Fiscal Responsibility Bill

That is true, and it is a sadness for me, but clearly not a big enough sadness to the hon. Gentleman, who is now leaving the Chamber. Given the Chancellor's ability to present such thin gruel to the House, I am surprised that his party did not claim to see the signs of joined-up up government. Yesterday they announced that in future all five-year-olds in our schools would be taught the dangers of debt, how not to fall into debt, what to do if they fell into debt, and how to get out of debt as quickly as possible. Bright, or perhaps not so bright, five-year-olds might suggest that the lessons could start here rather than in the classrooms. I want, however, to inject a note of seriousness, if not horror, into the debate. I want to compare our present position with the phoney war that led up to world war two. Although those on all three Front Benches now talk of the need to lower the deficit, they are all also talking about spending more. I do not believe that our voters—the voters of this country—have any idea how serious the financial position of the country is, or how massive the cuts will have to be if we are to return some semblance of order to our national accounts. Let me illustrate that first by looking at the payments on the new debt. Let us suppose that we could not roll that debt over, but had to close Government Departments. The cost of the debt in the first year of bailing us out—I am ignoring past debt, which we have to service as well—would be the loss of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department for business and enterprise, the Law Officers' Department and the Northern Ireland Office. In the second year—we are not concerned only with the new tranche of debt; there would be two years of debt—we would have to lose, in its entirety, the Department responsible for innovation, the universities and skills. In the third year, the debt repayments would be greater than the budgets for defence, the Cabinet Office and some other Departments of State. It would decimate what we do as a Government if we had to pay for the money that we intend to borrow by closing Government Departments and the programmes that go with them. I do not believe that the people of this country yet have any idea about the seriousness of the position that we face.