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The Budget

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. That situation has many parallels with the situation in 1979, when the IMF was on the brink of stepping in to take a long hard look at this country’s finances because we were spending far more money than we took in revenue. I do not accept that we can blame this on the banks, as the right hon. Member for Neath tried to do. By his own analysis, the banking crisis cost us £90 billion. I believe that the Treasury Committee looked at the matter and said that, although it was hard to come up with a figure, the cost was about $50 billion. I accept that its report came out some time ago and that things may have changed. However, it also said that the cost might be a lot less than that, because a lot of that money was put into the banks in the form of shares, which may at some point result in a net profit for the Government. Let me take the right hon. Member for Neath at his word and accept that it has cost us £90 billion. When his Government left office, the national debt was £950 billion, of which £350 billion was the responsibility of the Government in 1997. Let us say that £440 billion of that debt of £950 billion was arguably not the fault of the Labour party. That still leaves around £500 billion that clearly was its fault—it cannot get away from that. It cannot say on the one hand that the whole thing was down to the banks when the maximum that we have given to them is £90 billion out of a total of £950 billion. What about all the other hundreds of billions of pounds? Whose fault is that? Now we come to the crux of the Labour party’s economic thesis, which is that if we spend lots of money that we do not have, somehow it will create growth and mean that we can pay off all the money that we have spent and have some sort of profit left over. I find that that economic argument, which I suppose is Keynesianism, has been disproved on many different occasions. I thought that it was finally put to rest by a former Labour Prime Minister in 1978, Callaghan, who I think said, ““We used to think we could tax and spend our way out of recession. I tell you in all honesty that that is no longer possible.”” I believe that it was either a Labour Prime Minister or Chancellor of the Exchequer who said that to a Labour party conference in 1978. He realised, as most people understand, that someone cannot simply borrow money, spend money that they do not have, and hope that that is going to create some sort of profit that will allow them to pay the whole thing back. The Labour party accepted that before the general election, when it was happy to talk about cutting public expenditure to a level of around four fifths of the amount that the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties are now doing. To say the least, it is very disappointing that, finding itself in opposition, it now opposes every single cut that the Government are making and refusing outright—we saw the right hon. Member for Neath wriggling like a fly on a hook when he was asked this question—to say what cuts they would make when they would have made four fifths of the same cuts that we are making. I know that many Members wish to speak today. I would like to end the fairy tales and talk about finance. We had more humbug from the right hon. Gentleman than one would have found in the old pick-and-mix at Woolworths. It was the hon. Member for Islwyn who made the most sensible comment today when he said that we all know that, in business, poor performance leads to the sack. Opposition Members have been given the sack, and it is now up to the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats to get the finances in order and get the country back on its feet again.