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The Economy

As ever, my right hon. and learned Friend’s razor-sharp attention to detail has enabled him to make a telling point. So we do not have the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Instead, we have the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. I know that she is not exactly busy these days. I am not sure what the role of a Chief Secretary is in a Treasury that has completely given up any attempt to control public expenditure. Yesterday, the Prime Minister announced in an interview in The Guardian—not to the House of Commons, of course—that there would be no spending review at all this year. The whole panoply of comprehensive spending reviews and three-year plans that we have had from the Prime Minister over the last 15 years has been junked without a word of explanation to Parliament or the public. If somebody does not review spending when they have the biggest budget deficit in the country’s history, they really must have abandoned all the basic responsibilities of government. On the plus side, however, this means that the Chief Secretary has more time on her hands—more time to plan her budding leadership campaign, of which we read in the newspapers, and more time to join us here. We welcome her to her place. The case that we make today is simple. First, the Government’s policies to tackle the recession are simply not working—literally so, in the case of the many schemes that still exist only in the form of a press release. Secondly, the Government have not yet faced up to the fundamental failure of the debt-fuelled model of economic growth which their Prime Minister pursued for a decade, and which has led us into the longest recession in the world and the deepest recession in our recent history. Or as the right hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke)—always a friend of the Prime Minister—put it just this lunchtime on television:""There are many aspects of our economy that put us in a worse position"."