Having been around at the time, I rather got the impression that it was having an impact on everybody, from communist China to the republican United States and throughout Europe and the whole world. If there is a banking crash, it is not surprising that it has consequences.
To return to my point about the west country, we have to recognise that there are some things that the private sector will never do, and flood defence is one of them, so there will always be a role for the public sector in the economy. I firmly believe in a mixed economy and I am enthusiastic about anything that we can do to help the private sector innovate and invest, but it has to be complemented with investment in science, innovation and so on. The Government have a role in such things.
The Chancellor talks seriously about reducing public expenditure to levels last seen in 1948, but I say to the House and the country that the world in which we lived in 1948 was hugely different from the world that we live in today. Expectations are different and the population is getting older—many Members, not just me, may be grateful in a few years for what the state is willing to do as opposed to what we can do as individuals. That issue affects all parties that will be standing at the 2015 election, and we need to address it, because we cannot allow ourselves to drift into a situation in which it is almost inevitable that our economy will stall and hardly grow. That would lock us into unpalatable and difficult consequences. It is dead easy to sign up to cuts in a debate such as this, but living with the consequences of them—60% of them are still to come—will cause a great deal of pain to constituents of Members on both sides of the House.
Of course we have to deal with the immediate consequences and fall-out of what has happened over the past five years. Some sensible reforms have been announced in relation to savings, but we need to get pensions right, because we have got them wrong in the past. We need to get our economics right in the long-term interests of this country and of future employment and jobs, and I am not sure we are doing that yet.
2.14 pm