I have to say that I have some sympathy with the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) and the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood). I draw the House’s attention to the wording of the motion, which states:
“That this House approves…the Government’s assessment as set out in the Budget Report and Autumn Statement”.
Even the Chancellor of the Exchequer does not accept the assessments made in the autumn statement, yet we are now going off to Brussels and—if the motion is passed; I hope it is not—saying that we accept them.
I hope you will give me a little latitude, Mr Speaker, because I would like to start by setting the scene of where we are with our economy and looking at some of the history behind it. We must look at credibility. In the 2015 general election, Labour lacked economic credibility and people voted accordingly. It is true that most of the economic meltdown in the UK in 2008 was due to world factors such as the Lehman Brothers collapse and so forth. Let me try, however, to dispose of the myth to which some in Labour still cling—namely, that there were no real problems with the UK economy when the world economic meltdown occurred in 2008 and that all Labour’s economic problems thereafter were due solely to world factors.
That analysis is just plain wrong, and most people know it. Most voters know that the Labour Government did great things to improve our society and our economy, but voters also know that Mr Gordon Brown made some fundamental economic mistakes—for example, the nonsense of his slogan “an end to boom and bust”, his light-touch regulation of the financial services sector,
the disaster of the private finance initiative, and large deficits in the good times. Just before the world meltdown, the UK annual deficit was 3.1% of GDP.
As I have said in the House before, Mr Brown arrogantly ignored the warnings that some of us gave him well before the crash. I am angry and sorry that he made those mistakes, because they meant that the UK economy was not as well placed as it should have been before the world crash. Even without them, the UK’s defences would have been overtopped when the financial tsunami came across the Atlantic, but not by so much. Today, our economy faces what the current Chancellor has described as world headwinds, and because of the current Chancellor’s own mistakes, the UK is far worse placed to withstand those headwinds than it was in 2008, when the world tsunami hit. The national debt expressed as a percentage of GDP, for example, is far higher than it was in 2008, and it is now rising.