Pre-Budget Report

The numbers suggest that the debt position is not as alarming as the right hon. Gentleman says. The current public sector net debt is 36.3 per cent. of GDP. In the last year of the Government of which he was a member, it was actually 42.5 per cent. Is he saying that circumstances today are so different from the circumstances that the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) inherited, with a fiscal expansion under that Government of 3 per cent. of GDP between 1990 and 1993-94?