The comments made by Ed Davey, the Leader of the Liberal Democrats, on Twitter on 17 October 2022.
So much damage has already been done by these reckless Tories.
Now they will slash spending on our NHS and schools, while propping up bankers’ bonuses to keep their donors happy.
General Election NOW.
The comments made by Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire, on Twitter on 17 October 2022.
There is no unity candidate.
No one has enough support.
Only one MP has a mandate from party members and from the British public – a mandate with an 80 seat majority. Boris Johnson.
The choices are simple – back Liz, if not bring back Boris or face a GE within weeks.
The comments made by Alison Thewliss, the SNP MP for Glasgow Central, on Twitter on 17 October 2022.
Such a massive contrast between the First Minister spending an hour and fifteen minutes presenting the case for independence and taking questions from a range of journalists, and the Prime Minister barely able to form a sentence, taking only four questions before scuttling off.
The comments made by Liz Kendall, the Labour MP for Leicester West, on Twitter on 17 October 2022.
How can Truss remain when everything she stands for is gone? And – crucially – where is the mandate for what the Tories are now proposing? Why should my constituents pay the price for the economic damage this Tory Govt has caused? Untenable. Undemocratic. Unforgivable.
The comments made by Keir Starmer, the Leader of the Opposition, on 17 October 2022.
The Prime Minister says she is in charge but the evidence this weekend suggests she is in office and not in power.
Friday’s press conference completely failed to answer any of the questions the public has.
Mortgages are rising and the cost of living crisis is being felt more acutely: the Conservative Government is currently the biggest threat to security and the finances of families across the country.
That’s why the Prime Minister must come to Parliament on Monday, to explain what she plans to do to turn the situation around.
If the Prime Minister won’t take questions from journalists, Liz Truss must at least take them from MPs representing the families whose livelihoods she’s putting at risk.
The comments made by Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, on 17 October 2022.
Let’s be clear: this emergency statement is not in response to an external crisis, a war, a pandemic or global energy prices – it’s in response to the ongoing crisis in the Conservative Government.
It also speaks volume about the Conservatives’ total disregard for rural communities like ours in Cumbria, that one of the only things that hasn’t been axed from the mini budget is the cut in stamp duty – a measure which will fuel excessive second home ownership and the Airbnb boom that is turning our communities into ghost towns and ejecting local families.
This chaos cannot be allowed to go on for any longer – it’s time for a General Election.
The speech made by David Howell, Baron Howell of Guildford, in the House of Lords on 10 October 2022.
My Lords, I welcome my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe back to the Front Bench and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, on her maiden speech. I am sorry that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham is leaving us.
I begin by reminding your Lordships of something they probably do not need reminding of, but the media and many critics of the Government certainly do. After the two years of shutdown of the entire economy during Covid, plus now a war in Europe, after a huge swelling of public spending to cope with all that, and now the enormous energy cap finances and subsidies to stop the bleeding, it cannot be any surprise at all that we are in a very tight public finance situation.
I cite the Office for National Statistics in saying that public sector debt, excluding public sector banks, at the end of last month was running at £2.428 trillion. That is a couple of hundred billion more than this time last year. That puts net public debt at 96.6% of GDP. That is a net level last seen here in the 1960s and just slightly lower than at the end of the Second World War, or some of the levels experienced in the 1930s. This is not the highest in the world by a long chalk. In fact, it is the 11th highest in Europe. I see no harm and some good in judicious tax cuts, especially those that would bring down the CPI, which has an enormous effect downwards on government finances, or those that actually increase revenue, such as lowering fuel tax or going back to the income tax top rates the country enjoyed under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, which were quite happily accepted then but now seem to cause such agitation.
But when all that is done, it is obvious that very big steps are now needed on the spending side. I beg Ministers to understand that the sane and effective way of bringing public finances into some sort of reputable balance is to identify and remove functions from the public sector, rather than slashing budgets all round by 10%. That is the classic Treasury style. The functions approach, which is questioning systematically the objectives of endless departmental activities and why they need to be in the state sector at all, was what we tried in the 1970s and later in the 1980s when I worked with John Hoskyns, as has been mentioned, which eventually led to taking most major industries out of state ownership, a healthy restoration of the balance between the state and the market, a real reduction in civil service manpower and a major contribution to growth.
