The Economy

We have heard a lot today about learning the lessons of history, but what we heard from the hon. Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) shows that the Government clearly have not learned the lessons of their own history. In the last years of the Labour Government, we listened to the Conservative party talk about wanting more deregulation and complain that we were over-regulating. We concede now that we were not regulating the banking sector as vigorously as we should have done, yet still we hear calls for further deregulation. That is a lesson that Conservative Members really ought to learn. Equally, Conservative Members ought to look much closer, and with a far less jaundiced and more objective eye, at the Government's past year of performance. Any objective reading, any audit of how they have performed economically, must tell them, as it tells us, that it has been a disastrous year. Unemployment is higher by 1.5%, inflation is higher by 1.6%, output is down by 0.7% and manufacturing, which went up for a period as there was restocking and which boomed partly because of big deflation in the value of the pound, has now ground to a halt. We are not seeing a manufacturing-led recovery. Critically, growth, the key driver of our economy, is flat, non-existent, zero.