Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his kind and helpful intervention, because I happen to have with me some economic data from the 1930s. I believe they will prove helpful because they are from the United Kingdom. It is a common error—if I may say so, it is a schoolboy error—to confuse the situation in the United Kingdom with that in the United States in that decade. In 1931, public spending in the United Kingdom was £1.174 billion, a figure that had been cut to £1.061 billion by 1934. Unemployment peaked in 1932 and gross domestic product grew from £4.399 billion in 1931 to £4.813 billion in 1934. So there was a percentage cut of nine-odd per cent. in public spending accompanied by a 9% rise in GDP, and unemployment peaked long before the cut in public spending was at its maximum point. So in fact this Government are rightly following what the British Government did in the 1930s, and the key thing, which I will give credit to the Labour Government for, was coming off the gold standard. In 1931, having an active monetary policy meant that the economy could grow even while public spending was being cut. Her Majesty's previous Government, the one that she dispensed with on 6 May or thereabouts, allowed the pound to fall so much and allowed the Bank of England to ease quantitatively—or print money, to put it in less jargonistic terms—that the increased money supply created the conditions where this Government can and must cut fiscally, and can have economic growth and falling unemployment. We are already seeing some of the fruits of that coming through in the figures announced today.