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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

What I said, or what I thought I said, was that we would cut child tax credits for high earners. [Hon. Members: "No!"] Well, if I mispronounced it, then I mispronounced it. [Interruption.] No, we are not talking about cutting child benefit; that is quite clear. We are talking about child tax credits. Let me be absolutely clear, and I apologise if I did mispronounce it, because the policy is unambiguous. Let me turn to the Budget pluses and minuses. There are pluses. First, the Chancellor clearly did not accept some of the demands that were being made of him to run a populist Budget. He restrained himself from that, which is a big contrast with earlier Budgets. I go back, for example, to 1992, when there was a similar situation. The economy was in difficulty and an election was coming. Large offerings were made, which had to be withdrawn a few months later. This Chancellor, to some credit, has desisted in that respect. The second, rather minor, positive is the fact that the Chancellor's news on economic borrowing was slightly less severe than it could have been, but that is a little like someone grappling with a very large overdraft discovering that their mobile phone bill is not quite as bad as they thought it would be. Still, it is good news. The other positive, though I say this slightly sardonically, is the fact that we have had an accurate description of what the fiscal problem actually is—the scale of it and the time scale over which it is due to be dealt with. However, that is a little like saying that the Chancellor has identified and acknowledged, probably for the first time, the fact that we have a very large elephant in the room; has carefully measured the elephant, telling us that in eight years' time it will become a mouse; and has suggested a time scale over which that contraction will occur, but without at any point explaining to us the biology by which that elephant will transform itself into a mouse. There was no discussion whatever of the what and the how of the fiscal contraction occurring.