Pre-Budget Report

I will give way in a moment. The fact is that this Government are being driven not by the needs of the economy and the medium and long-term best interests of the British people, but by the needs of the Labour party and the insistence of the Prime Minister and the Schools Secretary that the scale of the fiscal problem, the challenge of dealing with it and the true price of not dealing with it are to be concealed at all costs from the British public until after polling day. No price is too high to pay, provided the bill does not arrive until 7 May. No burden is too heavy to bear if it is the Prime Minister's successor who will bear it. That is the most systematically reckless, cynical and dishonest strategy for dealing with a fiscal crisis that anyone in the House will be able to recall. It compares very unfavourably with the stance of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), who as Chancellor in 1995 and 1996 insisted on pursuing the policies that were right for Britain's long-term economic health, not those that would deliver short-term illusions of success, however tempting that may have been electorally. Britain's fiscal history over the past decade and a half is pretty simple. My right hon. and learned Friend created the golden legacy of low inflation, stable growth and falling unemployment, a legacy that the current Prime Minister inherited in 1997. He exploited that legacy to create a formidable image as a "prudent" Chancellor even while he was pumping up the bubble that was the root cause of the fiscal crisis that we now face. However, when the legacy ran out, he carried on spending, focused as always resolutely on the short term, spending the proceeds of his unsustainable bubble and then borrowing some more—spending and borrowing his way through the illusion of a boom. Apparently, that is his idea of building an economy that is best placed to withstand the slow-down and ready to lead the world out of the recession.