Finance Bill

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dundee East (Stewart Hosie). I want to support amendments 40, 41 to 43 and 46, tabled in my name and those of my right hon. and hon. Friends, as well as to discuss clause stand part. This is a vital debate. The debate on clause 3 touches on the core of the Budget that the Chancellor presented to the House some two weeks ago. The tax measures that sit at the heart of the Budget and that are the subject of this clause all flow from the decisions and the fiscal judgment that the Chancellor took when he presented the Budget to us. This clause is the automatic consequence of the fiscal mandate that the Chancellor set out for us a few weeks ago and, in particular, of his ambition dramatically to accelerate the time period in which we will eliminate the structural deficit in this country in order to bring forward by just one year the date at which debt as a proportion of our GDP begins to fall. The price of accelerating that moment is, of course, £40 billion of extra tax rises and spending cuts. That has left the Chancellor—we might get a chance to discuss this in a clause stand part debate later—reliant on Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts, which are optimistic. To give Sir Alan Budd his due, even he says that there is only a 40% chance of his forecast coming to pass next year. In the Budget debates over the course of the last couple of weeks, we heard that the Chancellor is now pinning all his bets on an increase in business investment and in export growth. We have achieved that before, but only once since the Library started collecting figures on the subject in 1966. Of course, the Chancellor is relying on that happy coincidence of business investment growth and export growth in every one of the next three or four years. It is fair to say that most people would not quite bet on such an outcome coming to pass, but rather than seeking to stimulate domestic demand and to create better conditions for business investment in the UK domestic economy, the Chancellor has instead chosen to give consumption the biggest whack possible and to introduce a consumption tax. Indeed, the hit to our growth is so severe that buried in the tables at the back of the Red Book we learn that an extra £9 billion of tax increases are required simply to make good the loss of growth and the loss of jobs.