Fiscal Responsibility Bill

Perhaps I should avoid a protracted historical discussion, although I always thought that the hon. Gentleman's favourite Labour Government were in office during the period of achievement from 1976 to 1979. However, we have managed to identify another one whom he holds dear to his heart. I was talking about the Prime Minister standing on deck looking at the consequences of his policies. In that economic desert, we find before us this Fiscal Responsibility Bill—a pathetic and dangerous piece of legislation. It is pathetic, because we should not need a new law to make the Government do their job. We just need the Government to do their job. The Chancellor is like a man with a new year's resolution to lose weight. He knows that he desires the outcome, but he doubts his ability to make the disciplined decisions that are necessary. He therefore passes a law requiring himself to lose weight, confident in the delusion that he can now tuck into a diet of endless doughnuts and pork pies. As people across the country are daily discovering to their dismay as they examine their discarded gym memberships and low-fat cookery books, there is a world of difference between resolving to do something and having the fortitude to see it through. The Chancellor has flunked the difficult decisions at every turn. The media were briefed that December's much delayed pre-Budget report would be bristling with tough choices. It did contain an announcement from the Chancellor on pay restraint, as well as the bizarrely counter-intuitive set of higher taxes on employing people, but it then emerged that the extra spending in the PBR added up to more than the extra revenue that would accrue. As in the Prime Minister's Labour conference speech, the goodies kept on coming, but these really were empty promises. What was the result of the PBR? Having previously said that the deficit this year would be £175 billion, and after announcing a slew of supposedly tough choices in the pre-Budget report, the Chancellor was able to announce that the deficit would now be £178 billion, falling next year—during a period when the economy is forecast to grow in all four quarters—to £176 billion. That is why, speaking as a man still just in his 30s, I know that our national debt will not reach 40 per cent. again until I am in my 60s. The Chancellor's legacy is a burden that blights an entire generation. It is not an enviable record, but the Chancellor has at least one partial admirer. I was reading The Economist over Christmas. Its edition of 19 December identified the "Heroes of New Labour". Underneath, it added, "Yes, there have been some". There are, to be precise, five heroes of new Labour. None are current MPs; two have died, sadly; and one, Lord Adonis, experienced his finest hours as a member of the Liberal Democrats. The Chancellor is not one of them, but he warrants a footnote under the heading "The nearly men". The article says:""By stubbornly keeping his job, Alistair Darling, the unfortunate Chancellor, probably prevented a desperate fiscal plight from becoming even worse under a putative successor."" His biggest legacy, his entry to the new Labour hall of fame, is to have prevented the right hon. Member for Normanton (Ed Balls) from making a bad situation even worse. We are all genuinely grateful, but the Chancellor's hopes must have been so much greater as he walked into this Palace as a new Member of Parliament many years ago. The Bill is not only pathetic but dangerously wrong-headed. How can we know what the world will face in 2016? We may confront the scale of threat to our national security that demands the wholesale economic sacrifice that helped us to win the second world war, which we have discussed in this debate. What are we meant to say if that happens—"Sorry, we are not fighting. We can't due to our obligations under clause 1 of the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2010"? We may face another recession—it is entirely possible; the so-called double dip scenario. We all hope that it is unlikely, but it is entirely possible. What then? What are we meant to do? Are we meant to say, "Sorry, all the hospitals are going to have to close. That is our obligation under clause 1 of the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2010"? The Chancellor said today that that would not happen because the Chancellor of the day would come to the Dispatch Box, rip up the Act and say, "Don't worry, I never meant it in the first place." That raises the question why we are all here pretending that this is a serious piece of legislation. We need real determination to plot a path to sustainable recovery, and that requires real political leadership. So how dispiriting it is that the so-called official Opposition woefully fail to match the scale of the task before us. The Conservative shadow Chancellor, in his speech to his own conference, made a virtue of his supposed resolution. It was an interesting speech, but as he confirmed his intention to target big tax cuts on the very richest households, he told us:""We are all in this together."" As I watched the television and listened to his speech, I was initially reminded me of the immortal question asked to Debbie McGee—to paraphrase: "What first made you sceptical about the shared austerity message of millionaire George Osborne?" The shadow Chancellor went on to say that he had identified £7 billion-worth of savings. Let us leave aside for a moment the fact that some of those were costed in 2020 prices and failed to match any sustained scrutiny. This is the crucial bit. The Conservative shadow Chancellor went on to say:""Anyone who tells you these choices can be avoided is not telling you the truth."" But that was not really the truth. We have a structural deficit of about £85 billion, so what the Conservative shadow Chancellor told us was perhaps at best one 12th of the truth. It might have been up to a point the truth, but it certainly was not the whole truth and it certainly was not nothing but the truth. Instead, just yesterday we had the Conservatives splashing £400,000 on posters claiming that they would aggressively cut the deficit, but they gave no specific proposals except a single pledge to spend more.