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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I do not know whether the Secretary of State does the research for the Prime Minister, who is also very fond of quoting me, but he has just used the same quotation twice. As I have just explained, I certainly agree that there should be no tax reductions, or abandoning of tax increases, unless it can be explained how they will be paid for. What I said was what I said, and what has happened since then is this: we have had the reports from Gershon and Reed, and we have settled down and studied them. We have worked out that of their £12 billion savings, £6 billion can certainly be secured. That can pay for what we have proposed. As I have just said, increases in national insurance are particularly disastrous. What a responsible Government should have tackled is the public spending programme for the next three years. They should have produced a review of the changes that were needed to address the deficit. That has not been done, and it is extremely difficult for an Opposition to do it. A strange background is provided to the debate by what I consider to have been the most cynical of all the decisions made by the Government in the last 12 months: the deliberate decision to put off a public spending round in the run-up to an election. According to the Government's own programme, there was supposed to be a full public spending round. That would have informed everyone's debate, and would have set out priorities properly. The excuse given for its postponement was pathetic: "uncertainty". No one believes that. Everyone knows that it was postponed because the Government did not want to address any of these questions in the run-up to an election. That displays unforgiveable cynicism. We as the Opposition party keep getting pressed by exasperated journalists and members of the public to give details of what cuts we would make, but even when the information available to us is not complicated further by the explanations offered by the Children Secretary, but is set down on paper in English prose, it is not adequate to address that question. Similarly, Secretaries of State need to take advice from within their Department and negotiate with the Chief Secretary and his officials before they can draw up a possible programme. We need to have a public spending round, but this Government suspended that out of cynicism—out of pure electoral opportunism.