Finance Bill

The Economic Secretary is moving from being sensible to playing silly crude politics of the kind that he and his boss always play, and it does not do him justice. I was very clear; I said that the proportion would fall faster only if the amount spent on public services was rising faster because the overall growth rate had accelerated—and that is the statement with which I will leave him. I can tell him that I do not envisage a Conservative Government cutting the share of public spending in national income as quickly as the Chancellor did at the beginning of his period in office—but who knows? If growth were really fast, it would be possible to do that safely, and to give people back some of the proceeds of that faster growth; that would reinforce the growth rate. However, as the Economic Secretary well knows, one can play all sorts of tricks with compound arithmetic and percentages. If he now rushes out a press release saying that I have signed up to massive cuts, it will be another typical piece of misinformation, and will bear no relation to what I have just said to the House. I am strongly of the view that we will need to increase spending on nurses, teachers and doctors, as the current Government did, and as the Conservative Government before them did. We will argue about the percentages and proportions nearer the time when we come into office, when we can see how big the need is, and how much resource there might be. There are lots of other areas in which we will not need to spend so much. When we come into office, we will be able to cancel the identity card scheme and the wasteful centralised computer schemes, if they are still running. We will be able to get rid of a lot of regional government; I recommend that to the Economic Secretary as a good cut to make.