Sir Alec Shelbrooke

I am sure it has just slipped the hon. Gentleman’s mind that people have the ability to do that. Famously, when Stanley Baldwin was the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, he gave a third of his wealth to the country to try to help with the national deficit. He did it behind the scenes and just signed it “FST”. He did not actually declare that it was from him. People can pay more tax if they wish. What they cannot do is sit in an unfair position where they can see that we do not have the most competitive taxes in the world; otherwise, they would stay here. It is blatantly obvious what is happening. If I were to throw a party at my house and I locked everybody in and halfway through the party they were trying to tunnel under the fence or get out in a hot air balloon, I would not say, “Well, that’s going really well. Let’s lock some more doors.” This is an overall assault on the lifeblood of the economy of this country. All this motion does today is ask whether the Government will be sticking to their manifesto promises. When the Chancellor came to the Dispatch Box last July, about a year ago, she kept talking about the OBR. She talked up the OBR, saying we could never again have a situation like under the Tories where they ignored the OBR. She announced £22 billion-worth of taxes for the alleged black hole. The OBR immediately came out and said, “That’s not true, it doesn’t exist.” At best, it was £9 billion, and most of that had been caused by giving pay rises to the public sector because, allegedly, that would solve the problem. We on these Benches warned that, without reform, the public sector would come back. And boy, have they come back! If the Government wanted to be believed that there was a £22 billion hole, one, why did they raise taxes by £44 billion; two, why did they then do another £30 billion-worth of borrowing; and three, how come we now have a £30 billion hole? That is a £100 billion hole in the economy that has been created since 12 months ago. How can anybody say that the Government have taken responsibility for the economy and are building it up? Somebody on the Labour Benches said that we were trying to rewrite history, but they are trying to rewrite the last two weeks! Labour is the only party I have known to come to the House trying to cut welfare and increased the bill! Where is the money coming from? What do we hear? We hear that we must get rid of the triple lock, because it is now going to cost £15 billion instead of £5 billion. How about we stop people self-declaring just to have time off work and get on universal credit, which is costing £40 billion, and we do not hit people who are on fixed incomes who do not have the ability to do other things? A great number of the retired people in this country are carrying the burden of supporting their families in work, looking after their grandchildren, and doing those things unpaid. We should be grateful to pensioners in this country and not be saying, “You’re the ones whose income we’ve got to cut” because the Government are letting welfare run out of control. This does not stop at what the Government have done to businesses in my constituency or to the ecosystem that relies on a rural economy, and it does not stop at them wanting to put solar panels all over credible farming land, pushing those businesses out even further, because they have brought in VAT on schools, and they have done it through pure ideology and envy. My constituents are not rich people. They have cars that are 15 or 20 years old. They do not go on holidays. They have been putting money in to give their children the best education, and they are now having to withdraw their children from those schools.