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Finance Bill

Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for giving me an opportunity to contribute to our deliberations this afternoon. The Budget that gave rise to this Finance Bill was a total humiliation for the Prime Minister himself and for the Labour party generally. The reputation of the former has been destroyed for ever, and the reputation of the latter for at least a generation, and possibly irredeemably. Their self-imposed destruction does not concern me, as they are the architects of their own misfortune and eventual downfall, but what does concern me is the catastrophic impact that this Budget and this Bill will have on our country both financially and socially for many decades to come. The context of all our deliberations is debt. That point was made by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), and is made in the amendment that he, my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) and I tabled, and I shall turn to it repeatedly throughout my contribution. I wish to examine what the Government are going to do, and the suggestions being put forward by the other parties to try to tackle that huge burden. The scrappage scheme, the increased alcohol duty and the manifesto-shredding, aspiration-capping 50p income tax rate are all brought about by the need to address our huge public debt. The Government of this country are now borrowing £480 million every day. We are borrowing £20 million an hour. Our national debt increased by £12 million during the time that the Chief Secretary took to make her speech opening this debate. I am afraid that it went up by another £21 million while the Conservative spokesman was talking, which makes the rate charged by the Conservative shadow Foreign Secretary seem positively mean-spirited. I shall try to boil those numbers down to understandable levels, because people trade tens of billions as though it were small change. Our debt is clocking up another £1 million every three minutes, and it is a serious and frightening problem. It will rise by £175 billion this year, £173 billion next year and £140 billion the year after that. When the Prime Minister delivered his first Budget as Chancellor in 1997, almost exactly 12 years ago, total Government spending was £322 billion. Now the debt increase alone for the next two years will be £348 billion. The Prime Minister used to boast about the golden rule of keeping total debt below 40 per cent. of GDP. Now, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, we will not get down to that proportion until I am 62 years old, and I am 38 at the moment. I was going to say that that would be the rest of my working life—but by the time I get to that age we will had to respond by increasing the retirement age significantly. All those assumptions are desperately bleak, but they are, simultaneously, heroic in their optimism.