I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “That” to the end of the Question and add:
“this House declines to give a second reading to the Finance Bill because, notwithstanding the importance of increasing the energy (oil and gas) profits levy, it raises taxes on working people through its freeze of the personal allowance threshold; because it fails to take advantage of other sources of revenue, such as ending non-domiciled tax status and further reducing the tax allowances available to oil and gas companies; and because it derives from an Autumn Statement which fails to set out plans to arrest the 7 per cent fall in average living standards forecast over the next two years, and to grow the UK economy, including through replacing business rates, supporting start-ups, giving businesses the flexibility they need to upskill their workforce, investing in clean and renewable energy, insulating homes across the country, and creating jobs in the green industries of the future.”
After 12 years of economic failure from the Conservatives and 12 weeks of economic chaos, we now have this Finance Bill from a party that is holding Britain back. It is a Bill from a party that has, of course, lost any claim that it might once have tried to lay to economic competence; but more than that, it is a Bill that shows a party making the wrong choices time and again, and a party with no plan to grow our economy and halt the decline in living standards.
As people across the country know, the Conservatives’ economic failure is hitting households hard. We are living through the longest period of earnings stagnation for 150 years, with real wages lower this year than when the Tories came to power in 2010. Living standards are forecast to fall by 7% over the next two years—the biggest fall on record, taking incomes down to 2013 levels. No wonder the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies described the forecast drop in disposable income as “simply staggering”. This will truly feel like a lost decade for people across the United Kingdom: a decade of low growth, with incomes now set to fall back to where they were a decade ago.
I know that Conservative Members are desperate to make out that global factors are entirely to blame for the economic reality of today, but although no one denies the deep impact of covid and of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it is simply not credible—and it is frankly insulting—to pretend that the occupants of Downing Street, now and over the past 12 years, have had nothing to do with the mess that we face. It was decisions taken by the Conservatives in office that left us uniquely exposed to the inflationary shock of oil and gas prices rising—they took misguided and damaging decisions to shut down our gas storage, to stall on nuclear power and to ban renewable technologies such as onshore wind—and it was decisions taken by the Conservatives in office that have denied the UK the opportunity to grow our economy over the past 12 years as we could and should have done.