I take my last minute to argue on another point: to make the real case for levelling up. By that, I mean by universal capitalism, rather than trying to do it by universal income redistribution. Assets and savings in the bank are what every family in the land needs for their security and dignity. Measures to bring about a capital-owning democracy and a much fairer and more widespread form of social capitalism than we have now are what Governments of the last 50 years have shied away from again and again. Now is a much better time to approach this. This is the real levelling up—the capitalism working for everyone everywhere that Theresa May used to speak about. It is time for serious action on that front to make a real difference to people’s prosperity, certainty and prospects.
The speech made by John Birt, Lord Birt, in the House of Lords on 10 October 2022.
Announcing unfunded tax cuts in the Government’s mini-Budget was all but universally condemned. There was no advance consultation, no leaning on expertise. The Permanent Secretary to the Treasury was summarily fired, the OBR’s offer of a forecast waved away. This appeared a back-of-the-envelope, “we know best” plan.
The immediate consequences of course were dramatic. The Bank of England was selling UK debt one moment and buying it back the next. It had to mount a massive and costly rescue of pension funds. We experienced a rapid rise in interest rates, impacting both individuals and business. The estimates of the future level of government debt ballooned and the cost of financing that debt rose to 4% and is still rising.
The impact of all these factors on redistribution will be chaotic; the full consequences ahead for public services are still unknown. The rationale, of course, was growth, and we all want more growth. The World Bank published a league table of growth rates for the G7 countries from 2008 to 2021. Is Britain in the relegation zone? No. In fact, we are near the top; we are third, behind the United States and Canada, and ahead of Germany, France and the rest—hardly a crisis.
The US is clearly top of the tree with a 1.9% average annual growth rate versus our 1.1% over that period. So, yes, it would be nice to be up there with the US—but how? Where is the analysis: not another back-of-the-envelope plan but a deep and evidenced diagnosis to help us understand what really stands in the way of higher growth in the UK? The notion that stimulating the economy at a time of full employment and high inflation will do the trick sustainably is widely condemned and wide of the mark.
One requirement for growth is clearly investment, yet we have now spooked the markets. Investors have a global perspective: they look for opportunity but will shy away if we fail to offer them reliability and stability too. Beyond that, what can government do?
We know that we have vast labour and skills shortages across the economy: crops unpicked, short-staffed restaurants unable to open on the days they used to, and too few doctors and nurses. I know from my own exposure to the real economy that we are short of many more skills—for example, data scientists, digital marketeers and engineers. The Institution of Engineering and Technology estimates a current shortfall of 200,000 across the economy. We need a massive drive to bring our system of education and skills into line with the UK’s economic needs.
Moreover—I experienced this very strongly myself—modern workers no longer live just down the road. Executives and specialists often fill jobs hundreds of miles from home, travelling huge distances each week to reach their work, crashing locally mid-week. Other workers commute long distances daily, and all travel to and from work unproductively in our crowded country, on the worst road and rail infrastructure in the developed world.
Addressing these and other problems will improve the trend line of UK growth, but problems largely ignored for decades will take decades to put right. The notion that we can suddenly accelerate beyond the US to a sustainable annual growth rate of 2.5% is manifestly unachievable. The sooner the Government come back down to earth and face reality, the better for us all.
The speech made by Joan Walmsley, Baroness Walmsley, in the House of Lords on 10 October 2022.
My Lords, the Chancellor’s special economic operation was not as tragic as Mr Putin’s appalling special military operation, but it was pretty tragic for the economic prospects of ordinary people. Since the Budget that was not a Budget, I have met a small business that has shelved its expansion plans, a person with two jobs who is now looking for a third, and a mother of four who got extra blankets from the charity shop to avoid putting the heating on.
Planning to cut taxes for top earners shows whose side the Conservatives are on, and I am glad that they have decided to reverse that idea. In their defence, they say that they will reduce the basic rate of income tax by 1p next April—that is if we all get through the winter. However, 5 million people earn too little to pay tax, and the freeze on the tax threshold means that the average family will be £290 worse off next year anyway, and the tax cut is worth only about one month’s mortgage payment increase for some people.
Then there are energy bills. The Government have intervened to cut bills but they are still double what they were a year ago. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor, with their bungled Budget that was not a Budget, caused a massive increase in mortgage rates, connected exactly to the timing of the Chancellor’s statement. They spooked the money markets so badly that the Bank of England had to intervene to prevent pension funds going bust. All this adds up to ordinary families struggling, and then the Chairman of the Conservative Party tells them to go out and get a better paid job—shades of “Get on your bike”.
