Treasury and Work and Pensions

It is a great pleasure to contribute to the debate and to follow the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr. Anderson), who gave us an impassioned history lesson on the politics of 20 years ago. As I was not a Member of the House in those days, I found it quite refreshing to imagine what life must have been like in the Thatcher years. Let us turn to the real subject of this debate, which is not what happened in 1986 but what is happening in 2006. I have to say that I was disappointed by the Chancellor’s contribution, as I am sure many Members in all parts of the House were. I was anticipating that, in his farewell appearance at a Queen’s Speech debate in the role of Chancellor, he might put on a magisterial display and range across the successes under his chancellorship. Instead, we had a policy-lite speech that consisted primarily of attacks on Conservative Back Benchers. When we look at Hansard tomorrow, we will see that he spent more time criticising members of the No Turning Back group than he did on Labour party policy. That may have had something to do with the fact that he threw away most of his speech on Labour policy because he was so enraged by the reaction of Opposition Members. That is not a particularly encouraging sign of what we can look forward to should he become Prime Minister shortly. I shall talk about what the Chancellor did not want to talk about—his legacy—and the need for sound public finance. We hear often from the Chancellor about his successes, but he chooses to gloss over those elements of the economy that have been less successful. I shall focus on a couple of those elements tonight. In 1997, we had had five years of rising GDP and, as a Labour Member who spoke earlier seemed conveniently to forget, that growth rose at a higher rate in the last five years of the Conservative Government than it has on average in the nearly 10 years of the Labour Government. They do not like to be reminded of that.