Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

This afternoon's debate has had a somewhat timeless quality about it—inevitably, given that respected Members of all parties are probably addressing the House for the last time. I wish them all well in their future careers or in retirement. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Lynne Jones) said that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had not played to the Gallery today; well, she can say that again. This Budget was a disappointment, but a very predictable one. I waited throughout for the rabbit to be pulled out of the hat. Normally, there is a rabbit; I predicted that this time it would be a rather scrawny, emaciated or half-skinned rabbit, but I thought there would be one. In fact, there was none. This was a holding statement of a Budget to get to the other side of the election. What worries me about this Budget is that the British public expected and hoped for three things from it. The first, as touched on by other Members, is honesty about the dire position the country is in and how we are going to put it right by providing the deficit reduction that we all know has to be undertaken. It is absolute nonsense for the parties to pretend that one is committed to cuts while the other is committed to investment. We are going to have to make reductions in public expenditure; the question is how we do that without affecting front-line services or our constituents in ways that are deleterious either to the economy or to their personal prospects. If we simply deny the fact that that has to be done and that the national debt is increasing by £450 million each day, we will not ring true to our constituents. They know the problems and they know that the country has to face up to them. The tragedy is that we have not heard from the Government the details of what they would do if they were in government after the election. Nor have we heard from the Conservatives what they would do if they were in a position to do it after the election. We know that serious reductions in expenditure will have to be made, which will mean difficult choices, and we need to have that grown-up debate. The second thing I believe people wanted from the Budget was a sense of fairness—the fairness referred to by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak. I wanted to see a move towards a fairer taxation system, but I did not see one. I find it almost impossible to believe that after 13 years of a Labour Government, we have increased the inequality to which the hon. Lady referred—that we have a system that taxes the lowest paid proportionately more than the most well-off in our society. Increasing the threshold would have been the right way of dealing with that in the short term, but we heard nothing at all. There is stasis in the allowances, which means an even more regressive taxation system next year than the one we have had this year. I wanted to see fairness in public-sector pay, but we heard that there was to be a flat-rate 1 per cent. cap on it. That is not fair. It is not fair to the people at the bottom of the heap, for whom 1 per cent. is a pittance, although I am sure it is very fair to the chief executives on their £200,000-a-year salaries. They will be very happy with a 1 per cent. increase, because it will buy them many more things than it will buy the home help who receives the same 1 per cent. A flat-rate cash increase across the public sector would have been much fairer than a percentage increase. I wanted to hear about fairness in public services, and a reduction of the inequalities in those services. I still cannot explain to my constituents why a child in a school in Somerset receives, on average, £700 a year less for his or her education than the average child in England, and thousands of pounds less than a child in a leafy London suburb. That cannot be right. It is simply unfair, and it is time that it changed.