Treasury and Work and Pensions

I am a company director and a pension trustee, and I have declared my interests in the register. This afternoon was a great missed opportunity. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had a fairly full House. He could have reported on his stewardship of the United Kingdom economy over the years. He could have explained why the Treasury wishes to sponsor legislation in the forthcoming Session. He could have taken us through the legislation that the other economic Departments are sponsoring, and he could have told us how he wished to tackle the obvious problems that we see around us in the British economy. Instead, he chose to be even more juvenile than he usually is. To summarise the Chancellor’s speech, it said that a number of Conservative Back Benchers had, over the months, called for various taxes to be reduced or abolished and that if we added all those up, it would amount to a lot of money—which, by some mystery, would be the first Budget of an incoming Chancellor of the Exchequer for the Conservative party. Dream on, Chancellor of the Exchequer. My hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor has made it clear that he will not produce a shadow Budget until much nearer the general election. How wise he is. We have no idea how much worse the public accounts will be before we have the chance to govern the country again. We also believe that if the Chancellor becomes Prime Minister, he will need to delay a general election until 2010, so there is a lot more scope for him to debauch the public accounts. The Chancellor is driven to living in a make-believe world where any random comment by a Back Bencher or any aspiration by the Conservative party is wrongly reported as likely Government policy for 2010, which really does not do the House any good.