My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lady Blower on an excellent speech and look forward to her regular critiques of this Government’s dreadful schools funding record.
In the election, I campaigned for candidates in Cardiff, Newport and Gower in south Wales, and in Battersea and Putney in south London. There was a clean sweep for Labour in each but a truly terrible result across the entire country, our loss of 59 MPs leaving a mountain of seats to win and form a Government again. But Labour’s fundamental values remain, in my view, by far the best ones for the country, including ending the economic idiocy of 10 years of grinding, completely unnecessary and massively damaging austerity.
Some of us, including the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, made the case for ending austerity years ago. We did so in 2013 when George Osborne was squeezing the UK economy tighter than any in the advanced western world, and in 2015 when he was preparing to increase the Tory cuts in national spending from the £140 billion, which he and his successor Philip Hammond actually undertook, to the £200 billion by 2020 that Osborne planned in his last Budget, and which David Cameron
endorsed in his memoir. In his September 2019 spending review, the new Chancellor pledged to raise public spending next year by nearly £14 billion. This is a miserly, derisory 10% of the total cut in national spending due to public spending cuts and tax rises since the Tories took office in 2010. Frankly, it is insulting to pretend that we are witnessing the end of austerity.
Moreover, 80% of the Government’s 10-year austerity programme has been in public spending cuts. Yet Downing Street is already briefing that the highlight of the new Chancellor’s budget will be tax cuts. With the NHS stretched to breaking point, with social care criminally underfunded—as my noble friend Lord Hunt pointed out—with millions desperate for housing, with volunteers overwhelmed by demand at food banks, with Britain’s skills, productivity and infrastructure poor, with schools reducing teaching days during the week to keep going, with all of these spiralling problems crying out for public investment and spending, it says everything that needs to be said about Boris Johnson’s priorities in the Queen’s Speech by going for tax cuts.
Labour has pressed consistently over the last five years for faster, fairer and greener growth, for a big boost to public investment in infrastructure, skills and green initiatives to stimulate Britain’s slowing economy, so that national output once again expands at the 3% annual rate it grew at during the last Labour decade before the global financial crisis. We are the ones who insisted that the squeeze on public services had gone too far and that current spending on staff numbers and facilities needed urgently to be raised, if Britain’s social safety net and the basic features of a civilised society were to be restored. We accepted that paying for better public services would mean higher taxes for some. I made the case for reforming national insurance by scrapping the upper earnings limit and introducing a financial transactions tax, to make the tax system fairer and lift the burden of paying for public services off the low paid.
The Queen’s Speech says that the Government’s top priority is to take Britain out of the EU at the end of January. Actually, we will still be in the EU until at least the end of the year—but no matter. Boris Johnson has never been one for sticking to the facts. Plenty of hard bargaining lies ahead before Britain’s future trading relationship with the EU is settled. There will be a big price to be paid for frictionless trade with a club of which we are no longer a member. No one expects the EU to stand idly by while the Prime Minister pursues his vision of a post-Brexit Britain: a low-tax, lightly regulated Singapore-upon-Thames haven on the EU’s doorstep, intent on winning a race to the bottom. Boris Johnson did not get his EU withdrawal agreement by suddenly becoming a shrewder poker player than Michel Barnier. He got an agreement by doing a deal and giving ground that he swore he would never concede, notably and shamefully on Northern Ireland. I expect him either to do more of the same by the end of this year or to end up with the hardest of hard-right Brexits, or no deal—both utterly disastrous.
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