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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw), and I will try to respond to his challenges. The Budget statement treads water while this reckless Government cut too fast and too deep. While the Deputy Prime Minister confides that there will be nothing for him to disagree with the Prime Minister about in future television debates, the nation suffers. Indeed, the nation is bracing itself for worse to come. I was proud to join more than 250,000 honest Britons on the march for the alternative on Saturday. That was the big society in action, rising up to say no thank you to the Government, and I am happy to spell out what the alternative is. Strangely, it is the very alternative that the British people voted for last May. Let us be clear: no individual party won the 2010 election. The British people essentially said, ““A plague on all your houses.”” One thing is certain, however: they roundly rejected the Conservative argument that there was a need to clear the deficit in double-quick time over four years. That argument was well put by the Tory party and the Tory media, but the British people gave it a resounding no. Instead, more people voted for candidates who argued that the deficit needed to be reduced more carefully and more slowly. As someone who has run an organisation employing more than 250 people, I well know the difference between making cuts of, say, 8% and 16%. Chief constables said that they could manage a cut of up to 12%, but that anything greater would harm front-line services. The front-loading of cuts in public expenditure will also make the situation far worse. There are many of us in the Chamber who have run real organisations in the real world, and we know that savings can be more intelligently and better made when they are properly planned and actioned over time. There is a massive difference between the quantum of the service reductions being recklessly driven forward by this Government and the approach that Labour has argued for. Alongside cuts in spending and tax increases, there is a need for growth to address the deficit. The Government's plan for growth is this vacuous document, and in its four-point plan, it is silent on how to stimulate the biggest driver for growth—demand. That is not surprising as the actions of this Government have been to machete demand. With consumer confidence in free-fall, unemployment rising exponentially and inflation fuelled by a VAT hike, living standards are being eroded and the economy is contracting. All this is before the cuts in public expenditure hit next month and we see record job losses in the public sector and the lowering of demand for goods and services in the private sector. It is not, I am afraid, a pretty picture.