Amendment of the Law

Lord Darling of Roulanish Excerpts

Monday 23rd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Alistair Darling (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)]

I continue to admire the humour and chutzpah of the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) in delivering that speech.

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to make what I am pretty certain will be my last speech in this House; I am very grateful to you for that. I will not follow on from the comments of the right hon. and learned Gentleman, although I will return to some of the points he made, and nor will I follow on from what the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions said, except by saying this: I agree very much with what my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) said in relation to annuities. Here we are, days away from people being able to choose what they do with their annuities, yet we hear that we are still to recruit the people who are going to be giving the advice—let alone training them and let alone members of the public being able to access that advice. The only thing the Secretary of State did was lay off some of the blame on to his Liberal Democrat colleague—so when the inevitable inquiry starts as to why these things were mis-sold, we know where the blame will be apportioned.

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, but I want to focus on the Budget as a whole. The most notable thing in the report by the OBR—it has done a very good job over the last five years—is in the second paragraph, where it says that the Budget is not expected to have any material impact on the economy. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought that was what Budgets were for.

The economy was growing in 2010—and it was growing in 2010—because of the measures we put in place in 2008 and 2009 to stop a recession becoming a depression. The Chancellor last week and the Secretary of State today implied that nothing particular had happened at that time, but we came within hours of the banking system collapsing. That is why we were facing such a difficult set of economic circumstances by 2008-09, and it took a Government committed to doing something about it—our Government—to make sure our economy was growing again in 2010. Sadly, what happened after that was that the economy slowed down, to a large extent because of the rhetoric and the fact that the current Government chose to trash what was happening and mendaciously claim we were like Greece, and as a result the Chancellor’s public spending figures are now way off what he planned in 2010.

[Mr Straw]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that, contrary to the myths peddled on the Government Benches, up until the financial collapse the Conservatives backed our spending plan and our debt levels were significantly lower than those of most other countries, including the US?

[Mr Darling]

My right hon. Friend is right. Our debt levels were the second highest of the G7 group of economies in 1997, but 10 years later they were the second lowest. On public spending, last week the Chancellor blamed all our woes on our alleged overspending. How was it that the Conservatives were supporting our public spending plans right up until December 2008? As for the Liberal Democrats, they were in a different stratosphere from the rest of us when it came to calling for more public spending.

At the last election five years ago the essential argument between us was whether we could halve the deficit in a five-year period, which was my judgment of what we could safely and realistically do. The Chancellor—the shadow Chancellor at that time—said that that was woefully inadequate. But what was woefully inadequate five years ago was announced as a personal triumph last week. He has managed to do what I said we could do, but he somehow says it is a great triumph on his part and something we should be grateful to him for.

Let us look at what the Chancellor has actually done in relation to borrowing. He announced last week that at long last borrowing was on a downward curve. Every Budget he has ever presented shows borrowing on a downward curve. The difference between this Budget in 2015 and the Budget in 2010 is that it is on a downward curve all right, but he is borrowing three times more than he expected to borrow in 2010 because the economy slowed down so badly in 2011-12.

As for debt, we all expected that it would be shown that we were not going to hit the Chancellor’s original target of debt reducing as a share of national income by 2015, and that was what was expected from his autumn statement in December, yet, lo and behold, last week suddenly he was meeting his target, by a minuscule amount—coming from 80.4% to 80.2% of GDP. Why was that? It was not because of some economic miracle. It was because he looked around the Treasury cellars and found assets he could sell, one of them being a thing called Granite, which is an absolute monster of financial alchemy. Northern Rock produced it, into which it fed sub-prime mortgages, and the more sub-prime they became, the more mortgages had to be fed into this thing to keep it going. After five years it is, of course, possible to manage these things and get them to come right, and that is why the debt is coming down—because he is selling off this asset—yet even the OBR says it is highly uncertain whether or not this target will actually be met. So when we look at what the Chancellor said on the causes of where we are now and what he has done over the last five years, I have to say his credibility and track record are not as great as he would have us believe.

On the public expenditure figures of last week, the OBR has described the Chancellor’s spending profile as a rollercoaster. If we want to go on a rollercoaster, we go to Disneyland, not the British economy. Anybody else whose plans had been described as a rollercoaster would have hung their head in shame. What sort of planning can people put in place when they have no idea what is going to be spent? We have the absurd situation where the Ministry of Defence may have to lay off armed services personnel in 2016-17 because of the steep decline in public spending, only to say, “It’s all right. We’ll be able to re-engage you in two years’ time.” How can universities plan for research and development when we have such a steep decrease in public spending now, with the promise of perhaps something in the next few years?

