Amendment of the law

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell). At the end of his speech, he said, "We will ask the Opposition which section of the community will be afflicted by any cuts they may make in the future." It is not for me to attempt to answer that 12 months before an election; no doubt my right hon. and hon. Friends will set out our plans in detail. I simply say that today's denial Budget has afflicted every single section of the community—every single man, woman and child—with borrowing and debt that will last for generation after generation. That is my only criticism of the hon. Gentleman, who made an excellent job of trying to defend, in the best possible way—he is an expert at it—a Budget with which I think he is slightly uncomfortable. Despite his partial praise and partial criticism of my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood), I detected a deep unease in the hon. Gentleman's views on the amount of borrowing that this country will undertake. The hon. Gentleman said at the start of his speech, "We are in a global recession, we are not in this alone and we can't judge the measures that the Government are taking in this country without looking at what is happening in China, Brazil, India and other far east countries." I agree, but are any of those countries seriously going to go on a massive Government spending spree in the hope that Government can buy their way out of bankruptcy? Those countries will be freeing up their private enterprise and their economies, not adding to paternity pay or health and safety regulations. They will use private enterprise to get them out of the hole. I will return to that subject later in my speech. I also agree with the hon. Gentleman—and the Prime Minister, if he said it this week—that a time of crisis is a time of opportunity. However, it is not an opportunity to borrow £175 billion next year, then £173 billion, then £140 billion, and it is not an opportunity to put us deeper into debt than at any time in our history, and it is not an opportunity to have more debts than every other Government since this country's history began. It is a time of opportunity to cut regulation and red tape—something my hon. Friends and I have wanted to do over the past 10 years. I suspect that it is more difficult to cut some of the nonsense in a booming economy: why cut health and safety regulations and the plethora of red tape when we can afford them—as well as lots more civil servants, local government and health and safety inspectors—and when industry is making a fortune and paying its taxes? When we are in a hole, it is time to stop digging and to stop strangling ourselves with red tape and regulation. As I listened to the Budget statement, I was reminded of a film. Many years ago, there was a "Carry On" film called "Carry On Regardless". That is what we had in the Budget. In some ways, it reminded me of the Prime Minister's Budgets in 1998 and 1999, when he could carry on the expenditure levels that are now no longer sustainable because of the golden economic legacy that he had been left by the outgoing Conservative Government. We have had no sense at all today that the Government understand the urgency of making cuts in non-essential Government expenditure. I do not think that my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham was suggesting in the slightest that any front-line services should be cut—none of us is suggesting that—but as I go round my constituency I get the same message from everybody from every side. They say exactly the same thing: "When can we get rid of this Government? Goodness me, I don't envy you lot the job you will have to do. The mess you will have to sort out is terrible and there will be pain." The people out there—our electorate—know that there will have to be cuts in some services. They are doing that themselves. They cannot go to their bank manager and say, "I'm absolutely broke, but can I borrow more money to spend my way out of bankruptcy?" Every little business in my constituency is pulling in its belt. Yes, those businesses would like to invest and they are saving every penny they can for proper investment. They are not squandering a single penny. When I open the pages of my local newspaper, I may see a little advert as Eddie Stobart wants a driver. I may see an advertisement saying that a hotel wants a chef. I see columns of advertisements placed by the district council, the county council and the health service, which is still recruiting like nobody's business. I am not talking about front-line staff. Five-a-day managers are being recruited. These people will not be managing anything; they will be paid about £23,000 a year to go around exhorting the rest of us to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables each day. No doubt eating five portions of fruit and vegetables is jolly good for us, and I try to do it myself occasionally, but the idea that it is essential to recruit people to carry out these exhortations is bananas. [Laughter.] Yes—and apples, broccoli and leeks as well. That was an inadvertent one, although I sometimes throw them in to check that the House is alert. The idea that we can afford, at the present time, to continue that sort of extravagance is absolute nonsense. I was about to say "pie in the sky", but that would have been the second portion. We cannot afford to do that in the current circumstances. We could not afford to do it in the past, but Government and local government could get away with it because we seemed to be earning, we seemed to be paying our way, and we were in a boom period. Now the bust is here with a vengeance—and when the bust is here with a vengeance, we all have to pull in our horns. We invest in what will actually help us to escape from our problems, which is growth. That means that we must cut the red tape and all the things that slow down our industry. The Chancellor says that in a couple of years' time we will have 3.25 per cent. growth. No one in the House believes that. Labour Members have made a good fist of defending the Budget—no doubt they received their briefing and found all the good things that it is possible to defend—but no one seriously believes that we will move from negative growth of 3 per cent. to positive growth of 3.25 per cent. in a couple of years' time. If that were to happen—if we were to achieve that 3.25 per cent. growth—where would it come from? Would it come from Government expenditure, Government investment in infrastructure, or Government investment in so-called front-line services? Of course not. Government are not going to create that growth. If we end up with 3.25 per cent. growth in two years' time, it will be because private industry has created it. The investment that private industry will put into its business is infinitely greater than anything that Government can spend by borrowing hundreds of billions of pounds. If those hundreds of billions were to go into capital investment and increasing productivity it could be justified, but much of it is going into shoring up the current account and continuing the profligate expenditure policies that got us into this hole. This is my main criticism today. As elections approach, Governments are often accused of jam tomorrow. Well, this Government is promising pain in a couple of years' time rather than inflicting it now. I am quite pleased about that for political reasons, because I know that my constituents—and, I suspect, those of most other Members—will see through this Budget