The Prime Minister has invented a new fantasy enemy: the anti-growth coalition. She even said in her conference speech that green issues are anti-growth—no; it was Brexit that was anti-growth. We on these Benches are not against growth but we are in favour of growth that works; growth from the bottom up rather than from the top down. We are in favour of the growth of well-paid jobs in science and technology industries, particularly green technologies to reduce emissions. That is not anti-growth; that is a vision for saving the planet.
Telling companies that they can keep more of their profits rather than increasing corporation tax is telling them that they can spend it on whatever they like—perhaps increasing CEO salaries. They should instead be saying that companies can keep more of their profits but must spend it on innovation and research and development to increase productivity and increase the skills of their workers. This can be done by various measures, including more tax credits.
The Lords Science and Technology Committee, in its latest report, heard evidence that growth comes from investing in science and technology. We welcomed the new national Council for Science and Technology, chaired by the previous Prime Minister, and recommended that it should meet more often—but the first thing the current Prime Minister did was to abolish it. Now all government departments are being asked to make cuts. What cuts will be made to the Chancellor’s former department, BEIS, reducing its ability to fund innovation and R&D?
I recognise that the Government have provided a significant amount of money to subsidise energy bills, but I have heard nothing about how they plan to reduce energy demand, thus improving energy security and cutting the amount needed for the subsidy and the cost of borrowing money for the subsidy, as well as ordinary people’s bills. Where, in the noble Baroness’s opening speech, was an emergency programme to insulate houses? Where are the improvements to building regulations and, importantly, enforcement to ensure that all new buildings are energy efficient? It saves families money, saves the Government money and creates jobs. What is not to like?
The speech made by David Frost, Lord Frost, in the House of Lords on 10 October 2022.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate and to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, who is a voice of clarity and forthright speaking in this Chamber. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe on her appointment once again to the Front Bench, in the Cabinet Office.
This country faces serious underlying problems, which my noble friend Lord Bridges and others have set out, and in my view this Government are beginning to tackle them. This will create turbulence but there is really no choice.
My noble friend Lord Lilley referred to the achievements of the Thatcher Government in the 1980s. One of her close advisers, John Hoskyns, said:
“It is not enough to settle for policies which cannot save us, on the grounds that they are the only ones which are politically possible or administratively convenient.”
Unfortunately, too many of those who have opposed the Government’s growth plan seem to want to do just that, thinking that the right way forward is just more of the same: more super-zero interest rates, more public spending and more clever policies, and the whole thing run by clever officials and institutions who are very invested in how things are now. The task before us is different. It is to make politically possible what is necessary for the country to begin to recover, and I believe that this is what the Government are setting out in the growth plan. I welcome that. I have spent a lot of the last year, within and outside government, urging the Government to get more serious about low taxes, reform and change. I am very happy that they have begun to do so.
The situation that we face as a country is difficult but it is not as bad as that which many others face. It is not as bad as for those trapped in the eurozone, who have no control over monetary policy or much else of the normal role of a Government. The report a week or so ago from Deutsche Bank researchers attracted a lot of attention in the hysteria of the last couple of weeks, pointing out that our economy might shrink slightly, by 0.5% in 2023. What attracted less attention was it saying that Germany’s economy would shrink by 3% or 4%. We must keep these things in proportion.
We have had a productivity and growth problem since 2008—which I note in passing is the period of the deepest integration of this country in the single market and of the highest inward migration. Re-joining the single market and reversing those trends will not help our growth performance at all; it did not help then and it will not help now.
The right way forward is set out in the growth plan: the gradual normalisation of monetary policy, which is essential if we are to solve the productivity problem. Zero interest rates harm the motor of a free market economy. The only way forward is medium-term fiscal discipline while letting fiscal policy take the strain in the short run, and supply side structural reform.
When the economy does not grow, you get competition for static resources, which is why we have what my right honourable friend the Prime Minister called the anti-growth coalition. The fact that so many people do not like the term shows that it has captured something real about attitudes. These people’s vision of the country seems to be to keep everything as it is. They do not want change. They are happy to see our country as a shabby-genteel aristocratic family, trying to keep up appearances but not ready to go out to work.
This will not be easy. Politicians must explain what needs to be done. However, I take inspiration again from the words of Margaret Thatcher, who said:
“First you win the argument, then you win the election.”
If the Government stick to their guns, I am confident that they will do both those things.