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Amendment of the law

The hon. Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) must be one of life's eternal optimists. Perhaps that is no bad thing, given that he has a majority of 400. There are some points of light in the Budget, but I got the impression from listening to him that the problems that we face could almost be micro-managed away. That cannot be right. We are in the midst of one of the most severe economic downturns that we have ever faced. It might not turn out to be a great depression—that risk might have been averted at global level—but it will certainly be known as the great recession. My criticism of the Government is that the Budget does not contain the kind of bold, confident thinking that we have seen from the Obama Administration in the United States. It contains hints of the things that the Government think are important. There is a nod in the direction towards dealing with child poverty, for example, and a gesture towards greater progressiveness in the income tax system, but even these are not grasped firmly. I am left with the overwhelming feeling that the Government have run out not only of cash but of political capital and self-belief. I applaud some of the things that they have done, but the figures are so nugatory and limited that their effect will be negligible, given the scale of the overall challenge that we face. A more fundamental charge can be made against the Government, although it cannot be made lightly: in many ways, this is a dishonest Budget. I understand why the Government might believe that being honest, open and up front with the electorate at this time could risk driving us further into a depression. If you like, this is the beneficent lie—the white lie—that the Government feel that they have to tell to put a positive gloss on the economic situation that we face. I understand the argument that they are in the business of perception management, but I believe that things have been done for political reasons. As the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Angela Browning) suggested, the Government need to treat the electorate as adults. We can see a sleight of hand at the heart of the Budget statement, which is unforgivable, and I think that the electorate will see through it. That expresses itself in a number of different ways. Earlier, the Secretary of State suggested that this was a case of "We say cuts, they say efficiency savings; let's call the whole thing off". The electorate probably will, soon. In Wales, the Labour Finance Minister has confirmed that changes announced in the pre-Budget report and the Budget will mean that the £416 million that the Labour-led Welsh Assembly thought was available for public services will no longer be available. The Minister on the Front Bench might find that amusing, but many people, including Labour Assembly Members—and people who have hitherto been Labour voters—will not find it amusing when those measures result in cuts in public services. The Labour First Minister—the leader of the Labour party in Wales—has said that he cannot give any guarantee that there will not be public sector job cuts or cuts in the quality of public services as a result of the changes made in the Budget. The Barnett formula means that, regardless of any efficiency savings made in Wales or Scotland, we have no choice about this. The changes will affect the bottom line there. The Government's report on the operational efficiency programme praises the efficiency savings programme in Wales. On page 34, it refers to Value Wales and to the savings that have already been made. The First Minister in Wales told the Prime Minister that one would need to be the Archangel Gabriel to find any further efficiency savings in the Welsh Assembly Government. They simply are not there, as what the devolved Administrations by and large do is focus on health, education and public services; there are no armies of project managers and other non-jobs that may abound here in London. I find it curious for a Government suddenly to find all these efficiency savings when they have been in office for 12 years. Is it an admission of their inefficiency and the lack of productivity in the public sector? If these are genuinely efficiency savings and not cuts, why have they not been found up until now? Why did the Government, by their own admission, waste public money while the economic situation was far better than the one we face at the moment? The other element of dishonesty is, as we have heard, in the growth figures. We may have averted an L-shaped depression, but we are in the middle of a classic U-shaped recession, which is going to continue for some time. Nobody believes that this is a V shape and that we are suddenly going to bounce back from the worst fall in economic output in the post-war period. It has never happened—not once in the post-war period—that we have bounced back to a reasonable level of growth in the second year. That is clear if one looks at the Government's own table on page 200 of the Red Book. All the post-war recessions have involved either a second year of output reduction or minimal and negligible growth, which happened in the early 1990s. The British economy has never bounced back, as I say, in the second year. Nobody believes that.