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Comprehensive Spending Review

I am certainly more than happy to pay tribute to British business, but I do not connect the first part of the hon. Gentleman's question with the second. Last week two more myths were added to the Chancellor's own special edition of Grimm's fairy tales. He now claims that the measures in the spending review are fair, and even that the scale of the cuts would have been greater under Labour. Let us start with fairness. Last Wednesday, the Chancellor told us that fairness was"““one of the guiding principles of this spending review””.—[Official Report, 20 October 2010; Vol. 516, c. 955.]" Not for the first time, this spin lasted barely 24 hours, before the Institute for Fiscal Studies comprehensively rejected it, proving that, far from the poorest being protected, it is the poorest who will bear the brunt of the cuts. It is families with children who will pay the most. We should not be surprised at that, because the Institute for Fiscal Studies was scathing of the Treasury's analysis of who loses what.