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Economic Affairs and Work and Pensions

It was the shadow Chancellor who said—and we were reminded of this—that the cuts would be deeper than anything that Margaret Thatcher had undertaken, and that was the proposal from the Labour party when it was in government. It is unfortunately an economic fact that the budget deficit that this country faces is higher than at any point in our peacetime history, and whoever forms the Government of this country has to deal with that budget deficit and cannot ignore it. Indeed, there is a rather striking fact about the Labour Government's proposals, which they left in their Budget book—the shadow Chancellor has a copy in front of him. There are £50 billion of cuts built into the Labour Budget produced in March, and not one single pound of those cuts has yet been identified by the Labour party.