Amendment of the law

For St. Albans read Wokingham; my hon. Friend has spoken powerfully for me, for herself and for many of our right hon. and hon. Friends. Our constituents, by and large, pay the bills, go to work, work hard, are prudent and save—they do all the things that, we hope, Governments of all persuasions wish them to do—but we are the ones who get socked with the tax bills, and we do not get any of the extra money if the Government are thinking of money for better schools or hospitals. It is very noticeable how unfair the system has been. The Conservative Government to whom I belonged always gave more to areas with greater needs—and of course that is fair, and a common-sense approach—but the situation has now become extreme. Our areas have needs too, and, as my hon. Friend rightly says, the distribution system is very unfair. I wish to draw attention to the two economies out there: the huge divide in modern Britain is between those of us who work in the public sector and those who work in the private sector. The big divide is between those who are trying to run small and medium-sized entrepreneurial businesses and their staff, and those who are in the large bureaucracies of the public sector—those in the quangos, the councils and the Whitehall Departments. There is a monumental sense of injustice, because when we talk here about tough choices we are talking about whether we increase public spending at 2 per cent. or 1 per cent. in real terms—above the inflation level—or about whether we are going to have three nice extra things or one nice extra thing in our budgets, but what people in private sector companies are talking about during this awful recession is whether they close one factory or two factories out of their three or four, and whether they get rid of 20 per cent. of the work force today or whether they may have to fire 25 per cent. of the work force in two months' time because demand is so low. They also talk about how they can halve their stock levels because they cannot afford to maintain them and they cannot get the borrowing for the stock, and they discuss what impact that has on all the people who would like to carry on in their jobs making things. I do not think that these Ministers have a clue how tough it is out there for private sector businesses. I do not think that they have any idea what it is like for businesses of just four or five people, where those running the business are personal friends with the individuals whom they are employing, but at some point one they are going to have to say to one or two of their employees, "Either you go, or we all go." That is the tough choice that such people are facing; that is the reality. They are the people who are facing this huge rash of extra bureaucracy, extra regulation and changed tax rules that makes their lives even more difficult at a time when they need to concentrate on sorting out their business, when they need a break from their banks and when they need a break in terms of improved demand and improved economic prospects. It is this huge divide in Britain that is so unfair and that is causing so much anger, and it is one of the main reasons why the governing party is so low in the opinion polls—about which it must be extremely worried. When listening to the Chancellor and hearing about his many schemes for people who, sadly, lose their jobs, one wondered whether there was at last some forethought about the colleagues of his whose jobs are going to be destroyed by his very bad economic management, and who may well be feeling that pain in a year. They will then discover that it is very brutal out there and things are very different when one loses the protection of the indexed pension, the decent salary, the expenses and all the rest of it. The public expect us to do everything we can to try to reduce the length, depth and severity of the recession, and to make the tax changes or produce the schemes that might make a difference to those who are struggling to keep going potentially good businesses that have been very badly damaged by the current climate. But they also expect us, above all now, to treat their money seriously and to spend it wisely. They do not believe for one minute that all this extra money that has been tipped in, so much of it borrowed, is buying them a better school, a better hospital, safer streets or stronger border controls. They think that a lot of it is wasted. I called this Budget the Damian McBride memorial Budget, but I now wish to say something nice about the Government. I know that I will upset my right hon. and hon. Friends by saying so, but I think that the Government did a very good thing in sacking Mr. McBride. I think that the Labour party would agree. However, I have some advice for the Government. They still have dozens of McBrides left in their organisation—spin doctors spinning in favour of their bosses and the Government—although I hope that none is doing all the things that Mr. McBride was doing, at least not any more. The Government do not need those spin doctors—indeed, I fear that I am doing the Government a good turn by giving them this advice. One reason why they are getting such a dreadful press at the moment is that those spin doctors—and their bosses—are turning on each other, fighting for power and the ear of the current incumbent, and positioning themselves for the leadership race. If the Government got rid of more of their spin doctors, I could say nicer things about them. It would be a good saving, because many are supernumerary. They are letting the Labour party and the Government down, so some savings could be made there. A much bigger saving in cash terms could be made by cancelling the ID card scheme and the national computer database. It is hugely expensive and will be deeply intrusive, without making our country any safer. Burglars will not take their ID cards to the scene of the crime and leave them on the mat when they leave. We already have identity documents that people have to show when