Banking Bill

I am sorry that the right hon. Gentleman does not like the phrase, but it was in the Prime Minister's conference speech, so if we are not allowed to repeat it in the Chamber of the House of Commons, we have come to a pretty pass. It is a shame that the Government have not used the Bill to enact the kind of future-looking changes to the regulatory system that would ensure that that happened. We will give the Bill our support and help its passage because we support the measures in it, not least because we proposed some of them, but we will also remind people of the 10 years of economic policy and regulatory mistakes that brought us to the point at which the banking system in this country was on the verge of collapse and the taxpayer had to bail it out. We will offer people the kind of far-reaching changes that will not only enable us to deal with banks that have failed, but help us to prevent those failures in the first place, by ensuring that we never again build an economy on unsustainable debt.