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Comprehensive Spending Review

That is the message that consistently comes from our constituents. I want to refer to the different context in which the comprehensive spending review is now undertaken. When, years ago, Governments came to the Welsh Grand Committee to discuss how money was to be spent, the Secretary of State ran Wales through the then Welsh Office, but it is now different. The relationship between the devolved Administrations and the United Kingdom Government is necessarily different from what it used to be. The Secretary of State for Wales will know that not long ago the First Ministers of Scotland, Northern Ireland and, of course, Wales jointly issued a statement declaring that Government economic policy, which she and her colleagues outlined this morning, was fundamentally wrong. There is a real difference of view about how we should tackle the economy and the deficit between those who head the three devolved Administrations, the Government and the Opposition. The shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Neath, has made an excellent case to show that the issue about the deficit is not what Ministers have described today. It may happen before we finish this afternoon, but none of the speeches so far today has mentioned the word ““bank,”” which is also never mentioned in the Chamber. It is an inconvenient word for the Conservatives, because they know that the deficit we faced was overwhelmingly caused by the banking crisis. I know that, because I was then a member of the Cabinet and of the National Economic Council. Every day, we knew that the Government had to take decisions to tackle the fundamental problems of the crisis, otherwise all our constituents in Wales would have gone to the holes in the wall in town centres and no money would have come out. As a consequence of a collapse of the banking system, society as we know it would have collapsed. Overwhelmingly, the deficit was the consequence of the banking crisis. The world knew that; the only people who do not know it are the Conservatives.