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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. It is a colloquialism, but we often talk about the direction of travel. My point is that freezing personal allowances is completely the wrong direction of travel. I hope that an incoming Conservative Government will start increasing personal allowances, giving people more money to spend, so that they can meet their basic needs. With the Government's announcement, income tax will now start to be paid on 27 per cent. of national average earnings, which is far too low a figure. My next, brief point is this. I have been doing a bit of bedtime reading, and I was recently looking at "The Right Approach to the Economy: Outline of an Economic Strategy for the next Conservative Government", which was produced in 1977. Among its authors were the noble Lords Howe and Howell, and it was edited by the father of my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude), who is playing a key role in ensuring that we are well prepared for government. It is an historic document, and, interestingly, it reminds us that we have been here before. Back in 1951, at the end of a Labour Government, we found ourselves in an enormous crisis. In 1977, when "The Right Approach to the Economy" was written, we were also in an enormous crisis, and on both occasions, the crisis was largely contributed to by a Labour Government having had runaway expenditure in previous years and having built up an enormous deficit. One of the big problems that we are now suffering from is that during the period before the global financial crisis, the Government were running a deficit of £34 billion, when we should have had a surplus. That is symptomatic of the recklessness with which they were managing the economy, and we are now reaping the whirlwind. The tax strategy outlined in "The Right Approach to the Economy" was to have four major elements:""Lower personal taxation to restore work incentives…An enterprise package of measures to stimulate business growth…Stronger encouragement to personal savings and capital building on the widest possible scale,"" and "Simplification of the system." Those four recipes are as relevant today as they were in 1977. Indeed, one of the papers over the weekend referred to the fact that Finance Bills are now about 10 times the size that they used to be. The system is grossly complex. Think of how much money is wasted just in administering it, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Briefly, my last point concerns the amount of debt interest. The pie chart on page 11 of the Red Book shows that debt interest payments stand at £43 billion. The most hated tax in my constituency is council tax. The income from council tax is only £26 billion, so if we were not paying so much debt interest, we could abolish council tax. That is the extent to which we have got ourselves into a problem of overhanging debt, produced by this Government, for which we are all paying dearly. There are obviously various other ways in which one could carve that figure up, but the big thing missing from that pie chart on Government spending by function is anything about waste. The amount of Government spending that is wasted is significant, and it should be included in a pie chart, with a figure for the billions of pounds that are wasted. That chart needs to be improved. I hope that an incoming Conservative Government will include a figure for waste, so that we can see over the course of that Government how the figure will decline. The Government suggested, with a bit of smoke and mirrors, that they could do away with our problems by making a few economies in individual Departments, but my hon. Friend the Member for Tatton, speaking from the Front Bench, was absolutely brilliant when he quoted directly from the people on the front line in those Departments. Let us hope that we have similar frankness from those people when we get into government. Then we can have a real campaign to show exactly what an awful inheritance we are going to have.