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Comprehensive Spending Review

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the deficit was the price paid to avoid a massive depression, a price that the present Government would not pay, and that the way to get that deficit down is through a combination of focusing on jobs and growth, progressive taxation and savings over a longer period, and not throwing nearly 500,000 people from the public sector onto the scrap heap, alongside another million from the private sector? It is throwing people into poverty. We do not require an unfair and unnecessary return to the failed policies of the past.