I entirely disagree. The absolute root cause of it all was not saving enough and having a bad culture of over-reliance on debt. I well remember that back in ’98 and ’99 when Francis Maude was the
shadow Chancellor, he kept saying, with regard to the low savings ratio, “We are storing up problems for the future.” At every Budget, no matter how high Labour was in the polls, our shadow Chancellors and shadow spokesmen—people like Howard Flight—would say that the savings ratio was way too low and we were storing up problems for the future. We did warn, we did say it, and we were ignored.