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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) modestly said that when he came here he was not a very nice person, but I do not agree with that at all. He has always been a very nice person and, more importantly, he has enormous integrity. I want to get that straight, because when he goes into this election, he can hold his head high for the simple reason that, from the Back Benches, he has been absolutely true to what he believes in. As I have said several times in the past month or so, we not only need radical reform in this Parliament but we need our Back Benchers to have backbone. That has been part of the problem. Many of the complaints that have been made about the manner in which the system works, through the Whips and so on, do not take sufficient regard of the way that some of us have acted from time to time, for a variety of reasons, despite our general agreement with the policies, principles and attitudes of our parties. That applies across the House and in all parties, and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) for standing out as a man of integrity. This is what makes a Parliament. We should not just get up and parrot whatever other people want to give us, by way of a broadsheet. We must get up and say what we really think, because our first duty is to our country, our second duty is to our constituents and our third duty is to our party's policies and programmes. Those sentiments are not mine but Winston Churchill's, and I believe them absolutely. I will do my best to continue in that manner after the next election if my electorate are good enough to return me to the House. I want to talk about the truth in relation to two main matters, the first of which is the economy. The Economic Secretary to the Treasury is a sort of neighbour of mine, as he represents Dudley, South—at least, he is not far away—and I have had many exchanges with him, as well as with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister, about what lies at the root of the Budget. Debt is what lies at the root of the Budget, and that will continue after the election whichever party gets into power. In an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne), I made a point that I have made several times in private meetings about the extent of the debt. I have pursued this issue since a debate on fiscal stability on 7 October 2008, when I began to compare the figures of the Office for National Statistics with the assertions that the Government were making about the true level of debt. I do not need to go through all the debates there have been on this, because I can say what I need to say very briefly. The national debt, as asserted by the Government, even to date, is set to double to £1.5 trillion by 2014-15. That is £23,000 for every person in the country during the decade of weakest economic growth since the second world war, and the worst decade for the stock market since the early 1930s. That is the asserted level of debt, but the actual level of debt is truly alarming—I would call it frightening. Yesterday, I received a letter from the ONS confirming the actual amount of net debt against the background of what has been asserted. That letter is in the Library, so anyone can check it. It says that the actual net debt is more than £2.65 trillion, if we include all the hidden costs such as public sector pension liabilities, and is not the £1 trillion figure that the Government have, in my opinion, misleadingly presented. What that means for public expenditure and taxation is relevant because there is a balancing act between how much we will need to cut public expenditure and how much taxation is liable to go up. We will only be able to tell the British people the truth. If I might quote Winston Churchill yet again, he said to tell the British people the truth. If we tell the British people the truth, they will follow our lead, but I do not believe that that has been done and the consequences will be very serious for whichever party wins the next general election. I firmly believe that my party will do so, but these figures will not go away. The Fiscal Responsibility Bill, which I described as a Bill for fiscal irresponsibility, will do absolutely nothing about those figures. I believe that that Bill has been enacted now, and it is an attempt to reduce the deficit by half within the next four or five years. I am afraid that that will not deal with the level of real debt. When one speaks to the credit agencies and the people in the bond market, as I have, and asks what criteria decide what our rating will be in the international financial markets, they do not say that they are considering the accounting principles set by the Government. By the way, it is not just the Government—I have discovered today that these figures, according to the ONS, are agreed in conjunction with EUROSTAT. In other words, these are European statistical formulas that have been adopted. I shall come on to that in a moment, because the bottom line is that the real figures are being fudged, not only here and in Greece but in every other country in Europe, if things such as public sector liabilities are not included. The credit agencies and the bond market are not interested in the conjuring of accountants; they are interested in the bottom line. They will tell anyone that the real bottom line is the actual amount of debt, and Network Rail, the private finance initiative, nuclear decommissioning or public sector pensions cannot simply be magicked away. So when I speak about £3.1 trillion, which is a huge figure, with its consequences for public expenditure and the amount of money that people will have to be taxed, we have to be realistic; otherwise, we would not be telling the British people the truth. Other problems arise from the speech that I heard from the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Already the issue of youth unemployment is a big problem that the Government have not done enough to resolve. Unemployment among 16 to 24-year-olds now runs at 19.6 per cent., and we heard only the other day about the problems regarding further education and the lack of confidence among those who know most about that matter. We heard during the debate on access to higher education that the problems for further education are recognised in that sector. Unemployment among people at large—I am now referring to the International Labour Organisation's definition of unemployment—in October to December 2009 stood at about 2.5 million. That is 7.8 per cent. of all those who are economically active in this country. To that I would add the claimant count for jobseeker's allowance—that is, 1.635 million. In total, therefore, the unemployment figure that we should really be looking at is 4.1 million. We cannot ignore the reality of the figures, which are in the House of Commons Library research paper "Economic Indicators, March 2010". Employment among 16 to 24-year olds has fallen by 7.8 per cent., which is more than for any other age group, so young people are being badly served by this Government. Another factor is that the number of public sector workers has increased by 200,000 in the last two years. As I am sure that people know, when they think about it, there is not one penny of public expenditure that does not come from the—hopefully reasonable—tax paid on income from private enterprise. That is the sole source of money for public expenditure. We all want reasonable public services: I am not against that at all, but the figures that I have set out are unchallengeable facts. They come from the ONS and the House of Commons research department. I am certain that the Minister will not attempt to challenge them from the Dispatch Box, but the picture that they paint is tragic. The Budget does nothing to resolve the problems that the Government face. The problems are so deep that they will not be resolved by the policies produced yesterday. It is tragic, but the Government have failed and that is why, above all else, we have to get rid of them. However, it is impossible to disengage the Government's failure from other difficulties. We know that the truth has not been told on debt, where the problems accumulated as a result of massive, irresponsible and extravagant public expenditure by the previous Chancellor, who is now the Prime Minister, when times looked good. He and his Government now face ruin for the mistakes that they made, but the difficulties go beyond what has been going on in the UK. We had a debate on the Lisbon agenda in European Committee B only a few days ago. The hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) was also there, as was the Economic Secretary. I have attended many similar debates since that agenda was devised in 2000. Because of the European Communities Act 1972 and the slavish manner in which we fall in with most of the policies emerging from Europe, it is impossible to disentangle our policy making here from what goes on in Europe. I think that the hon. Member for Luton, North will recognise that many of the problems also stem from the Maastricht treaty. He and I were the only two people in the House when section 5 of the European Communities (Amendment) Act 1993 was debated. We referred to article 2 and the aspirations embedded in the European treaties to produce high employment and prosperity for the people of Europe. It has all come to nothing: it is a total failure, and it has led to the rise of the far right and high unemployment. We are not immune, because we are seeing that even in this country. Why have the British Airways people been on strike, and why are we seeing the beginnings of similar action in the railway industry as well? Those events are just indications of how the failure of the economy, connected with what is going on in Europe, is producing the tensions and uncertainty that are already undermining the people of this country.