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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I wholly agree with my hon. Friend. Indeed, when the public are trying to make sense of what they probably regard as the confused arguments about tax, spending, borrowing and all the rest, they should recall two previous occasions when similar issues were posed. One was early in the Thatcher Government, when we also had a huge fiscal crisis. We went in for fiscal discipline and a tight monetary policy in order to get stability, and that produced growth. We were bitterly opposed by the Labour party, however. I took over during a comparatively minor fiscal crisis, albeit an important one: £50 billion was the annual deficit figure that frightened me when I became Chancellor of the Exchequer. I went in for fiscal discipline and a strict monetary policy, and I was fiercely opposed in terms that the Secretary of State still longingly recalls. He sometimes forgot that it was the Major Government, rather than the Thatcher Government, whom he was attacking. We were bitterly opposed. Now, we have the worst recession—the deepest and longest that we have ever had—and the worst fiscal problems that we have ever faced. We are proposing to tackle that with sensible, courageous fiscal policies while maintaining proper monetary policies. Labour Members call themselves neo-Keynesians, but they are actually the populist, short-term, vote-catching, easy-way-out people of so-called new Labour, and they are opposing the same approach being taken again, dressing it up and—with great respect—getting things rather confused.