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The Economy

As the hon. Gentleman will know, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was in the House on Monday and will be in the House again next week. He will be answering the Treasury Select Committee tomorrow and will be leading a debate on the economy before the end of the month. The hon. Gentleman will agree, I think, that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has repeatedly debated the economy and discussed it in this House. I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman is disappointed to see me at the Dispatch Box, but I have to say that I miss debating with the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond) and I look forward to listening to his speech later on. First, I want to address the immediate action that we are taking here and internationally to help families and businesses to deal with the global credit crunch. I then want to turn to the issue of how we will address some of the long-term causes and the long-term opportunities for our future. I sometimes wonder, when Conservative Members talk about the economy and the actions that we need to take, whether they understand the scale of the financial crisis that the world is going through. Lord Turner said today that""the world’s financial system has gone through its greatest crisis for a least a century"." Extraordinary events and extraordinary risks to our future require extraordinary action, not just here but across the world, to get us through. When Conservative Members change their minds about whether they support the action that we took in October, they misunderstand quite what the risks were not just to our economy but to the world economy last October, the sheer scale of devastation that would have been caused if those international banks had gone under and how important the recapitalisation scheme was.