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The Economy and Welfare Reform

I suspect that that was a veiled attack on the Prime Minister and his public school education, which is true to form for the hon. Gentleman. I remind him that our education policies, which were designed for England, received the majority of the votes in England—but obviously we will review them. We do not want to compete by cutting wages and living standards. We want to compete by improving our country’s productivity. The only thing that drives sustainable economic growth and a long-term improvement in living standards is productivity growth. The Chancellor himself calls productivity"““a fundamental yardstick of economic performance””." His record, however, simply does not measure up to that yardstick. Productivity growth has fallen in each of the last eight years, and the productivity gap with the United States is widening. Why is that the case? It is not because the British people do not have the dynamism and the energy to succeed in the world, but because they are being held back by the Chancellor’s obsession with meddling and interfering—his micro-management of the micro-economy. For a start, he is holding back businesses with £40 billion-worth of new regulation. He admits that there have been too many false starts on cutting red tape. He should know, because he started them. He launched and relaunched regulatory drives in 1997, 1998, 2001, 2003 and 2004—and he will probably launch another one when he speaks in this debate. Instead of judging the Chancellor on his words, we will look at what happens on the ground, and whether life becomes easier for the small business struggling under a mountain of Government paperwork. He will not get very far lecturing the rest of Europe about the need for economic reform when his own MEPs have voted to extend the 48-hour working week to Britain. I keep reading that he is the most powerful man in the Labour party and that no one dares to sneeze in its councils and committees without his say-so, so why did he allow his MEPs stick two fingers up to him just as he is about to take over the chairmanship of meetings of European Finance Ministers? I would be interested to learn what he has to say about his MEPs.