Serena Tierney says emergency budget is tough but necessary
June 22, 2010 10:31 PM
Well we were warned to expect an "emergency budget" weren't we? And this is exactly what we got.
The Conservative Chancellor George Osborne began today's announcement by setting out the facts. Simply put, we face financial meltdown if we don't act now. And it won't just affect us - if we don't act now, the burden of repaying the huge debt will be placed on our children to repay.
As Liberal Democrats we had expected and hoped to be able to bring in the necessary cuts (which everyone acknowledges must be made) more slowly, but the huge scale of the debt and the crisis in the sovereign (inter country) debt market means that even that luxury has to go. The Labour party are conning themselves and the country if they believe these actions can be delayed. The Labour party would bring the UK close to bankruptcy which given that the Labour party itself is on its knees financially is not surprising.
As many of you know, I'm a commercial lawyer as well as being a Liberal Democrat. The scale of the problem announced today is so bad that I have to reluctantly agree that it just isn't possible to leave it to just a few of the most well off to sort it out. We will ALL will to have play our part in setting our country's finances back on the path to solvency.
The budget includes limits on child benefits and housing benefits and an increase in VAT which will affect everyone. No-one wants to have to do these things. However on a more positive note, the increases in personal tax allowance will mean that the less well off will be spared some of the pain as we move towards the Liberal Democrat objective of seeing your first £10,000 of earnings not taxed.
But I am delighted to see that the Government has been persuaded to re-introduce the link between the basic state pension from April 2011 and to set a minimum annual increase of 2.5%. This is a long overdue correction of a terrible injustice that unfairly penalised those who had worked hard over their lives and I applaud today's decision to correct it. It can't come soon enough.
On businesses, which we must depend on for our recovery, the targeting of National Insurance and Corporation tax reductions will, I believe, help stimulate growth in the private sector, particularly small businesses, which is the only way we will be able to climb out of this mess.
As Nick Clegg rightly said "Sorting out Labour's mess will be difficult but it is the right thing to do." In the run up to this election, during it, and continuing now, the Liberal Democrats have held fairness at the forefront of our values. Sharing power with the Conservatives makes many supporters of the Liberal Democrats nervous and anxious. It isn't easy and we can't have everything we want.
But just imagine how much less fair today's budget would have been if we had not been there to balance the package.
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