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The Budget

I hear that comment from a sedentary position. Somebody said that Labour went on to reduce the national debt further, and indeed they did. They accepted the previous Conservative Government’s spending plans, and for two years they paid off the national debt. We were running a surplus, and I congratulate them for that. Then, in about 2001, for some reason they suddenly decided to start spending. I am sure that it had absolutely nothing to do with the election that started to loom. They began spending at a rate that must have averaged well over £30 billion a year, because by 2008, before we had had any problems at all with the banks, they had increased the size of the national debt from £350 billion to £650 billion.