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Finance Bill

I shall come to that point in a moment, but the simple answer to my hon. Friend's question is no, I do not know anyone else who believes these forecasts. While he is on the subject of cycles, as I have said before, I think the only cycle that the Prime Minister understands or is interested in is the political cycle, and our economy is being run with regard to the political cycle, not the economic cycle. The Chancellor, in his Budget, was therefore torn between a desire to hide from the electorate the scale of the adjustment that would be required until after one more election, and a desire to send a signal to the bond markets that would induce them to continue funding the Government's unprecedented borrowing requirement. So what we got was the usual fudge: optimistic growth projections that unravelled within minutes of the Budget and have been further undermined by the Office for National Statistics data published since, and tax increases for ordinary families now, but with much, much more to come after the election, starting with the tax on jobs that will hit everybody on £20,000 a year or more in 2011, all under cover of the smoke generated by the 50p distraction tax "on the rich", designed to fool the gullible. We also got a slashing of planned public expenditure growth. After allowing for the increased cost of servicing the huge pile of debt that this Government are building up, and of benefits for those joining the dole queue, there will be real-terms cuts equivalent to 2.3 per cent. in departmental expenditure totals. That is on top of the halving of capital expenditure budgets. It is an unprecedented scale of cuts in departmental expenditure. All this from a man who told us in 2005 that further efficiency savings were not possible, and that any reductions would necessarily involve cuts in front-line services. He was wrong then, and I suspect he would wish to argue now that he was wrong then. The fact is that a Government who said no further efficiency savings were possible subsequently claimed to have made £26 billion-worth of efficiency savings, and to have identified a further £15 billion-worth of efficiency savings. They have no credibility left on spending: no one believes a word they say any more.