---

Regional Economy (Tackling the Recession)

I am a very strong supporter of the decision of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor to intervene and to use public money where private money had failed. What started as a debt crisis in the United States travelled rapidly around the world as a liquidity crisis for financial institutions and then passed on throughout the whole of the private sector economy of the developed world. There was the potential for a worldwide collapse of the banking system to set recessionary forces at work in the world economy. Although the origins would not have been the same, the outcome would, in effect, have been the same as the events in the late 1920s. The effects were seen in the early years of the 1930s, a much troubled decade. Nowhere were the effects felt more strongly than in our region. I regard it as a core responsibility of mine, while I hold this office, to ensure that our region does not return to anything that remotely approaches the grim days that we faced in the 1930s. For those who think that we should go back to those days, precipitating a banking crisis is the right way to set off such a thing. It is the responsibility and the duty of the Government to intervene and to ensure that that does not happen, and to use the strength of the public purse and the management of public finances to take a long-term rather than a short or even medium-term view of such things, and that is the approach that the Government have adopted.