risky to assume that big cuts in public sector payrolls could be effortlessly absorbed by the private sector. There is often a mismatch in skills, which creates a delay in people finding jobs in the private sector, and the recovery tends to come in the most prosperous areas at the expense of the most impoverished. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has estimated that 725,000 jobs will be lost in the public sector alone by 2015, although the number could be lower if the Government succeeded in pushing through pay cuts. It is clear that these changes go further than is necessary to deal with the deficit. They do little or nothing to recoup money from the banks that have put the country in its present position, and they are clearly unfair on the poorest in our communities. This is the last point that I shall make to the Liberal Democrats. If they fundamentally believe that cutting back the state is what the country should do, they will come back for the national health service. It is not consistent with the measures in the Budget that it is possible to protect the national health service—a public service that intervenes at every level in people's lives—and cut back other aspects of the state. The Liberal Democrats and the Tories will have to come for the NHS. We only have to look at people such as Mr Daniel Hannan and the speech that he made in America. He was personally invited by the Prime Minister to speak at the Tory party conference, lauds the private sector and wants to cut the NHS and to move to a private health insurance system. Those are the people at the heart of the thinking of the Tory party. I suggest that the Liberal Democrats think very carefully before they vote for the Budget. It is an ideological Budget to cut back the state. They will not be able to defend the NHS once they have gone through the Lobby and voted for this Budget.