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Section 5 of the European Communities (Amendment) Act 1993

I am not as skilled as the hon. Gentleman in using the internet. Old-fashioned though it may be, I go to shops and buy books, I am afraid. As for the Budget, the reality is that it will not solve our economic problems. Our problems are not really about the deficit; they are to do with unemployment. Looking back, another time when we had an enormous public debt and enormous deficits was the second world war, after which the then Labour Government ran a full-employment economy, which was the way they overcame our problems. If our Budget was directed towards creating employment, we too would solve many of our problems. The important thing is to generate directly in labour-intensive areas, which are not expensive. We are talking about relatively low-paid workers in the public services or the construction sector—labour-intensive sectors with low import content, which are just the sort of sectors where we want to be generating. However, public services and construction are the very sectors we are cutting. If we had a massive Government-driven house building programme, along with the creation of more public service jobs, we would bring down unemployment and people would be paying taxes rather than living on benefits, and over time the deficit would solve itself. That is what the Labour Government did after 1945. We were living in Keynesian times then, and I think that Keynes was absolutely right. I like to think that if he were here now, he would be saying what I am saying, albeit possibly in a more sophisticated way.