Amendment of the law

I, first, declare my entry in the Register of Members' Interests—in case anyone thinks that my interests benefit from this Budget. Our level of debt before the recession was so high that, now, we are less able than we would otherwise wish to react to the problems that we face. The current Prime Minister must regret the profligacy of the former Chancellor—the sadness, of course, being that they are the same person. In his new role, he suffers from the problem that we spent too easily money that we did not have. It is not just the banks that got us into trouble, but the Government's expenditure, which was not related to the true state of even a successful economy. It means that, now, we probably have the fastest rising Government debt as a proportion of GDP of any advanced nation in the G20. The debt, which this country will continue to face over the next decade, will take an age to pay off. No wonder this document before me used to be called the Red Book.