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Fiscal Responsibility Bill

My understanding is that the SNP aspires to be in coalition with the Conservatives after the general election, so they may be able to come up with a joint plan at that stage. Let me get to our deficit reduction proposals. The straightforward answer is that we are not saying that Departments should be ring-fenced. In the mind of some Members, the right hon. Member for Birkenhead may have exaggerated in his speech the scale of the threat we face, but he rightly warned of the scale of the problem, as I tried to do in the introduction to my speech. Our economy is 5 per cent. smaller than it was a year ago. We cannot carry on with all this "share the proceeds of growth"—with a robe of feel-good Conservatism, without wearing a tie—saying that there are no hard choices to be made. It is not a realistic way forward.