The former Chancellor the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe knows as well as I do that when we look at spending profiles for four or five years, the last two years are pretty doubtful.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

indicated assent.

[Mr Darling]

The right hon. and learned Gentleman nods. They are pretty doubtful for one of two reasons: one is that a lot can change in that time, and the other is that the person presenting them has every intention of changing them as and when we get to that time. I do not believe for one moment that the Chancellor has changed his philosophy or beliefs from when he told the House last year that he wanted to reduce public spending to the lowest share in modern times—certainly since the welfare state and the national health service were introduced. All that has changed is that that was a political embarrassment last year, so he has simply shoved up the numbers at the end of the spending profile to be able to say, “Look, I’m not going to cause you any difficulties; public spending is going to rise, not decrease.” That is nonsense; the Tory view of public spending has not changed one jot.

Where I part company with many Government Members is that I do not think public spending is almost de facto a bad thing. It is extremely helpful to an economy in education and research and development, never mind the things an advanced economy demands in relation to the welfare state and pensions. So when we look at that profile, it is not credible, and I think it also conceals what the Conservatives would really like to do.

I want to say one thing about oil. I welcome what has been proposed. It is very sensible, because the oil taxation regime had to change, but I just remark in passing—and I am sorry only one nationalist has turned up to the debate—that the OBR forecasts are 47% below what it proposed just a year ago. North sea oil revenues are a 10th of what the nationalists told us they would have if they had an independent Scotland. This is another example of where pooling and sharing resources across the United Kingdom makes a massive difference. If Scotland had been independent today, it would have been faced with cuts that would make the austerity that is now being visited on the economy look like a Sunday afternoon tea party. They would have been substantial and damaging to the people of Scotland. That is why the nationalists have nothing to say about this; they have no one to blame for this problem but themselves.

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Darling]

I have never actually met the hon. Lady, but I will certainly give way to her.

[Dr Whiteford]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. Would he accept that, over the past 30 years, oil revenues have contributed billions of pounds that have consistently bailed out Westminster’s bad economic management? Would he also accept that oil prices go up as well as down, and that the long-term trajectory of oil revenues is an upward one?

[Mr Darling]

I agree that oil prices go up and down, but when I said that last year during the referendum campaign, I was told that I was scaremongering, that I was talking Scotland down and that that could not possibly happen. The hon. Lady should listen to her former leader. He told us that the oil price would never drop below $113 a barrel, but look what happened a few months later.

In relation to the oil price, I would like to say in passing that whoever is Chancellor in the future will increasingly face a structural problem in the economy. North sea oil revenues are not going to return to where they have been for the past 30 years, income tax revenues are decreasing, corporation tax is proving more and more difficult to get, and the Government’s ability to collect money through fuel duties is steadily diminishing. This is all going to put more pressure on measures such as VAT. All Governments are going to have to face these facts, and the fall in oil prices brings them into sharp focus.

The current low levels of productivity are a matter of great concern. The Chancellor had a lot of fun comparing Yorkshire and France, but French workers are in fact more productive. That is not because our workers are lazy, or anything like that; it is simply because French firms have invested more. That is why certainty in public spending is important. It is also important that the Government should do those things that the private sector is not going to do. For example, I have increasing doubts about the ability of the private sector to provide us single handed with the energy generation that we are going to need. I am in favour of replacing our nuclear power plants, but the proposals for the next nuclear power station are heavily dependent on the French and Chinese Governments, and I worry about that. I speak as an advocate of the mixed economy, but I believe that we now need to ask ourselves whether we have reached a stage at which it might be cheaper and more effective for the Government to be doing more in that regard, rather than leaving it to the private sector.

