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Comprehensive Spending Review

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, but I suggest that having a large deficit with a smallish debt is still a worse situation to be in, in many ways, than that of a small deficit and a very large debt. At some point—I hope by about 2014 or 2015—we will have the debt under control and the deficit will be down to zero, but at the moment the deficit is running completely out of control and that is what is likely to scare the financial markets. That is the situation that the previous Government bequeathed us. I am suggesting that the deficit is even more of a problem than the actual size of the debt. I will not spend a long time reciting an economic history of the country since 1992, fun though that would be, but it would show that the Conservative party’s record on the economy has at all times been good. We could go back to the 1940s and show that every Labour Government have precipitated a financial collapse that the Conservative party has had to clear up. Clement Attlee almost ruined the country and was only able to set up the welfare state on the back of American war loans. It was Harold Wilson who devalued sterling and said that the pound in our pocket would remain exactly the same, and it was Jim Callaghan who came out with the line, ““Crisis? What crisis?”” That was just before practically everyone went on strike, which was the last time we had to go to the International Monetary Fund.