---

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

We have heard some excellent speeches this evening. This has also been a poignant debate, with six valedictories. They were delivered by the hon. Members for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mr. Purchase) and for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay); by my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack); by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe), whom I had the privilege of serving under when she was shadow Secretary of State for Health; by my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell), who led for the Opposition on the first Standing Committee on which I had the pleasure of serving in this place; and by the right hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond), who said, in referring to his own, that a Member's maiden speech is often the best speech that they make in this place. I suspect that that might not be the case for all Members, but it is probably beyond question that it is the best rehearsed speech any Member ever makes in this place. I pay tribute to all of the departing Members, and I am sure that I speak for all of us in wishing them well whatever they do in the future. The scale of the fiscal and economic challenge this country faces is unprecedented. The backdrop to the Budget is stark: unprecedented levels of public borrowing and structural imbalance in the public finances. Despite the prediction that we would "lead the world" out of recession, Britain was the last G20 country to emerge from a recession that was the longest and deepest on record. We still have the biggest Budget deficit in the G20 and one of the weakest economic recoveries. In February of this year alone, the Labour Government borrowed more than they will spend on police and immigration in the whole year. They are racking up debt at a rate of more than £300,000 a minute—a legacy to our children and our grandchildren that will take them a lifetime to pay off. Our credit rating is under threat; one in five young people in this country cannot find a job; child poverty is increasing; the banking system cannot finance the recovery in the small and medium-sized business sector; and national income per head is lower in real terms now than it was at the last general election. Therefore, what we needed last Wednesday was a big Budget: a Budget to match the scale of the challenges the country faces; a Budget for recovery; a Budget with the vision and the toughness to tackle the challenges we face, not duck them. This Budget was Labour's last chance to bid for fiscal credibility, and they blew it. For the Chancellor personally, it was the last opportunity to secure his legacy, but he chose partisanship over statesmanship. What did he give us? He gave us a Budget whose good news announcement was that we are borrowing "only" £167 billion this year and £163 billion next year; a Budget whose only big ideas—the stamp duty cut for first-time buyers, the green investment bank and new university places—were stolen from the Conservatives; an empty, cynical, pre-election Budget, lacking in energy, lacking in vision, lacking in new ideas to get the economy moving again. It shows no sign of the Government's having grasped the scale of the mess they have got us into. It is therefore unsurprising that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) said it was "not so much a Budget as a holding statement." A City commentator described it as""a do-nothing Budget that had shades of Nero about it"." It contains nothing to deal with the legacy of Labour's debt, nothing to put this country back on the path to sustainable prosperity—instead, just more delay, dissembling and ducking of the tough decisions. Perhaps we should not be too surprised when we look at the track record of this Government and this Prime Minister: the man who ended boom and bust; the man who doubled the tax rate for the poor and destroyed social mobility in this country; the financial genius who sold the nation's gold reserves at a quarter of what they are now worth; the visionary who raided our pension funds and destroyed a pension system that was once the envy of Europe; who has doubled our national debt and set it on course to double again; who has made an art form of deferring the bad news; and who has made every decision since this crisis began on the basis not of what is good for Britain's economy, but of what will conceal the scale of his failure until after a general election. His credibility is destroyed. Just a few months ago, he was still peddling the line, "Labour investment versus Tory cuts", but now his own Chancellor says that the cuts will be deeper and tougher than Margaret Thatcher's. What did we get from the Chancellor in the Budget statement on his planned spending cuts? We got about 30 seconds in a 58-minute speech, with the real announcement sneaked out later in the afternoon in a series of press releases that were meaningless in their content and bogus in their precision. I am thinking of the £343 million—not £340 million—of savings identified in the Ministry of Justice over the next three years and the £194 million saving to be made in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Those are meaningless and bogus because the Prime Minister has refused to allow his Chancellor to publish a spending review for the next three years. A departmental saving is meaningless if we do not know what the departmental budget is to start with. Cabinet Ministers, including the Schools Secretary, have been tripping over themselves to claim that they have to cut only X hundred million or Y hundred million pounds from their budgets. The truth is that they do not know how much they will have to cut, because they do not know what their budgets will be as the Chancellor has not told them and he has not told the electorate. He has not told the electorate for a reason, which is that he does not want them to know because he does not want a real debate on spending priorities.