Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I am afraid I do not have time. Table 2.3 also states that public sector net borrowing would peak at 11.8 per cent. in the year that we are just finishing, and fall to 4 per cent. by 2014-15. Four per cent. is still a big deficit to be running after five years, but it is not nearly as big as I feared it might be, because of the steps taken by this Government to secure the recovery. We need to strike a balance on the economic level—I will come to the human level in a minute—between making cuts, because we cannot carry on running such a deficit and because of the need to reassure the international capital markets, and cutting too soon, as the Conservatives are proposing, which would jeopardise the economic recovery. In those circumstances, growth—anaemic as it has been in the past quarter—might stall completely, placing even greater pressure on public finances. Disappointingly, the Leader of the Opposition hardly put forward a single proposal today that had any meat on its bones regarding what this country should do, given the state of our public finances. He intimated that, in his view, the Chancellor was not cutting enough and not cutting quickly enough—an honourable and coherent position, but one with which I profoundly disagree—but there was no meat on those bones. I understand that there is an Opposition policy on bank bonuses, which is now broadly shared by the Government. That is to be welcomed. There is also a proposal for a Tobin tax—sometimes called the Robin Hood tax. The Government's position is that such a tax should have multilateral agreement, which is sensible. The Conservative position is to introduce it unilaterally, which is surprising. The Lord Mayor of London has described that plan as "bonkers". The Conservatives might know more than I do, but it does seem strange to go unilateral on that, however desirable the effect of the tax might be. The right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) also mentioned a council tax freeze. Attractive as that might sound, such a proposal flies in the face of what is often said on both sides of the House about local control and decentralisation. It is all very well to go for local control, decentralisation and all those nice clichés about empowering the people, but when central Government want to freeze council tax or prevent the closure of a hospital—which is Conservative policy—we get back to centralisation. Getting that balance right is a constant problem for politicians on both sides of the House. Another subject that the Leader of the Opposition did not mention today—although it was brought up indirectly in the Budget in relation to the freeze on inheritance tax allowances for at least the next year—was the Conservative proposal for an inheritance tax windfall for 3,000 of the wealthiest families in the country. I do not think that that is a good way to proceed. It is intellectually coherent, but I just happen to disagree with it. It goes against my prejudices and I think that it is wrong. The Leader of the Opposition in attacking the Budget was right to say—quite accurately, as far as I am aware—that the UK entered this recession sooner than many other countries and will come out of it later than many other countries. What that critique singularly overlooks, however, is that the recession in the UK has been markedly shallower than that in many of our competitor countries, which has had a real effect on employment. Unemployment in Spain is at 19.3 per cent.; here, it is 8.2 per cent. That affects an awful lot of people's lives. It is not just a question of the length of the recession in this country; its shallowness, importantly, has had a positive effect on people's lives. Many people are in work who might well not have been if the Government had not taken the steps they did to lessen the effects of the recession.