they arrive at our borders; they are called passports. Instead of ID cards, we should have a border authority that wants to inspect passports properly and make sensible decisions about those visiting our shores. These people do not come across in rowboats; they are not sneaking into the country. They come in through the front door—through Gatwick, Heathrow and Dover. Let us do the job at the port of entry with the proper documents. We do not need to make everyone else live in fear that they will be caught without their ID card when digging at the bottom of the garden. If the Government do not scrap the ID computer scheme, they are not serious about civil liberties, and they are certainly not serious about saving money. It is a no-brainer, because it would be a popular public spending cut. Unelected regional government is widely loathed and hated in England. The Government can no longer say that it is hated only in parts of England with Conservative local government administrations, because they decided to test the popularity of regional government in what they thought was the Labour heartland of the north-east. At the time, it had mainly Labour MPs and mainly Labour councils—more recently elected than some of the MPs—but the Government lost that vote not by 55 to 45 or 60 to 40 but by four to one against. If they want to repeat the experiment in my part of the world, we can make it five to one or six to one against. Regional government is widely hated. It is a huge cost burden and involves unnecessary administration, bureaucracy and regulation. If something needs spending on or regulating, it should be done nationally by the Departments or locally by the county or unitary authority. We do not need the middle men and women—let us sweep them away. Again, I fear that that would make the Government popular, but I can recommend it because I know that there is no chance of their listening to the people of Britain. The Government will go back to the north-east, where they still hope to win some seats in the general election, and they will have to explain why they rode roughshod over the freely expressed and sensible views of the people there. The people have rumbled the Government. We do not need European government, national government, regional government, county government, district government and parish government. That is six layers of government and too many people bossing us around, too many people on expense accounts and fancy salaries and with public sector company cars. Get rid of some of them. The obvious place to start is the regional level, and it should go. Let me mention something that I have not mentioned for a very long time in this House—my hon. Friends will be very disappointed—and that is the subject of the European Union. Tony Blair, in the good days, thought that we had so much money that he would like generously to give some of Baroness Thatcher's rebate back to our partners. The Government always tell us that they have a lot of influence in Brussels and that they get on well with our partners. I think that the Prime Minister should go back there next week and say that his predecessor made a huge mistake. When Tony Blair generously decided to give all that extra money to the rest of the EU, he thought that Britain was strong, prosperous and well run. The present Prime Minister now realises that it was not, it is nearly bankrupt and borrowing too much money. We cannot afford to borrow extra billions of pounds—and it will need to be borrowed—to give to other countries, some of which are in a stronger financial position than we are. It is a little challenge for the Prime Minister after the triumph of saving the world: to go back to Brussels, say that his predecessor wrongly and stupidly gave away the good deal that Baroness Thatcher had negotiated with great skill, and tell them that the British people now need that money, because it will all be on our overdraft as the public accounts are out of control. I come to the public sector rich list. I pay tribute to the Taxpayers Alliance for the work that it has done in getting to the truth about some of the waste and grotesque excess that has substituted for proper public spending under this Government. Up and down the country, there are hundreds and thousands of senior officials in posts in quangos, in Whitehall and in local councils who are earning mega salaries. Those salaries do not respond to market pressures. In the cold and hard private sector world of which I have reminded the Government, people on high salaries in companies under pressure are not only losing their bonus, but will have to take a pay cut—if they are lucky, because otherwise they will lose their job. When they get another job, if they manage to do so, it is at a much lower rate of pay than prevailed a year or two ago. I am all in favour of people being highly paid if they earn it and the taxpayer does not have to pay the bill. Good luck to them; I want more and more of my constituents to have well paid jobs. But we cannot afford to replicate the high pay of the successful in the competitive sector—freely, out of the money that customers make available—in the public sector, where most of our staff are motivated by a sense of public duty and think that, say, £63,000 a year is a decent rate of pay. They should not need £160,000, £260,000 or £400,000 a year, which now seems to be the going rate for some of these quango jobs. The Labour Government are rediscovering their socialist roots in a big way in this Budget, but I suggest that they could do themselves a favour by having a new rule in quangoland and throughout the public sector: not to give people salaries above the Prime Minister's level of pay, and to go back to those already on mega-deals and ask them to make a contribution by taking a pay cut or accepting really tough performance criteria so that they have to earn it. We all know that most of those jobs in the public sector have been a joke so far and performance pay has been granted too readily.