stouravonmagazine.co.uk
16 New Stour & Avon, June 3, 2022
Political round-up
Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher
A special gift from MPs to Her Majesty Congratulations on 70 glorious years to Her Majesty The Queen. What a joy it is to be able to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee. Services of thanksgiving, parades, beacons, street parties and family gatherings will ensure that this occasion of national pride is engraved on our hearts. It is most gratifying that the Jubilee coincides with the removal of all scaffolding from the Elizabeth Tower so that Big Ben can be revealed once again in all its splendour. Members of Parliament have paid for a special gift in honour of Her Majesty – a pair of ornate lamps sculpted in bronze on either side of the steps which lead from Westminster Hall with its Diamond Jubilee window to New Palace Yard where the Silver Jubilee Fountain is situated.
Christchurch & East Dorset CHRIS CHOPE MP Public visits and tours to the House of Commons are now being resumed and I encourage readers to see for themselves what has been achieved. The new Session of Parliament, which began with the Queen’s Speech on May 10, has been interrupted for the Jubilee but is about to resume in earnest. The war in Ukraine, the challenge of rising energy
costs and their impact upon family budgets remain at the top of the agenda. My participation in the debate enabled me to restate the argument for lower taxes and less government. I expressed my concern that windfall taxes are both simplistic and damaging. Describing a tax as a windfall tax does not make it any less of a tax. Instead of flirting with the idea of ever-higher taxes, we need to encourage our oil and gas industry to invest, rather than disinvest in our economy. Instead of windfall taxes, the Government should be paying back to taxpayers some of the windfall receipts of tax revenue. VAT receipts are expected to be £9billion more this year than predicted. These could be used to scrap VAT and green levies on energy bills. I referred to the statement in the Queen’s
Speech that ‘Government will drive economic growth to improve living standards’. The emphasis needs to be on increasing productivity and reducing the overbloated Civil Service so that we can recover from the highest levels of taxation in a generation and with inflation raging at almost 10%. As chairman of the allparty parliamentary group on park homes, I took the opportunity to remind the Government that it has not fulfilled its commitment to introduce legislation to change from RPI to CPI the measure for calculating the maximum annual increase in charges for pitch fees for park home residents. The Government also has outstanding business to deal with the issue of rogue operators and complex company structures which bedevil so much of the park homes industry.
Was lethal delay due to drunk staff at No 10?
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The government has U-turned and implemented Labour’s policy of a windfall tax (sorry, ‘energy profits levy’) on oil and gas firms to fund relief on our energy bills. And to be fair to the Tories, they have actually gone further than Labour could get away with, by borrowing to provide additional support. Listen carefully and you can hear Richard Drax spitting teeth in South Dorset. The truth is there is little to separate the parties now on macro-economic policy or tax and spend. The Tories have come round to the centre ground with higher taxation to better fund public services. This provides an opportunity
to Labour. I would advocate we go into the next election promising to stay within Sunak’s tax and spend envelope, as Brown successfully did in 1997, neutralising the usual lazy attacks on our fiscal credibility. This windfall U-turn is symptomatic of a weak government that has run out of ideas, and for whom the agenda is set by a mixture of events, the opposition and a zealous commitment to culture war. Creating Daily Mailpandering dividing lines seems to be all they have left. I don’t know how our local MPs put up with it. The recent defence of parties as ‘work events’ is perverse - no one else was having work leaving dos in 2020.
Dorset Labour GREG WILLIAMS It just proves that with this government, its one rule for them, and one rule for the rest of us. Every week in the House it’s the same old show - a fading Prime Minister reduced to rattling off his old hits like an artist with no new material. ‘Got Brexit done’ – not a track that he plays in
Northern Ireland. ‘Worldbeating economic growth’ – another lie. And then that worn-out 45 ‘Fastest vaccine rollout’ with the B-side ‘179,000 Covid deaths’ that he’d rather we didn’t flip the record over to hear. The Sue Gray report – or just Sue, as Johnson referred to her in the Commons, betraying a familiarity which adds grist to the rumour mill she was leant upon by the PM in order to pull her punches – did clear one thing up. We know why the Government delayed implementing the second lockdown in October 2020, with the needless waste of thousands of extra lives. It’s because the staff at Number 10 were too drunk.
