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Amendment of the law

I thank the hon. Gentleman for allowing me in. I would have given him a couple more minutes before getting even more fractious in my seat. I listened to the Budget yesterday in stunned silence. The figures were enormous. When I left here I went on a sort of comfort-eating crusade. Thank gosh I do not smoke or drink or I would have been a mess by midnight. No slice of carrot cake in the precincts of the House of Commons was safe, and when I had worked my way through the various tea rooms, I got home and raided the fridge. I was just trying to come to terms with the enormous figures that had been put before me, and I thought that if I ate, somehow things would become clearer. I put my svelte figure under huge stress last night, but this morning I was back to the muesli. I understand that over the next five years we shall have increased the national debt by £703 billion. It will probably be more than that, but right now the Government are telling us £703 billion. Our total debt will be well over £1 trillion. There are 12 zeros in a trillion. I have only 10 fingers and thumbs. There are more zeros in a trillion than I have digits. This is an enormous sum of money. The real concern that I have is that I will not be able to pay it back. Personally, Charles Walker will not be able to pay this money back. My peers will not be able to pay it back. Members of Parliament will not be able to pay it back. People of working age will not be able to pay it back. Our children will not be able to pay it all back. Our small children will have this debt around their necks. Even our grandchildren will struggle with the size of this debt. It is truly an enormous sum of money. Indeed, we may well find ourselves—we do find ourselves—borrowing to fund our borrowings. We will be borrowing money to pay money back on the gilts that become due in any certain year. Every year, a little more than 30 per cent. of income tax receipts will go to fund our borrowings—£43 billion a year. When our constituents pay their income tax, £1 in every £3 will go towards funding the debt mountain. This is a huge sum of money; a frightening sum of money. I do not want to be churlish because I know that there are many good people in the Government who work hard on behalf of this country. They do not always get it right and they have not got it right this time, but I do not question their integrity for a moment. We were told by the then Chancellor, who is now the Prime Minister, that the Government would borrow only to invest, that he would spend only to invest, but in reality Governments only borrow and spend, however you dress it up. They can borrow prudently and spend prudently, or they can borrow foolishly and spend foolishly. Now, the Government are not borrowing prudently. They are borrowing huge sums of money to bail themselves out of the enormous financial mess that they have got the country into. I personally blame the previous Prime Minister, Tony Blair. He had this enormous mandate when he came to power in 1997 to reform this country and make real changes to our public services. He allowed the brooding presence in No. 11 to limit his ambitions and aspirations for this country. If only, perhaps in 2000, the Prime Minister of the day had walked over to No. 11 and said, "Do you know what? You are beginning to really annoy me. You are a very, very negative influence on this country. You are bad for my karma, and I am going to make you Foreign Secretary. Then I am going to make you Home Secretary to finish you off very quickly." But he never had the courage to front up Gordon Brown, the now Prime Minister, and now we find not just ourselves but generations to come burdened with his foolishness. One in every £4 that the Government will spend this year and next year and the year after will be borrowed. No family or home could operate on that basis for any length of time, and I really fear desperately for the future of this country if we have yet another year of this Labour Government. They have no credibility or authority left. That is not necessarily their fault, and it is not necessarily a bad thing. All Governments come to the end of their natural life. We have a democracy in this country, and the democratic wheel turns. After 12 years, the public have had enough of new Labour. There is nothing that the Government can do between now and June next year that would enable them to win a general election, so I say to them: "Have the courage to go to the nation now. Go to the nation in June. Let's get this over and done with. You will be beaten in June, but the defeat will be far less severe than if you wait until next year. So, do yourselves and your colleagues a favour: go to the nation now." I did not want this to be a partisan speech, but perhaps it has been slightly so. I do not want to attack anyone in the Government personally, beyond the Prime Minister. I shall conclude by expressing my concerns about the Chancellor's forecasts. Everyone thinks that they are wildly optimistic, that they are not grounded in reality, and that the Chancellor painted slightly too rosy a picture of the public finances. I am concerned that he perhaps failed to level with the country yesterday, and that he was perhaps not—I shall not say "honest", because I do not want to force you to stand up and ask me to apologise, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The Chancellor is a very decent man, and he really did not want to tell the country quite how bad things were going to be. Thank God that we have the International Monetary Fund, however. A couple of hours after the Budget, it told us how bad things were going to be. It gave us the real picture and told us that there were hard times ahead. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Angela Browning) who, in her thoughtful speech, said that the British people were very resourceful and brave, and that they were able to face down a challenge. They are up to the challenge, and it is time that all politicians were honest with them and with their constituents. The money is running out. I wish that it were not. I would like to spend money as though there were no tomorrow, but those days are behind us. We are in for a very difficult number of years, but I would far rather that the years ahead were difficult for me and my generation than for my children and grandchildren. We must all take collective responsibility for the current financial crisis. I enjoyed house prices booming, and I enjoyed cheap credit to the maximum. We have had the good times, we have had the very best times, and we must now face up to our responsibility to ensure that we leave our children and grandchildren a safe economic legacy. We must leave them an economy that will allow them to prosper and to have the best chance to enjoy the things that we have enjoyed. That means us making sacrifices now—not next year, not three years down the road, but now.