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Fiscal Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I shall start by dealing with the Bill—I thank the Minister for introducing it—and then shall move to my amendment, which raises rather different issues from those raised by the Bill itself. I shall try very hard not to be unkind to the Minister today. I know that he is not responsible for this silly Bill. The Treasury is not even responsible for this silly Bill. It was cobbled together by the Prime Minister and his old ally, the Schools Secretary, just before the Labour conference. It was clear that the Government had squandered the legacy they inherited in 1997 and there was nothing positive to say about the economy. The golden rules had turned out to be fool’s gold. Boasts about leading the world out of recession were looking decidedly weak. So they dreamt up the wizard idea of passing a law that would pretend to achieve the fiscal responsibility which had been so absent from their time at the Treasury. Back in 2002, Mr Balls co-wrote a book with a foreword from the Prime Minister. It was called—this is not a joke—Reforming Britain’s Economic and Financial Policy: Towards Greater Economic Stability. These policies rested on three pillars. The first pillar was the independent Monetary Policy Committee, and this is the only pillar which is still standing. The second pillar was the creation of the Financial Services Authority to ““ensure financial stability””. The final pillar was a fiscal policy framework to deliver sound public finances through a code for fiscal stability, firm fiscal rules and better planned public expenditure. I promise that I have not made this up. As one commentator has observed, this book will now be sought only by historians with an interest in crumbling pillars. These were the men who fantasised that they had created a new way to run the economy. When that went belly up, they then invented a law which would make other people believe that they had succeeded rather than failed. When Her Majesty the Queen delivered the gracious Speech at State Opening last November, the Government made Her Majesty say: "““Legislation will be brought forward to halve the deficit””." If anyone else had delivered that line, it would have brought the house down. It is risible to think that legislation can deliver an economic outcome. That is the fundamental weakness of the Bill. It pretends that to legislate for duties or targets is to make them happen.