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Comprehensive Spending Review

I shall keep that very much in mind, Mr Owen. I am quite missing the shadow Secretary of State for Wales, because for all his many faults he has a similar effect on me as reading the Daily M ail in the morning does, in that as soon as I have heard him speak I want to get up and do likewise, at great length and with great passion. But as with so many other things, when one starts off with great passion and is cut off halfway through, it is hard to maintain the same level of enthusiasm. [ Laughter. ] I feel the same about sports; I do not know what right hon. and hon. Members are laughing at. I came back to the Committee Room early, and I amused myself with a few mathematical calculations. On my little piece of paper, I drew a depiction of 1 cm, and I thought, ““If that centimetre equals £1 million, what would equal £1 billion?”” I did the maths, and found out that it would be 10 metres, so a graph showing £1 billion would stretch halfway down the room. To properly show £160 billion, which is the deficit that the previous Government left us, we would need a graph stretching back to Waterloo station, and if we wanted to show the £1 trillion debt, the graph would stretch to somewhere to the west of Hammersmith bridge. That all goes to show that the previous Government left us with a mighty problem. The shadow Secretary of State for Wales made a load of comparisons. He talked about the bond market, but ignored the fact that that market was clearly reacting to the presumption that any Government formed after the election would cut spending in this country. He made some comparison with Japan, but Japan is not a very good country for anyone to compare themselves with. It has had the lost decade, with some of the worst debt of any country and a huge economic collapse; yet it was mentioned twice. I suppose that it is an improvement on Rwanda, with which the right hon. Gentleman once compared Wales. The right hon. Gentleman kept making the point, in various ways, that debt as a percentage of gross domestic product was not that great. I hear that phrase a lot, and I do not understand it. The reality is that if a country’s spending is £680 billion and its earnings are £520 billion, the deficit is £160 billion, which is a serious problem. It is all very well saying, ““Compared with GDP, it is not that bad,”” but if one’s income is £52,000 and one’s spending is £68,000, that is a problem.