Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

So there we have it—Labour's big idea is a stamp duty cut on homes worth less than £250,000. Where on earth did they get that one from? That has been Tory policy for three years. The Chancellor came in copying our inheritance tax cut. He leaves as Chancellor copying our stamp duty cut. The only new ideas in British politics are coming from the Opposition. The only things that Labour brings are debt, waste and taxes. Here is a first. The centrepiece of this Budget, the stamp duty cut, has already been torpedoed by a Treasury Minister. This is what the Economic Secretary said about the policy:""raising…stamp duty…threshold to £250,000 would not be an effective use of public money"." First, the Government denounce it, then they embrace it. That is not all. Remember our tax plan for super-strength cider? When we announced it, the Chancellor's spokesman said that that was illegal. It is now official Government policy. Remember our proposal for 10,000 extra university places? The Higher Education Minister said:""It is clear, as has been demonstrated in the House today, that this fatuous proposal of an extra 10,000 places is elitist"—[Official Report, 16 March 2010; Vol. 507, c. 802.]" That is what the Government said about it. Once again, they have been caught taking the public for fools. The Chancellor spoke for an hour. He could have done it all in a sentence. Labour has made a complete mess of the British economy and is doing nothing to clean it up. One figure in the Red Book stands out above all others. They have doubled the national debt and, on these figures, they are going to double the national debt again. In this election year they are borrowing £167 billion. We are meant to be impressed that that has turned out a few billion lower than the last disastrous forecast, but it is still—hon. Members should be ashamed of this—more than every single Labour Government in history ever borrowed, added up together. That is what they have done. Like every Labour Government before them, they have run out of money, and they are leaving it to the next Conservative Government to clean up the mess. Today the Chancellor had his last chance to do the right thing for the country. He totally failed. [Interruption.]Labour Members are leaving. The taxis for hire are on their way out of the Chamber. The Government are just going to carry on spending, carry on borrowing and carry on failing. The biggest risk to our recovery is five more years of the present Prime Minister—five more years of falling confidence, five more years of bloat and debt and taxes, five more years of Britain closed for business. Most members of the Cabinet are looking at their Blackberries. They cannot think of a single reason why the country should have another five years of the Prime Minister, so I say let us have an election and put them out of their misery. Let us have a look in detail at the appalling mess that the Prime Minister and Baldemort seem to find so funny. Here are some of the things that the Government did not tell us in the Budget. They boasted about trade. They did not tell us that page 171 of the Red Book just published says that the trade deficit has risen by £7 billion. They told us about investment. They did not tell us that page 169 of the Red Book shows that business investment is falling by 5 per cent. this year. Almost everything that they have told us about the economy has turned out not to be true. The Government told us they would be prudent. The Chancellor has just said that they will borrow £734 billion over the next six years, giving us a national debt of £1.3 trillion. They have confirmed in the Red Book that the deficit this year at 11.8 per cent. of GDP is the worst in the OECD except for Ireland. That is what the Labour Government have left us with. They talked about education and its importance. Next year they will be spending more on debt interest than on educating our children. They told us endlessly that they had abolished boom and bust, but the figures show that they have given us the deepest recession since the war. The figures show that we lost 6.2 per cent. of our GDP in total. The Chancellor endlessly boasted about the action that the Government had taken. We have the longest and deepest recession since the war. They should be ashamed. They speak endlessly about their brilliant judgments, yet we were the first into recession and the last out of recession. They talk endlessly about their great judgment and about how well prepared we were. We went in with the biggest Budget deficit, and we come out with the largest Budget deficit. And of course they promised us real help now, yet more businesses went bust in this recession than in any other, and more people have gone bankrupt under Labour than ever before in our history. What about all the schemes that the Chancellor mentioned, which were launched with great fanfare? How many people did they help? Let us take the mortgage support scheme, which was announced in December 2008. The Government said:""This is real help for homeowners"." So how many households did it help? Fifteen. That cost £66,000 per household helped; or, to put it in currency that the Cabinet can understand, that is about 13 days of Geoff Hoon's consultancy fees. The Government told us endlessly how brilliantly they had done on unemployment and what a triumph they had achieved. One in four adults of working age in our country are not in work. They talked about European comparisons. We have more young people unemployed than anywhere else in Europe. To be fair to the Prime Minister, there is one forecast that he got spot-on. He told an audience of bankers:""What you as the City of London have done for financial services, we as a government intend to do for the economy as a whole"." That is a pledge he met in full. Thirteen years on from 1997, we can now see what has happened. In 1997, debt was £350 billion. Now it is getting on for £860 billion. In 1997 the deficit was £6 billion. That is what the Labour Government inherited—a £6 billion deficit. Today it is £167 billion. In 1997 we were ranked seventh in the world for competitiveness. Now we are 13th. We were fourth in the world for tax and regulation. Does anyone want to know what we are going to do? We are going to get back to fourth in the world for tax and regulation.