I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend, and I am proud to be a member of the Labour party, because it is inherent in the founding principles of our party that we are here to represent the interests of labour. It should be a principle in the approach to taxation and funding our public services that a hard day’s work should result in a fair day’s pay and that the wealth people earn through hard work should be rewarded. There are many people covered under the Ways and Means resolutions we are discussing—particularly those on inheritance and people who enjoy non-dom status—who through chance or luck or birth have found themselves wealthy. It was not through hard work; they have just been lucky.
I understand the parental instinct that means parents or grandparents want to hand on assets of value, both financial and sentimental, to their successors. I understand that even more as someone who might benefit in the future—although, given my family background and the rising cost of social care, probably not in the way that many high-profile politicians have experienced in recent years. However, there is a problem in that people feel that the link between hard work and the rewards of hard work, and prosperity, have been loosened and weakened. Meanwhile, there are plenty of people out there who through luck, chance or circumstance have accumulated vast amounts of wealth and are seemingly untouchable by the tax collectors.
That situation is deeply regrettable, because it has a corrosive impact on the public finances and our ability to fund public services that benefit everyone, and it is also having a corrosive impact on politics itself. People feel that we gather in this place and work in the interests of a privileged few who have sharp elbows and access to Ministers and the corridors of power, while the vast majority of people, many of whom might have never even thought to email their MP, do not feel that they have a voice, and instead always feel that they are at the sharp end of things. We hear Ministers talking about the tough choices facing the Government, and of course they do face tough choices—if we had won the election we would have faced tough choices; we make no bones about that. However, tough times require fair choices: we should be operating fairly in the best of times, but when times are particularly tough we have to have social and economic justice at the heart of our programme.