Dave Doogan

The first line of the Tories’ motion gets to the word “manifesto”, and I accept their premise that that is what this is about—it is about the commitment “not to increase taxes on working people, and not to increase National Insurance or the basic, higher or additional rates of Income Tax”. I do not think that is a tall order. The next item on the list, however, is VAT. Never mind the headline rate, the concern now, from comments inside the Government, is about what will be dragged into VAT or have its reduced rate increased. There is no clarity on that from the Government, much less any reference to it in their manifesto from which Parliament, and taxpayers across these islands, can take any comfort or otherwise. The motion “calls on the Government to reaffirm the statement made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer…that…personal tax thresholds will be uprated” in the manner that they said. That is a fair point. Fiscal drag is an iniquitous thing to inflict on people. It eats into pay rises and erodes people’s incentives to get on and progress, and there is a real concern, given the fiscal misadventure—it seems to be one farce after another with this Government, and one U-turn after another. They talk about introducing stability into the fiscal dynamic. Well I am holding my breath waiting for that to happen, but I think I am making a mistake in that pursuit. Worst of all—well, it is not worst of all, but it is really bad—are the changes to agricultural property relief, which were also not in the Government’s manifesto, and I sincerely urge the Minister to pause and review those changes. As others have articulated, that measure was clearly something that Treasury officials put in front of every new Chancellor, and every new Chancellor to date has had the wit to say, “Well, I’m not doing that,”—expect for this Chancellor, who is lacking in wit and much else to recommend her. She said, “Ooh, I’ll just go ahead and do that,” completely failing to understand the agricultural economy as it exists in these islands. My constituency of Angus and Perthshire Glens is the garden of Scotland and the highest productive agricultural land in Scotland. An ecosystem exists around that farm enterprise, of recruitment, training, plant sales, feed stock, markets, fuel sales—it all exists, and it revolves like satellites around the farm business. Those farmers are now saying, “Why would I invest? What on earth would I invest for? Why am I investing my hard-earned capital into increasing technology and lowering the cost of production, so that I can get more competitive food on to the shelves of supermarkets and help with the cost of living, which this Government are incapable of doing anything about, meaning that my asset values go up, and so that when I die and my assets transfer, my tax bill goes up?”