Finance Bill Failures
A Budget with as many faults as the one which Sir Stafford Cripps presented a month ago should have stimulated keen Parliamentary argument, spurred the Opposition to search out the numerous weak points in the Government's financial policy and possibly produced a defeat for the Government on a point of genuine substance. When, as in Tuesday's debate, on the second reading of the Finance Bill, the most striking attack is made by a Labour member (Mr. Evans, the recently dismissed Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of. Food) and that on a point on which the Government is particularly vulnerable (the high cost and doubtful economy of food subsidies) then surely the time has come for the genera! offensive. But in fact the debate petered out, and it is now doubtful whether the Opposition will make better opportunities for them- selves when the increased petrol duties and the disastrously high tax on undistributed profits are debated at the committee stage. Yet in both cases the Government is again wide open to an attack. There can be no real excuse for the handicap on enterprise which both these taxes represent. Mr. Douglas Jay was simply falsifying the position when he referred to petrol as a luxury. It is an essential material of industry. But even more important is the tax on undis- tributed profits. Any Government which on the one hand calls for more efficient production and on the other hands takes away the means of capital improvement has tied itself in a knot, and .any Minister who attempts to defend such absurdities is bound sooner or later to contradict himself and expose a whole further series of economic confusions. But so far nobody has had the courage or the lucidity to call the Government's bluff when it challenges the Opposi- tion to suggest economies in expenditure. If and when somebody does, the hopes of effective debate to which the close result of the last election gave rise may be fulfilled at last, a genuine improve- ment in the national economy will be in sight, and the decisive defeat of the Socialists will not be far off. What excuse is there for hesitation ?
