Lord Inglewood (CB)

I must begin by making a declaration relating to my interests as listed in the register: I am a farmer, a landowner and a businessman in Cumbria. We are today asked to take note of the Budget, but that cannot be done as an exercise in textual exegesis because it is set in the context of the world we live in. I believe the Government’s starting point is right. We must have growth, and secondly, the broadest shoulders should bear the heaviest burden. We are living in an economic land of two nations. The first is the Westminster bubble writ large: the world of university theses, computer models, think tanks and digital technology that handles more or less virtual money, and so on and so forth. The other is rather less glamorous and somewhat grubbier: the world of what my children call “doing stuff”. Much of this happens outside the penumbra of cosmopolitan glitz, and many of these businesses and people are, as the Minister told us in his opening remarks—I will use a neutral phrase—experiencing hard times. For these businesses, the intellectual elegance of the computer model is a plaything of fantasy. Many of them are the warp and weft of most of our country, at the centre of place, the bedrock of communities. Many of them are struggling to pay the wages, keep people in employment, remain solvent, and keep on trading. That is where the welfare payments come from—not to say jobs. Many of them are not branch businesses; they contribute pro bono to the communities in which they are set. The Budget is compounding their cash flow challenges as the state sucks away their working capital, just as Count Dracula sucked the blood from young women’s necks. Their economic shoulder blades are being broken, and whatever the law or a computer might say, badly broken shoulder blades cannot carry anything. To survive, their working capital must be kept in situ until it is cashed in. I believe it is as simple as that. I would like to conclude on a more general level and look at what might be called l’Angleterre profonde—rural Britain. I hasten to add that I do not mean the Cotswolds, which I hear about with increasing incredulity through the media. I am particularly thinking of the part of the north-west of England I know best, where businesses—not only agriculture—are increasingly being starved of the lifeblood of cash, which threatens their survival. Yet they are providing a very large range of valued public goods, for which, in many instances, they receive a derisory amount of money, or none at all. Agricultural economics has always been a discrete subject of economics more widely. In the case of the Marshallian triangle of land, labour and capital, in agriculture, land and capital are the same. This is at the heart of my own local recently elected MP’s brave and principled stand in the other place. He is standing up for his constituents, which is what my friends and neighbours sent him there to do. He, like me, sees a dismal picture. It is a dismal prospect engendered by a dismal science, which prioritises policies generated by computers, algorithms and so on over the various realities and actualities faced by businesses and those working in them the length and breadth of the land.