Finance (No. 2) Bill

In the course of the debate, yet again, we have heard an awful lot of myths and legends. One of the biggest of those is the notion that because the Opposition have a different view of the economy, we are deficit deniers. You do not have to be denying a deficit to hold a different view of how it arose and the background circumstances, and a different view of how we get out of the situation that we are in. That is quite reasonable. It is healthy that we have politics within which there are different viewpoints. The proof of the pudding will be apparent in a few years. If you are right, I will have to eat my words. I do not believe that those on the Government Benches are right, but we cannot tell just by throwing words at each other. It is not correct to say that somehow the Opposition hold the view that there is no deficit. That would be plain nonsense. There are other myths and legends that we have heard about today. One, which we heard from the hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley), is that the previous Government were guilty of not mending the roof when the sun shone. We hear that repeatedly. If building schools, hospitals and roads was not mending the roof, I do not know what it was. If by that Conservative Members mean that we should have saved the money and put it in a reserve somewhere, that may be a legitimate criticism, but to suggest that we were not investing in the country's infrastructure is plain wrong. The hon. Member for Northampton South also suggested that the economic crisis was entirely our fault because of light-touch regulation. I may have been asleep through the years of the Labour Government, but I always thought I heard Conservatives saying that there was too much regulation, that we were the party of red tape and regulation, and that we over-regulated not just financial services, but everything. We heard an excellent maiden speech from the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith). Although I disagreed with the entire political content, it was a good speech. The hon. Gentleman said that in his view there was too much regulation. It is easy to say with hindsight that there should have been more regulation of the financial services industry, for example. I believe that there should have been, but when people say that we were over-regulating the economy, that is one of the myths and legends. We are told that we do not want to leave our children and grandchildren in a big financial mess by not paying off debt, but equally, and perhaps more importantly, do we want to leave our children and grandchildren in the position that generations have been placed in by previous economic failures, by destroying jobs and creating long-term unemployment in various parts of the country? I do not want to leave that to my children and grandchildren. We are allowed to differ and to hold different points of view and different economic theories. The difference is not about whether there is a deficit, but about how we got into the present situation and how we get out of it. The previous Government managed to stop the rise in unemployment reaching the levels that had been predicted. That was the cause of economic stimulus. Far from the deficit spiralling, as we heard earlier from the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), the deficit did not rise as much as had been expected. Therefore, we were not in some sort of new crisis—that is what has been suggested—which justified an emergency Budget which had very little in it. The Finance (No.2) Act 2010 that we passed in a great hurry before the summer also had very little in it, and we lost an opportunity to make some important changes. The public and private sectors are inextricably linked, and slashing jobs in the public sector will further reduce the tax-take, increase the demand on benefits and, in itself, increase, not decrease, public borrowing and the deficit. Equally, reducing our investment in infrastructure—not stopping it entirely, but reducing it more than we need to do—will ultimately put us in a more difficult position. Just last week I visited two constituent households at their request. The problems that they asked to see me about had nothing to do with jobs; nevertheless, by no coincidence in both households there was a working-age construction worker who was desperate to work but could not find any in my city. One said that the last job on which he had worked was now a complete university building in the city, but we will not see much more of that kind of building by our educational institutions. He is very keen to work, but the jobs are simply not there.