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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I shall tell the House what the business organisations have said about the Budget. Michael Saunders is chief economist of Citigroup, and he has said:"““Brown’s version of tax cutting…is one that still raises the tax burden. Every much trumpeted tax cut is offset by another tax hike or a cut in allowance.””" The hon. Gentleman mentioned the Institute of Directors. Its director general, Miles Templeman, signed a letter that appeared in the Financial Times on Tuesday supporting the policies I proposed for inclusion in the Budget. I am delighted that he was able to do so. Another thing that the Chancellor did not mention was the fact that the overall tax burden is set to rise to its highest ever level. There it is, buried in table C9 on page 285—the highest tax burden in our history. That is the remarkable thing about the Chancellor’s management of the public finances. He came in promising prudence; a decade later we have the highest tax burden in our history and a bigger structural budget deficit than Italy. That is truly incompetent. Yesterday, the Chancellor had to announce that even the borrowing figures he revised up at the Dispatch Box in December are already wrong and that we are borrowing £8 billion more than he announced before Christmas—not that he spelled it out exactly. Nor did he tell us that he was again revising down the current Budget figures. What he did was to follow our advice and bring the growth rate of spending below the growth rate of the economy. For a year he has been telling us it cannot be done, yet he did exactly that—sharing the proceeds of growth. Let us have a debate about how the money is spent.