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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I shall stop giving way for a time, Madam Deputy Speaker, to help with that. That quote was taken from an academic seminar at which I spoke before I was on the Front Bench. There were no doubt considered views of the same kind in my Budgets when I was addressing the same question—[Interruption.] The Secretary of State keeps quoting—he has probably got a whole wad of quotes of me and my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), the shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families—but I wish he would take more notice of what we say to him from the Dispatch Box and answer some of our questions. He should certainly take notice of my hon. Friend's education reforms. We are committed to recognising marriage in the tax system, and there are many ways of doing that—on which my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition will no doubt decide in due course. [Laughter.] I shall go back to the serious question. I have made my point about the debt. I do not object to the House having a good-natured debate about the most grave situations—I am sure that there have been entertaining debates when the nation has gone to war—but the gravity of our economic situation should not be underestimated. The public are about to take part in the general election campaign—or, rather, to listen to it and then vote—and they realise that this is a very big question. They are frustrated by the difficulty of deciding about it. The real question is this: are we going to have the present economic and financial crisis resolved by the democratically elected Government of this country, or are we going to have our affairs decided by a collapse in the bond markets and a further collapse in sterling, which is already devalued on a trade-weighted basis by 25 per cent.—the greatest devaluation, I think, since the second world war. What frustrates the public looking at the major parties is the fact that although we are all agreed on the dimensions of the problem, the present Government are simply not prepared to face up to them. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, not just the Chief Secretary, acknowledged that cuts would have to be deeper and tougher than those under the Thatcher Government. I said that some weeks ago and the Chief Secretary appears to have repeated it. The only person who has difficulty repeating it is the Children Secretary, but it is a fact, not an opinion, that we are going to have to get into some extremely serious spending cuts. Whoever is elected will have to make those cuts. If by chance we were to re-elect a Government who did not have a credible plan and who did not have the political will to face up to the problem—if the present Government were re-elected, they would not do so—the process would have to be introduced by the International Monetary Fund. As happened before, we would have conditions imposed on us to restore our solvency in the eyes of the bond markets. That is the background against which the Government are not treating the House or the country properly and against which the Government have failed to produce a Budget that could be rationally debated as an approach to the crisis on the eve of an election.