I am grateful to be called to contribute to this Committee debate. Many of tonight’s speeches have made me feel that I live in a different world from the one in which my constituents and a large number of people in this country live. I propose to Labour Members that the world in which they live is one far removed from reality.
When this Government came to office in 2010, the coalition confronted the worst peacetime deficit in Britain’s history. That fact cannot be repeated often enough. This is the architecture and the framework through which every single decision has been made since the formation of that Government. It is particularly nauseating to see Labour Members berate the Government for trying to make very tough choices and trying to make savings when they were the architects responsible for the chronic and devastating mismanagement of our public finances; and it is particularly nauseating to see those Members berate and accuse the Government of being purely political in respect of this very difficult measure.
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We know what has happened in the eurozone. We have seen the devastation that reckless public spending has brought to Greece, Spain and other countries. If we looked at how they dealt with their deficits, we would see that their particular approach has been far more severe than anything we have seen in this country. Indeed, unemployment benefit in Greece was cut by 20%—a savage, swingeing cut to benefits—and that was done to balance the books. In Ireland, we have seen cuts in public sector wages and cuts in child benefit. I am not
suggesting for a minute that we should go down that route. What I am saying is that this is the kind of response that other sovereign countries have had to make to deal with the very serious public finance hole in which they found themselves.
It is also particularly nauseating for Labour Members to pretend that we do not face this grave crisis and to pretend that there are endless streams of public money that we can just keep spending. This is absolutely the wrong approach, and it sends a bad signal to the country. The country knows that Labour spent too much money and that some difficult choices have had to be made. One of the more responsible Labour Members, the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins), openly acknowledged that even a Labour Government would have had to find savings in this particular period.