I thank my hon. Friend for that interjection, which gets to the crux of the matter. The Chancellor had to come here last week to announce further spending cuts in 2015-16, planning for future failure, because he is failing to deal with the economic reality that we face today. Ultimately, we are tabling this new clause because we hope that the Government will take stock of the situation in which they are leaving households up and down this country. The price of the failure of the Chancellor’s economic plan is not being paid by those at the top. We debated at great length yesterday the fact that the top-earning taxpayers are getting a tax cut from this Government, while it is ordinary families that rely on public services that are paying the price for this economic failure throughout the country.
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Despite the pain being meted out to those who are least able to bear it, the coalition’s self-defeating economic policies have resulted in the Government failing their own economic tests. They are borrowing more than they planned and they are not going to balance the books by 2015. Rather than spending his time planning how to boost jobs and growth now, the Chancellor is planning for failure in 2015. He should be laser-focused on injecting a stimulus into the economy to secure jobs and growth now, so that we no longer need to plan for failure and for further cuts in 2015. It is common sense.