Fiscal Responsibility Bill

Of course the Bill is gibberish, and it is very difficult to examine clause 1 without examining clauses 3 and 4. We will come to clause 4 later, but it is worth my reading out the relevant part of it in response to my hon. Friend. It states that the fact that""any duty in section 1…has not been, or will or may not be, complied with does not affect the lawfulness of anything done, or omitted to be done, by any person."" What kind of serious statutory requirement provides such a get-out clause? To return to the structural deficit, if the economy were in structural balance, the stabilisers could be allowed to operate over the cycle, providing deficits in years of below-trend growth and surpluses in years of above-trend growth. Let us set aside for the moment the ghastly truth that by the Government's own estimate, three quarters of the unprecedentedly large deficit—by the way, it is the largest in peacetime history, as far as I know—was caused by Labour's mishandling of the public finances. That is to say, it is structural. Clause 1(1) dismantles the stabilisers, which is why amendment 1 is absolutely essential if we are to make any sense of the Bill at all. It would enable it to address the right measure, which has to be the structural deficit. Of course, restricting the application of the Bill to the structural deficit might require an alteration of the targets in order to get the same level of desired reduction. I hope that the Government will take it for granted that the Opposition accept the need for that, and that when the Economic Secretary speaks, we will not hear the absurd objection that that somehow implies that we will be less tough on the deficit than the Labour Government. It is clear to me that we cannot leave the Bill as it is, if it is to be taken seriously at all. As it stands, if the UK had another downturn we would be plunged into a downward spiral of economic decline. Nobody believes that any Government would allow that, so something else would be done. None of the major economies have made the mistake that the Bill does in any downturn in recent history. They have all remembered the lessons of the 1930s, yet incredibly, the Government are suggesting that we forget those lessons if there is another downturn in future. My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Hertfordshire has already pointed out that when the Chancellor was challenged on exactly that point on Second Reading—I took a look at Hansard and I believe he was challenged three times, although it might have been twice—he repeated the same phrase each time: "We will come back". I presume that he meant "We will come back to the House", and that that is a euphemism for saying that if the Bill were tested in a downturn, he would repeal it and scrap it. As I tried to say at the time, he clearly does not believe in his own Bill. The first time that it is tested, he wants to put it into the shredder. Of course, I think I know the answer that is really at the back of the Chancellor's mind—he thinks that the Bill is nonsense. The Economic Secretary is an intelligent man and I am pretty sure that he, too, thinks it is a load of nonsense. We are all here debating it because the Prime Minister wants to continue with the strategy that served him well for many years in opposition and for some years as Chancellor: announcing good intentions, putting them on the statute book and taking credit with the public for doing that. Clause 1 is only one provision in a decade's worth of such Blair-Brown speak, of which there is a huge volume. The Financial Times commented on that recently, stating that that""approach to managing change seemed to be based on a mythical version of heroic leadership, popularised by some of the management magazines. 'Announce it and it will happen'"." That is exactly what we have here: announce that we will reduce the deficit, and somehow, magically, it is supposed to happen. It will not necessarily happen. Much more detail on the measures required to plug the deficit is needed. The cancellation of the spending review in the pre-Budget report is the crucial giveaway. Failure to produce detail is crucial to the collapse of confidence in Labour's economic policy. The Bill was designed to be a legislative distraction and, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham said, the clause is its kernel. However, this time, the Prime Minister's luck has run out. Far from distracting the commentators and the public, the measure simply confirms what many Members of Parliament have known for a long time—Labour's economic policy is bankrupt of ideas. When a Government run out of ideas, they should go. It is an open secret that it took all the combined efforts of the deputy Prime Minister and the Chancellor to persuade the Prime Minister to make at least some attempt to give an indication of the public expenditure challenge facing the country. The Prime Minister apparently insisted on the fig leaf of a measure, of which clause 1 is a crucial part. The Prime Minister seems, for the most part, to have retreated into a parallel world, articulating the mantras that worked in his younger days, such as "Tory cuts" and "Labour investment", as well as other nonsense. That is the Prime Minister's looking-glass world, where political battalions—an accumulated surplus from the 1990s—remain on the table to move around. Unfortunately, the accumulated surplus has all gone—it has all been spent. The economy is in crisis, the Government are in crisis and Parliament is in crisis. At the heart of each crisis is the sort of legislation that we have seen time and again; it is embodied in clause 1. Such legislation makes the public cynical—even more cynical, if possible, than they are already are about politicians. People do not need to know economics; they need no more experience than managing their pocket money to know that clause 1 and the Bill are content free. Content-free legislation makes this place worse off. It has the same corrosive effect as unfulfilled manifesto promises. However, the Government have an appetite for it: we have had the Child Poverty Bill, the Climate Change Bill—with even more absurd targets—and now the heart of economic policy is to be subjected to the same treatment.