and say "Ah yes, a tax cut. The huge tax increases will come in two years' time." The Government might have gained more political mileage today by giving us some of the pain now: by being absolutely honest, and saying, "We must rein back on excessive Government expenditure, and we must rein back on it now." Delaying the pain for a couple of years fools none of the electorate. Indeed, I suspect that it will mean a few more seats for my party at the next election. I believe that there are areas of expenditure that can safely be cut. I am not going to come up with a full shopping list, and this is not a Conservative party shopping list; it is just a list of some of my pet fetishes. We are going to waste £12 billion on identity cards, which are absolutely unnecessary. We have wasted £36 billion, I am told, on NHS computer systems which do not work. Thank God they do not work, because I do not trust this Government with my medical records—particularly if they introduce a euthanasia Bill shortly, given my current state of health. We do not need that particular investment. In fact, it is not investment. Buying £36 billion-worth of computers for the NHS so that, theoretically, all the medical records can be in a central system and, theoretically, everyone in Whitehall can access them is not investment, but an absolute nosey parker's charter and a waste of money. Let me also suggest that the Government cut the £300 million that has been spent, either at Cheltenham or somewhere else, on monitoring all our trips abroad. I am quite happy for MI5 and MI6 to recruit a few thousand more workers to gather intelligence to find out who the real terrorists are, but not for £300 million to be spent so that every time every single citizen of this country goes abroad full details of their passport, where they are going, the hotel they are staying in and, no doubt, what they have had for breakfast is logged on a central computer on the off-chance that we pick up some guy going to Pakistan for terrorist training. Let us put the money and investment into more Security Service foot soldiers on the ground infiltrating these communities, and into hearts and minds operations in those communities and gathering intelligence on the half a dozen guys who may be going to Pakistan to learn to be terrorists, rather than into monitoring the other 56 million of us and intercepting every e-mail we produce. We have got to start unscrambling the tax credit system and put in place a better system. I wonder how many of us as Members of Parliament could lay off half a secretary—not that I am suggesting we want to do so—if we did not have to deal with the absolute mess of the tax credit system and the child tax credit system. We must tackle the burden of public sector pensions as well, including our own—I suspect it will be the next Government who will have to tackle that. We have had a lot of measures on jobs today. They are well intentioned and well meaning, but the people in my constituency who have lost their jobs are not all waiting to be retrained into a new industry. The 30 or 40 men who have lost their jobs in a plasterboard factory get laid off every recession; they are waiting for that work to pick up again, and then they will be back doing the same job in the plasterboard factory. The HGV drivers who are laid off at the moment are not going to retrain for the new green economy and start driving green cars; they are waiting to start driving their lorries again, carting goods around the country. What is needed to help them is not some of the gimmicks we have had today on new training, but a cut in national insurance. If we cut national insurance, I can guarantee that within weeks more people in my constituency will be back in employment, because it is a burden on employers which encourages them to lay off labour and does not encourage them to take on new employees. I agree with the Prime Minister that a time of crisis is a time of opportunity: when the Conservatives come into government, there will be an opportunity for my Front-Bench colleagues to take an axe to some of the regulations that have been passed in the past 10 years. That opportunity will come because the people of this country realise that we cannot have more and more read tape strangling private industry as it is only private industry that will get us out of this crisis. I seldom watch television, but I caught a bit of a programme the other night. I believe one of our esteemed Gallery correspondents was responsible for it: Mr. Quentin Letts. The programme was certainly infinitely better than anything he writes, and it was all about training for using ladders. Mr. Letts had discovered that everyone in this country who may have to go up a step-ladder now has to get a certificate on handling ladders and using them safely. I understand from Mr. Letts's programme that the European Union regulations are about two pages long, whereas the British Government ones are about 30 pages long. That is typical of the gold-plating on every regulation. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham may have a view on which regulations may be scrapped. I take the view that while we are in the European Community, and we are—and rightly so—trading and working with our partners, we must obey European law. If we have British regulations duplicating those from Europe, we cannot get rid of the European ones; therefore, we should scrap all those duplicating regulations that we in this country pass in gold-plating the European standard regulations. We have such a problem with the working at height regulations, and in this place we are doing it with the fire regulations: we as a House and a British Government are gold-plating them, and nowhere else in the European Community is that being done. Before this is misconstrued as Maclean suggesting that we should go back to the bad old days before the Health and Safety at Work, etc. Act 1974 and scrap all the vital safety regulations that protect workers, let me say that I am not suggesting that in the slightest. If we look at the statistics, however, we will see that we are putting a lot of effort into targeting some areas where there are very few accidents or deaths, while ignoring other areas, such as the construction industry, which are still high up the accident league. Whatever we do, we must take the burdens off private industry, where one finds the only ones who will create the magical 3.25 per cent. growth that we seek. I wish to make one other major point before I conclude, and it involves contradicting what I have just said on cutting regulation. One regulation is essential, and it is not a matter of the regulation that may be necessary for the Financial Services Authority to determine whether or not the institutions are lending properly. It is the imposition of a new regulation or code of practice on our banks, which are turning the screws on all our businesses and individuals like never before. Every business man and woman in my constituency to whom I have spoken, including someone who I bumped into in London last night, has made the point that they have had letters from their bank saying that because of the change in interest rates their terms are being revised and charges on companies are being increased. As Bank of England rates get lower and as we pump more and more taxpayers' money into some of these wicked banking institutions, all they are doing is taking the taxpayers' money and then extorting more from the businesses to which they are supposed to be lending.