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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

It is a great pleasure to serve under your enlightened chairmanship of this debate, Mr Deputy Speaker. The debate has focused much on the immediate challenges and some specific measures, but I want to focus on the big picture. This Budget has seen a tax cut for 24 million working people and a wide range of measures to help Britain earn its way in the world. After all, this Budget was part of a series of Budgets to tackle the challenge of how to turn this country around after years of economic mismanagement. Some of that requires difficult and controversial decisions to be taken, but the fruits of these labours are not in the next day's headlines, but in preparing our country for the world we live in. My generation does not have the certainties of an economic world in which our main competitors were in the west—indeed, in the north-west of the globe and centred around the north Atlantic. We must compete against the growing tigers of the east and the growing and rapidly developing economies of the south, yet our economy was left unprepared for that. We all know that the fiscal situation was dire. Action has been taken over the past two years to deal with our debts, but we also need to ensure that we can earn our way in the world. Understanding the international context might be helped by a few facts and figures, showing that we cannot any longer rely simply on trading with the old world to earn our living. Over the latest period, demand for UK exports by the European Union has been falling. Compared with January last year, the value of our trade with the EU is down £300 million, while exports to France fell by 14% and by 3.5% to Ireland. Those falls were more than offset by increases in exports to the rest of the world, however. Exports to the rest of the world are up 16% since January last year. Trade with China is up 30%, and trade to India is up 15%. There have also been rises in respect of economies with which we do not have much of a history of trade; our trade with South Korea, for instance, is up 145%. Our trade with our Commonwealth partner, South Africa, is up 57%, too. It is clear that our international trade patterns are changing rapidly, and we can no longer simply rely on Europe and north America to pull us through.