Finance (No. 2) Bill

That is true. Clearly, the Chancellor and Prime Minister are on record, up to and including in 2008, as doing precisely what my hon. Friend says and supporting our spending commitments as they were at the time. Although the recovery remains distinctly fragile, the June Budget took a huge and risky gamble with it. Since then, confidence in the UK's economic prospects has fallen off a cliff and business surveys, such as that by Deloitte which I asked the Exchequer Secretary about, demonstrate that economic sentiment is darkening. There are increasing signs that the tentative recovery is stalling and that the economic storm clouds are gathering once more.