Fiscal Responsibility Bill

My hon. Friend tries to tempt me to be a bit more outspoken, but the House knows me all too well—I am not characteristically outspoken. I return to the divide on the timing of the reductions that the Bill requires. The Government's case is that they should delay the reductions for about another year. That is felicitous, because it will get them through the general election period and put all the burden of the cuts on to a future Government, but perhaps they actually believe what they are saying. Maybe they believe this neo-Keynesian nonsense that they have come up with that the only thing that is sustaining the economy is the excess public spending and borrowing, and if they started to reduce it now, it would plunge the economy back into a nasty recession. I have some simple questions for them about that. If all this public spending and borrowing is so good, why is our economy still in recession, as the Chancellor admitted from the Dispatch Box? Why is it the only main economy in the world that is not out of recession? As they have made so much more of the matter and are borrowing so much more as a proportion of national income than most competitor and comparable countries, one would have thought from their analysis that we would be romping out the recession ahead of the others. Instead we have been mired in it for all too long. Let us hope that we are now coming out of it. There is evidence of some revival in the private sector, which is most welcome. Another problem that the Government have with their punk Keynesianism is the idea that all this spending is somehow not getting in the way of borrowing and spending in the private sector, which of course it is. The only individuals and institutions in this country that can borrow on the scale that they want to at the moment are public sector ones. The Government have developed a sort of recycling machine whereby money is lent to the banks, who lend it back to the public sector, and the Bank of England prints the money just to ensure that the Government can afford to buy all the debt that they are creating to route through the public sector. The Government have a public financing system on a merry-go-round of borrowing and buying debt, particularly using the publicly owned banks, at the expense of everybody else. The small business people I speak to in my constituency and elsewhere tell me that it is still a nightmare trying to get the borrowing that they need to carry out their business, let alone expand it. Individuals are still finding it extremely difficult to borrow money that they might want to start up a business or buy an asset that they could productively use.