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Fiscal Responsibility Bill

My Lords, although the Financial Services Secretary was as loyal as ever to the virtues of collective responsibility, it is no wonder that he lacked his natural ebullience today. His deadpan delivery, masking qualms about the Bill, reminded me of old Stone Face himself, the great Buster Keaton. Many of your Lordships will remember that Buster Keaton’s final silent film was aptly called ““The Railroader””. This pointless legislation has been railroaded through Parliament by use of a guillotine in another place. Only four and a half hours of debate were allocated to its Committee, Report and Third Reading stages. Committee scrutiny never stretched beyond Clause 1. So much for Gordon Brown’s much trumpeted promise in his 2007 Green Paper on the governance of Britain that the Government would, "““act to ensure that it is answerable to Parliament””." He said those words at a press conference. I note with an unusual form of admiration the Bill’s certification as a money Bill, but observe with greater interest a masterpiece of irony in paragraph 31 of the Explanatory Notes, which states: "““There are no significant financial effects of the Bill””." I could not have put it better myself. I fancy that this Bill was forced on a reluctant Treasury by Downing Street’s teenage spin doctors posing as policy advisers. It has been disparaged across the spectrum as one more boneless wonder and one more headline. No Labour Back Bencher spoke in favour at Second Reading in another place. Charles Clarke, the former Home Secretary, ridiculed it as ““vacuous and irrelevant””. Paragraph 6 of the Explanatory Notes unveils the truth behind the Bill when it claims that in the November 2008 Pre-Budget Report, "““the Government announced that it would temporarily depart from the golden rule … until the global shocks had worked their way through the economy””." Thus it was inferred that the golden rule was fragmented by the collapse of the markets in September 2008. As most of us know, the truth is otherwise. The key date for the death of the golden rule was 18 July 2008, two months before the collapse in the markets. On that date, the Treasury sanctioned the golden rule’s obituaries. The Financial Times splashed its front page, disclosing that the Treasury had extinguished the golden rule. Robert Peston, no less, with his impeccable links with the Treasury, confirmed its termination and David Smith, the economics editor of the Sunday Times declared it part of history’s dustbin. These verdicts were reached on the basis of Treasury briefings on 18 July 2008, two months before the collapse in the markets, because by then our public finances were in disarray. No wonder this led the eminent economist, the noble Lord, Lord Desai, who is sadly not in his place, to declare that the golden rule had been, ““fudged and fudged again”” by Mr Brown, leaving Mr Darling an ““empty kitty””. The blame for the crisis in our public finances lies squarely with Mr Brown, and begs the question that if our public finances were in such disarray in July 2008, thanks to him, why did the Government not introduce this paltry specimen of legislation then instead of now? Why do we have to wait two years for this Bill? This Bill is no more than a comical booby-trap, which merits instant disposal by an incoming Administration. It serves no purpose and fools only greenhorns. The next Government, irrespective of hue, must establish a more credible framework for tackling our public finances, which requires an immediate Budget followed swiftly by a public expenditure White Paper along the lines of the one published by my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon in 1979.