Fiscal Responsibility Bill

I wish the Government would consider seriously the people who are unemployed and would like to set up a business of their own. They need access to bank credit, which they clearly do not have at the moment because of the distorted and broken banks and the regulation that is reinforcing that distortion. Those people also have a problem with the benefits system, and a good reform would be to make it easier for people to use the cover of benefit to get started. As my hon. Friend rightly says, we could then have a double win, because they would go off benefit altogether at a certain point and we would have tax revenue coming in as they started to pay themselves a salary or an income from their business. I hope that that point will be considered. The Government are in a hole with their argument that all this public spending and borrowing is sustaining the economy, and that it would relapse without it. They have against them the problem of international comparisons, but also that of historical comparisons. If we look at recoveries from previous, rather shallower recessions in this country, we notice a certain common characteristic. Usually, the recovery got under way when the Government of the day admitted that they had a budget problem and took action to control the budget deficit through a combination of tax increases and spending cuts. In 1981, famously, quite big reductions were made in spending to curb the budget deficit, and from the day of the announcement of those cuts the economy accelerated away into one of its long and successful periods of growth. Something similar happened after the exchange rate mechanism disaster of the early 1990s. Again, it was when the Government got a grip on the deficit that we ushered in a very long period of expansion under two different parties.