The Economy

I want to start by putting an end to the myth that the Government have no mandate for the action they have taken. [Interruption.] Already I can hear somebody saying from a sedentary position that there is no mandate. Let us look at the figures. I do not think anybody in the House would deny how unpopular the Conservative Government of 1997 were. That led to the Labour landslide. I therefore wonder how the Labour party managed to take an even lower share of the vote in 2010 than the Conservative party took in 1997. We went into the last general election saying that we would get the Budget and the deficit under control, and that we would introduce welfare reform. Everybody heard that message, not least because the Labour party kept delivering leaflets to everybody's houses saying that we were going to do those things.