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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

The hon. Gentleman makes a further point, suggesting, as we go through this year of more openness and scrutiny, that the Leader of the House might wish to pay further attention to the Budget as part of that process. My hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) has made a similar point. Twenty-four hours later, we are armed with the necessary information to be able to digest exactly what has happened in this Budget statement in a way that we were unable to do during the hour of the speech itself. Having been able to take stock and read the small print, we can make a full assessment of this Budget. Considering the state of the nation's finances and the urgency of getting public spending under control and assisting businesses that are still not getting support from the banks, there was very little to write home about. As the headline in the Financial Times, which is pretty much a neutral newspaper, put it: "Darling ducks deficit challenge". This Budget has really been more about election tactics—the survival of Labour rather than what is good for Britain. I can imagine the discussions that took place in the last couple of weeks, in the lead-up to this, with people saying, "How do we manage this exercise for the benefit of our party in surviving through the next election?" I am guessing that it came down to three principal tactics. First, with borrowing at £11 billion less than predicted, how can that be spun in a way to suggest that there is a successful story and fine stewardship in navigating the troubled waters of the recession? Of course, that tactic has to be employed without mentioning the fact that we were the first country in the G8 to enter recession and last country to come out of it. It must also be spun in such a way that we are borrowing £163 billion, of which it costs £43 billion a year simply to do the borrowing. From an international credit rating perspective, that borrowing continues to be under threat. The second tactic that I think was adopted was the idea of stealing some headline-grabbing measures from the Tories and taking credit for them in order to close off potential lines of attack during the election. That is why we saw the abolition of stamp duty for homes under £250,000, the inheritance tax threshold frozen, and more university places offered. Of course, that tactic works only when one does not mention that it was a Tory proposal to abolish stamp duty in that way, that it was the Conservatives who decided to raise the inheritance tax threshold to over £1 million, and that it was the Tories who put forward the idea of more university places. What has also now been exposed, thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Tatton, is that the university places funding scheme is available only for one year, yet the average university course takes up to three years. The third tactic that I think has been employed is to rally the Labour party with eye-catching headlines on measures such as tax information-sharing with that good old country, Belize. Well, of course that got a big laugh—the biggest laugh of the day—but the enormous build-up to the big hoo-hah when this announcement was made suggests that the Budget is not being taken too seriously. Why not get to the core of the issue by doing what the Conservatives have been proposing—capping the level of contributions made to party funding? That is something that the Government could have done in any one of the 13 years in which they have been in power. Instead, they decided to go for gimmicky headline-grabbing measures. The same applies to the amount of money for repairing potholes—£100 million. Anyone who was listening to the "Today" programme this morning would be aware that repairing the roads to the necessary standards that we expect would cost £9 billion, so £100 million will not go very far, and it will probably cause arguments as to how and where it is spent, with possibly more going to Labour seats than Tory ones.