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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I had thought that the Conservative party was supposed to have stopped banging on about Europe. I do not remember having mentioned the single European currency in my speech. My view is that it is would not be right for Britain to join it now, but I would not rule it out as an article of blind faith for all time. It is not inconceivable, in my view, that there could be a time in the future when joining might be more advisable, but that point has not yet been reached. I was talking about the deficit, about what reductions in public expenditure would be necessary and about the Government's vagueness on that subject. It was somewhat depressing to hear the hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) a few moments ago. When she was asked to identify how a particular policy initiative would be paid for, she dipped yet again into this pot marked ““administrative waste”” and said that there was so much money available in it that it could fund unlimited goodies. I remember being present at Treasury debates a couple of years ago, when all that administration was carried out in much the same way as it is now, where I was told by the Conservative shadow Chancellor and other Conservative Members that the Conservative party would match Labour's spending commitments in every single Department. If the party was going to match all those departmental commitments when all that money was being wasted, why did they not raise concerns at that point about the need to reprioritise that money? I am sceptical of the ability of administrative trimming to pay for the largesse that the Labour and Conservative parties claim it will pay for. I readily acknowledge that there is a way to go, that my party has not spelled out every detail and that we need further policy development, but the reason why respected commentators readily acknowledge that the Liberal Democrats have gone further in this regard than both of the old parties is that we have been more specific and more detailed about the type of cuts in public spending that we think are necessary. So, for example, people who receive tax credits when they have salaries that would be the envy of most households will see a reduction in those credits. For another example, we have talked about child trust funds. Just over a year ago, I remember participating in a Statutory Instrument Committee on which I was the only person willing to say that child trust funds are not affordable in the current circumstances. Both the Labour and Conservative parties supported them at that time, even though we were already living in a different budgetary context from when the policy was first introduced. We have also talked about longer-term projects such as ID cards and aspects of our defence procurement. We have gone through such strategies in much more detail than the other parties, but this is a process that all political parties will have to face sooner rather than later. There is a conspiracy of silence before the general election, and I believe that people deserve better than that in a democracy. That brings me to the final feature of my speech. A Budget this close to a general election will, of course, inevitably be a political as well as an economic exercise. We are looking as politicians—and, I suppose, the wider public, insofar as they are following these matters in detail—at what the Budget says about the values and policy priorities of the Government of the day and those of the Opposition parties that aspire to replace that Government. When I looked at the Budget in that regard, I found it wanting. I give some credit, however, insofar as there was something that came at least some way towards representing a vision on environmental-led growth, green jobs, environmental investment and so forth—areas that my party has been keen to bring to the fore. As I say, there were some elements of that in the Budget speech. However, two other features of my party's policy platform to which I had hoped the Government would give more prominence were conspicuous by their absence. The first is a vision of a fairer, more equitable society in which, in particular, people on low incomes are more self-reliant, have more of their own money to spend and can forge their own way in the world with greater freedom and independence. That vision of taxation has been a central feature of our policy platform, in the form of our proposal to raise the starting point for income tax to £10,000 a year. What surprised me more, coming from a Labour Government, was the lack of a vision of how we could do more to increase social mobility, so that people could prosper and succeed in the world without the welfare or well-being of their parents being necessarily an accurate guide to their prospects. My party has given the greatest policy priority to the so-called pupil premium, which represents a direct attempt to target more money on improving the life opportunities of people who start at a relative disadvantage. I do not claim that Labour has done nothing in that regard; many Labour politicians—indeed, politicians in all parties—take the agenda seriously. Nevertheless, I think that it could and should have been a bigger and more explicit feature of the Budget.