Fiscal Responsibility Bill

I, too, am sorry that the hon. Gentleman missed the start of my speech, because I touched on that point. We do not have a common data set that we can all share. Although there are areas of dispute—I am not sure whether this happened before or after the hon. Gentleman arrived, but I had an earlier exchange about one of them with the right hon. Member for Wokingham—there are also areas where intelligent people can probably largely agree. On such an important subject, it would be helpful to try to find as much common understanding as possible of what our difficulty is before deciding how to tackle it, which partly relates to the point that I was making before the hon. Gentleman intervened. Simply naming cut figures and headline items is a simplistic approach to tackling a long-term strategic problem for our country. Finally, the other useful aspect of this debate is the suggestion that what we are discussing is a problem that needs to be confronted. There are people—both in this House, to some extent, and certainly in the country at large—who would be prepared to accept a debt of roughly the scale that we confront now. They have equated our situation with that of others and said, "Well, the Italians managed perfectly well with a debt of that kind. Why shouldn't we just adjust our economy to deal with those changed circumstances?" I profoundly disagree with that position. Therefore, one of the values of this discussion is to expose that side of the debate and say, "No, that isn't the kind of economy that we would wish to run on in this country into the future." We are simply not equipped to achieve that, and trying to do so would have a thoroughly undesirable drag-anchor effect on private enterprise in any country where that took place. That aspect of the debate is of value in a discussion of a Bill of this kind. As we go through the afternoon, I hope that I may catch your eye—if you are still in the Chair, Mrs. Heal—to discuss some other elements of the Bill. However, clause 1 has some value, and with those reservations, I commend it to the House.