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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Both our leader and my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham, whom the public respect hugely for telling the truth in recent months, are clear that there need to be some savage cuts. I shall set out now what sort of things can be cut, and I shall do so in much more significant, clear and precise terms than did either yesterday's press releases from the Treasury or today's comments from the hon. Member for Tatton, who did not indicate in which areas there would be the specific reductions that the public know have to happen. We are very clear that there are large-spend items that ought to go, such as the like-for-like replacement of the Trident missile system, the identity card programme with all its costly infrastructure and the child trust fund, which we think was an extravagant, gratuitous and unnecessary way of giving money at a time that it is not needed to people who do not need it. We are clear that we need to have smaller government, a smaller Parliament with fewer MPs and a smaller number of Government Departments—several could be amalgamated. We are clear that there should be reductions in the increase in the salaries of those in the public sector at the top end of the income scale by limiting everybody across the income scale to the same increase. We have identified about £15 billion of cuts, significantly more than were identified yesterday by the Chancellor and significantly more than have been identified so far by either the Conservative shadow Chancellor or anybody else on his Front Bench. We are not hiding that. We are also clear that immediately after the general election there will have to be a further Budget and that it will have to be an emergency Budget that deals with the crisis properly, unlike yesterday's which did not, and that there will have to be a way of trying to bring the country together to own collectively the serious changes in the way in which we spend our money that need to be addressed. That is why my right hon. and hon. Friends have argued for a council for financial stability involving all the major parties, the Financial Services Authority and the Bank of England. That will ensure that we have that debate out in the open. The difference between our policy and that of the hon. Member for Tatton is that we are open about what we believe will have to go immediately, about what we believe that the process should be immediately after the election and about the fact that we will get public consensus for the very difficult economic decisions that have to be taken only if the public is consulted and engaged with. It should not be done in secret, behind closed doors, leading to proposals only being produced before the electorate after the election should his party to be elected to form the next Government.