It is a real pleasure to follow the very accomplished maiden speech of the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins). It was a little light, lyrical relief after the Chancellor’s Budget statement. I am sure that the whole House wishes her well in following the many years of her predecessor and of her father in this House.
This was a Budget that was trailed by both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor last week as offering economic stability for the country and security for working people. Today, it was trumpeted by the Chancellor as a big Budget and a new settlement from a one nation Government. But this is a full fat Tory Government. They launch a frontal assault on the finances of many low income families. They change nothing of the structural weaknesses in the British economy. They deny the truth that weak growth has been the central problem of the past five years, and they disguise the fact that there are economic choices that could give us a different debate and a different direction for the future.
My right hon. and learned Friend, the Leader of the Opposition, said that there is always a temptation to oppose everything, and there is a lot to oppose in this Budget. Let me start by welcoming the action on the non-doms. Let me welcome the commitment fully to fund the Stevens plan for the NHS. Let me welcome the 2% commitment for defence spending; it matches what a Labour Government did in each and every one of our 13 years in power. Let me welcome also the new £9 national minimum wage for those over 25 in 2020, not least because I was on the National Minimum Wage Bill Committee and remember how hard it was fought and how strongly it was opposed by Conservative Members. I welcome their conversion to that cause.
The Chancellor likes to talk about growth figures for 2014. He did so again today in his statement. But one good year of growth does not absolve him from a poor economic record over his five years. Of all the G20 advanced countries in the world, only France, Italy and Japan have grown more slowly than the UK since 2010. The Chancellor has led the slowest economic recovery in Britain for over 100 years. Again, today, we saw the Office for Budget Responsibility revising down this year’s growth forecasts and keeping next year’s stable at a time when GDP per person is still lower than it was before the 2008 global banking crisis and recession hit, with most people still feeling their household finances getting worse, not better.
Why does that matter? Why is that our central problem? Weak growth means that there is less of our national income to go round, and productivity and wages are seriously depressed, which is why we have the worst and widest productivity gap in this country since 1992; the average earner is still £1,000 worse off in real terms than five years ago, and the minimum wage is worth less than it was in 2010. Weak growth means a more fragile economy—we are not saving enough, investing enough or exporting enough—which is why consumer debt is rising and we have the biggest balance of payments gap since records began in 1955.