Pre-Budget Report

Does the Chancellor accept that, although it is true that he has not destroyed the record of growth, stability and low inflation that he inherited in 1997, he is only extending our record-breaking period of growth and stability on a sea of mounting public debt and consumer debt, to which the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) has already referred. If the Chancellor’s successor believes the extravagantly optimistic descriptions of the public finances that the right hon. Gentleman has just given, he will make serious policy errors. Does the Chancellor accept that his fiscal rules are now lost in a maze of creative accounting and absurd assumptions about the date of the cycle? Even in his pre-Budget reports, every year he has to raise more tax from soft political targets, such as the oil industry last year or transport through green taxes this year. Does he accept that his legacy to his successor will be the toughest public spending round that we have seen for a very long time, in which his successor will have to keep public spending below the growth of the economy as a whole for the foreseeable future? Judging from the Chancellor’s rhetoric, he will apparently give him no support in principle at all from his position as Prime Minister.