Fiscal Responsibility Bill

Traditionally, at this point in the Bill process, we all thank the Clerks and the others who have contributed so much to our deliberations over many weeks, but as we have not had any meaningful deliberations, it is difficult to thank them to the extent that normally I would. I have hardly got to know them or, for that matter, the Minister any better than I did. It was the most cursory examination of a most pathetic Bill. The Minister says that we have had a chance to look at the Bill in detail, but we got only to the end of clause 1. Admittedly the Bill has only six clauses, but if the entire detailed scrutiny process gets bogged down in clause 1, it is hard to argue that we have had the opportunity that the Minister claims we have. Leaving that to one side, it is fair to argue that we do not need to scrutinise the Bill for very long because it is so pathetic and because it is such an insult to the House to introduce it in this form, as is the idea that the Government have fiscal responsibility merely because they proclaim in an Act of Parliament that they possess it, even though they have no evidence to support that assertion. Indeed, that is such a laughable claim that very few Labour MPs have been able to bring themselves to come to the House and show any enthusiasm for the Bill at all, which is extraordinary when we consider what the Government are proposing. Let us suspend our judgment for a moment and imagine the Labour party winning the next general election. The Government are proposing that all those Labour MPs who are returned would march through the Lobby, month after month for the duration of the next Parliament, and cut about £100 billion off public spending, even if we went into recession again. Let us imagine what would happen if we went into another recession in, for the sake of argument, 2013 or 2014. At that point, one would normally expect the automatic stabilisers to kick in to help deal with all the people—the real victims of a second recession—who would be affected by rising unemployment, the closure of factories and offices around the country and all the other consequences of a recession that we can imagine. However, at precisely that point—the point at which one would expect the Government to expand public spending to try to cushion those blows, and the point at which Governments have historically always done just that—the Bill would dramatically cut public spending. Labour MPs, who have just marched through the Lobby to vote on all those matters, are basically signing up to closing whole swathes of schools and hospitals, in a fire sale of public services, because they would need to keep within the strictures of the Bill. What an extraordinary position for Labour MPs to be in. Indeed, I am amazed that the Government could find any MPs to vote for the legislation at all. I know that some oppose it from the left, as it were, because they think that the Government are cutting the deficit with excessive zeal, but that is not essentially the point that I am making. The point that I am making is that the Government should not be putting Labour MPs in a straitjacket with this preposterous Bill, which takes no account of what might happen in the next six years and chains Labour MPs to a potentially devastating series of public spending cuts.