Mr Ian Stewart: Amendment No. 15 deals with one of the most important aspects of the Bill, and I very much hope that the Committee will pass it. I believe that we should take a decision on the 35 per cent. or 33 per cent. now rather than leave it to some indefinite date in the future. This matter turns on a number of separate questions, as my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Mr. Howell) and others have...
Mr Ian Stewart: When, in Committee, I moved Amendment No. 130, it was accepted by a vote of no less than 15 to 12, representing not only my hon. Friends but some hon. Members on the Government side and also the Liberal representative on the Committee. I moved that amendment because at that stage it was clear that the Committee was not in a position to judge what were the Government's VAT proposals on...
Mr Ian Stewart: I did not want to prolong my speech, but I must take time to agree with what the hon. Gentleman has just said. There is great merit in learned societies that combine professional and amateur contributions to knowledge. If they were to suffer from the directive that is now proposed it would be a grave mistake. So far as I can see, that is not imposed upon us by the terms of the draft...
Mr Ian Stewart: Not at all. That does not follow.
Mr Ian Stewart: It must be rare for an Opposition Back Bencher to table an amendment to the Finance Bill on basic rates of tax and to have it not only accepted, but moved by a Minister. Amendment No. 10, which I tabled two or three weeks ago, has exactly the same effect as the Government's Amendment No. 95, which was tabled subsequently and which is longer and less elegant than mine, though, perhaps because...
Mr Ian Stewart: At the risk of spoiling the rhythm of the House, I wish to raise one specific problem in relation to this group of amendments and the question of qualification by apportionment of time. We had a long discussion in Committee which has borne fruit. The Chief Secretary has brought forward a number of amendments. After the Budget, the Inland Revenue issued a Press announcement on the subject of...
Mr Ian Stewart: I welcome this amendment, which has been put down in response to amendments moved by the Opposition in Committee in relation to the Government's earlier proposals to get round the anomaly which appeared in the development land tax legislation. We feel that this Government amendment has gone all or most of the way to meet the major problems which emerged from our debate on the taxation of a...
Mr Ian Stewart: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what changes in regulations governing the movement of capital between the United Kingdom and other member States are due in January 1978 in accordance with the terms of the United Kingdom accession to the EEC.
Mr Ian Stewart: Can the Chancellor confirm that in the Government's view there are no balance of payments constraints on putting residents of the United Kingdom in the same position as residents of other member States of the EEC as regards movement of capital within the Community?
Mr Ian Stewart: I want to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Mr. Litterick) in one respect only, and that is to make a completely different sort of speech from the one that I intended to make when I arrived here. I thought that he painted very clearly the constrast in the choices before any economy. We can either have full employment or some sort of free market. No free market is perfect in...
Mr Ian Stewart: That is one of the most gracious apologies that I have had in this House, and I accept it warmly. Having had the responsibility for advising those involved in industry and commerce for some considerable time, I feel that I must put the practical man's view of some of these things, because it sometimes gets submerged in a great tide of economic froth and the realities of the subject are...
Mr Ian Stewart: Even my hon. Friend's interesting intervention underestimates the strengths of the financial markets. The way in which the pound was not unsettled by the Government's failure to obtain a formal stage 3 of the pay policy and the way that the markets have shrugged off some of the more threatening noises of the Labour Party NEC, the miners and others, show that we have to recognise the realities...
Mr Ian Stewart: That may be what the hon. Gentleman was trying to say, but I do not believe that it is a practicable option. We cannot force markets against their natural direction for any length of time. The record of Governments who have attempted to intervene persistently in the exchange markets to force up or down the value of their currencies against the level judged proper in the markets has been that...
Mr Ian Stewart: I think it probably has both. The problem about incomes policies in the past—this is the case with the latest incomes policy that we have had—is that the other remedial measures should have been introduced much sooner after the incomes policy was introduced so that the beneficial psychological impact that it might have had in the early stages was not regarded as being sufficient in...
Mr Ian Stewart: With your permission, Mr. Speaker, and by leave of the House, I wish to present a petition from the Hitchin and District Ratepayers and Residents Association regarding the inequitable distribution of the rate support grant in so far as it affects Hertfordshire. This petition is addressed to the Honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament...
Mr Ian Stewart: rose—
Mr Ian Stewart: I find myself in the unusual position of agreeing on one particular point with the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mrs. Castle) and with my hon. Friend the Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley). The fact that they agree is perhaps more surprising than the fact that I agree with either or both of them. A very important point has been raised in the introductory remarks of the...
Mr Ian Stewart: My hon. Friend illustrates my point. I do not want to sound too complaining—no one wants to complain about amelioration of taxation—but it is getting too complicated to know what is going on. Not only is the Inland Revenue baffled, but the taxpayers are baffled as well. No one knows where he stands. There is a further complication. Because of the cumulative effect of the PAYE coding...
Mr Ian Stewart: If that is so, the hon. Gentleman was obviously very persuasive. It may be so. However, my point is that if the Government were saying last year and all through the first half of this year that it was their intention to deal with the problem of differentials—because their friends in the TUC and many others had pointed out that this was an increasing problem with an incomes policy and a...
Mr Ian Stewart: How do the Chancellor and the Governor reconcile the huge sales of sterling to foreigners in the first nine months of this year with the Chancellor's stated intention in January to reduce the reserve currency rôle of sterling?
