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Amendment of the law

Yes, indeed. Giving way allowed me to pick the Red Book up. If one looks at what Germany did, one finds that its discretionary measures were actually larger than ours. Given all the debate that took place and all the criticism that the Chancellor and Prime Minister faced from the Germans, one would never have expected that. The hon. Member for Carmarthen, East and Dinefwr is also wrong to say that people predicted the crisis. Some hon. Members, particularly the hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon), who is not in his place but with whom I serve on the Treasury Committee, have listened ever since 2005 to various people, almost all of them men in grey suits, talking about the economy. I did not hear any of them say that we were heading for the biggest ever cataclysm. The only people who were predicting the crisis were the people who have always predicted the collapse of capitalism, and they are to be found in the Socialist Workers party and the Liberal Democrats. Everybody else did not spot it. Even at the end of 2007, after the collapse of Northern Rock, people were saying that the situation was difficult but it would get better in the spring. It was not until the collapse of Lehman Brothers that it became absolutely clear that a domino effect was taking place and that we were into something that we had not seen before. The first person who publicly called it, much to my irritation, was the Chancellor on that infamous weekend that he spent in Scotland with that Sunday Times journalist.