Contribution
It is a great pleasure to have an opportunity to speak to the Bill. I would have thought it would be a pleasure enjoyed by many more people on the Government Benches. Last time I checked—it has been a while since I was at university—it was quite important to have constituents’ views heard on the Finance Bill and the Budget. It is scandalous how quiet the Government Benches are. We will have in the order of eight Labour speeches today, which is just unbelievable. If one were a Unionist, and I am not—[Interruption.] Was that an intervention? No, it was not. If I were, this would be an opportunity. The Government had an opportunity, with the mandate they had, to create a Budget for change, but this Budget will leave millions worse off.
The Budget last month had some moments of cheer in it, and I will touch on them now because it will not take long. There is scope within the Finance Bill for increased investment, which the SNP has called for. There is scope within the Budget for increased funding for the NHS all across the United Kingdom; again, the SNP has called for that, and it is welcome to see. Tackling the most elite of all the elites, the non-doms, is also welcome, as is the ambition to tackle the scourge of vapes.
Thereafter, though, we get into serious difficulty. I will start with the Bill’s clauses 15 to 18, a further and final attack on North sea oil and gas, Scotland’s natural endowment. The UK has drawn hundreds of billions of pounds from the North sea over the course of my lifetime, the past 50 years. It is almost as though the UK is addicted to it—so much so that it is going to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. The Government are hiking taxes, eroding allowances and driving investment from the North sea, including precisely the businesses that we need to drive the just transition to net zero in the places where we need them. What other state would attack one of its own industries in this way? It beggars belief. It will come home to roost in spades, and it will not shift the dial one bit towards the net zero future that we are trying to get to. The oil and gas that is being displaced from the Scottish sector by this Government’s ineptitude will be replaced by oil and gas from other jurisdictions, where the tax will be paid and where, doubtless, human rights are very much worse.
Clause 61 contains the universally detested provisions on agricultural property relief. The way in which this Government have manipulated the figures to justify this mendacious attack on one of the most noble professions anywhere in the world, and certainly across these islands, is simply unbelievable, as is the idea that 70% of farms will not be affected by these provisions. The fact that the Government habitually quote a circumstance in which two parents bequeath a farm at the same time—which almost never happens—shows that they themselves know that they are on shaky ground. If the problem is non-farming enterprises investing in the purchase of agricultural land in tax-efficient ways, tax that. That is what the Government should have had the bravery to do. There is no material enrichment from inheriting the family farm—other Members have talked today about the return on capital employed in farming being miserably low. It is as much a vocation as it is an employment, and we should never forget that the product of what farmers do feeds us all. It is ridiculous, single-minded, myopic nonsense from another dysfunctional, fiscally incompetent Labour Government who would not know which way up was if somebody did not point it out to them.
Because farms are a business, we can add the imposition across the economy of the increase in employer’s national insurance charges. If that were not enough, the Government have stuck the boot in on four-door pick-ups, turning them into family cars for taxation purposes. Pick-ups are the backbone of the agricultural economy, but it seems that nothing is off limits for this Labour Government when it comes to sticking the boot into agriculture. What Government seriously take on the people who produce our food? I remind the Government—I am guessing, but I am pretty certain that they will not know—that malting barley is the prime ingredient in the Scotch whisky industry, which again produces billions for the UK Exchequer.