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AMENDMENT OF THE LAW

And the business has been kept intact for the future. As for what the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field) has just said from a sedentary position, it reinforces Labour Members’ impression that the Conservatives would like the whole thing to crash—that they would like it all to go wrong. Of course, the impression that they wish to give may well not be the impression that they have themselves. The right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden also made the interesting, and true, observation that a Parliament cannot bind its successors. The Chancellor was not trying to bind a successor Parliament; he was simply saying that Labour would win the next general election, and that we would therefore have control of all the measures involved. What the right hon. Gentleman had in common with my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, North was the fact that he spoke for at least half an hour. He produced an erudite exposition of how life was in the 1960s and 1970s. He seemed to think that there was a relationship between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war in Vietnam. I must say that I do not see that, and I thought his exposition on the so-called sub-prime mortgage and its contagious effect was somewhat erroneous as well. The right hon. Gentleman drew an analogy with being found to be without a swimming suit when the tide goes out. He might have given credit to Warren Buffett for that simile: it was not original. He also spoke of the gold reserves that the Chancellor sold some years ago, making much of the loss of value without taking account of the value of the investments that we made with the money from the sale. Were he to look at the return on the investments we made, he would see that the sale at that time was opportune. My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mr. Purchase) made a fine and important speech on manufacturing. In our country there is an overemphasis on the housing market and less emphasis on our manufacturing industry. My hon. Friend will remember that when we were in opposition we asked for a Cabinet Minister for Trade and we wanted the emphasis to be on the industrial side of our economy. The Government have gone to some lengths on that, but we have seen the service sector increase as a percentage of our economy to the detriment of manufacturing. Therefore, when there is some dysfunction in the financial markets, it spreads out into the whole of the country. If we were still creating goods and selling them abroad, it would bring fine value to our economy. I am glad to see the hon. Member for Beckenham (Mrs. Lait) back in her place. She has followed the debate with great assiduity, if I may say so. She made some very important points and called the Budget, somewhat uncharitably, ““boring””. I was not here at the time, but that reminded me of the Budgets of Benjamin Disraeli, who would have two little carafes in front of him with clear liquid in them. No one knew whether it was gin in one and water in the other, but as the debate proceeded, they found out pretty quickly. Gladstone spoke for three hours in his Budgets, whereas today the Chancellor spoke for only an hour. Winston Churchill, who was Chancellor for five years, used to have a carafe in front of him filled with part whisky, part water. Perhaps those earlier Budgets were less boring. The hon. Member for Beckenham made some important points about risk. If she reads the fine report of the Treasury Committee on all aspects of the credit crisis, she will find some fine definitions of risk. She said that we were on the cusp of a deep financial crisis, and referred to the financial difficulties of 1974. Those financial difficulties came about because of the decisions made by Anthony Barber on 17 December 1973. He destabilised our economy to such a point that the Prime Minister Ted Heath called an election for February, which he lost. He left the difficulties that he had created to a Labour Government to deal with.