On transport infrastructure, it will, I hope, be for the next Government finally to make a decision on additional expansion, whether at Heathrow or elsewhere in the south-east. Actually, none of those arguments has changed in the 10 years since the last White Paper was published on the subject. I also hope that the next Government will take advantage of the present ability to borrow very cheaply by borrowing to invest. I personally would spend more time on HS3 than on HS2, but I recognise that I might be in a minority in holding that view, on my own side and in the House as a whole. To be honest, there would be much more benefit, particularly to the northern part of England, in spending more money on the transport links there than in building a fast link between Birmingham and London. However, that is something that the next Government are going to have to deal with. I speak as a former Secretary of State for Transport. The Department for Transport’s record on announcing such plans is pretty good, but it is not quite so good when it comes to delivering. Indeed, many announcements were made last week, but I distinctly remember announcing the same things myself 10 years ago. Perhaps that illustrates the problem that all Governments face.

One of the profound issues that needs to be discussed as we go into the next election is what people expect the Government to do in regard to the provision of services such as education, health and pensions and what sort of society we want to live in. However, this Budget does not begin to address those questions, which is why I shall have no hesitation in supporting my hon. and right hon. Friends in the Division Lobby tonight.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

amendment of the law

Lord Darling of Roulanish Excerpts

Tuesday 25th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Alistair Darling (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)]

The hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper)will forgive me, I hope, if I do not follow him directly in what he has just said. I want to say something about infrastructure in this country, and I want to talk about some of the slightly longer-term issues in relation to the capacity in our economy as it now is, as well as levels of public expenditure, but I start with annuities. In drawing the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, I declare a further interest. As I was 60 at the end of last year, my professional interest in pensions has become rather more personal.

Five years ago when I was Chancellor I looked at the whole question of annuities, which at that time was receiving quite a lot of publicity. There were two reasons that I did not make any changes. One was that I was concerned about any major change that would undermine the insurance principle that underpinned the idea of annuities when they were introduced some 70 or 80 years ago. Also, at that time I was concerned about some of the safeguards that we would need. Given the general economic climate at the time and because I was more focused on what was happening to our banks rather than our insurance companies, I did not pursue the matter.

However, I quite accept now that, because of the very poor annuity rates in the past few years and because the industry has not helped itself in the range of products that it offers people, it is time to look at the matter again. There are three areas about which I want to express my concern. These are issues that the whole House needs to address, and the Government need to address them during the consultation period that follows. First, I am concerned about the effect of the proposals on the annuity market. It is interesting that one does not have to get too many pages into the White Paper to see that at paragraph 2.27 the Government say that annuities are

“the only realistic option for many.”

I read last week that the IFS is concerned about the effect that taking out the higher end contributions will have on annuity rates. The Government need to have regard to that. It is not insuperable, but we need to look at it.

Secondly, the Australians have shown that it is possible to have a wide range of products that we would not necessarily recognise as annuities, but safeguards are needed, particularly in relation to the advice being offered. The Government said last week that they had made £20 million available. When I read the detail, I was surprised to find that that is a one-off payment. There is nothing after that. We in this House should all know that unfortunately the financial services industry has shown that if there is scope for mis-selling, mis-selling will happen. This is critically important.

Although the Pensions Minister may be indifferent as to whether or not somebody buys a Lamborghini, if they are buying it, they must at least understand that there might be consequences for how much money they have for the rest of their lives. It is not in the public interest that people go into something that might have to last them for the next 20 or 30 years without having received proper advice. That needs to be looked at. The offer of guidance is not enough.

Thirdly, the Government will have to consider the scope for tax avoidance. The reason that pensions are tax-privileged is that there is a societal interest in making sure that we save for our retirement. It was never designed to enable people to shelter their money from tax. Those are all aspects that need to be looked at.

I want to say a word about infrastructure. On Monday last week in the Financial Times there was the now traditional announcement of all the infrastructure projects that were on their way and on show, and an invitation to the pensions industry and others to invest. That is all very well. There were some old familiars which I recognise from my time in government, which are still not built and are still looking for money. Owing to the Budget, the pensions industry has just been relieved of quite a large sum of money. I would be interested in the Government’s assessment of where we will get the additional funds that we all know are needed from both the public and the private sector if we are to improve our housing stock, our transport stock and our ageing power fleet, which we are still struggling to replace. Successive Governments have had difficulties with that and this Government need to attend to the matter. That infrastructure will have some bearing on the capacity in our economy if we are to be able to provide for an ageing population and everything we have taken for granted over the past 30 or 40 years.

Reading the OBR report on the Government’s measures announced last week in relation to the economy, we see, rather surprisingly, that none of the measures announced by the Chancellor will, in the view of the IFS, make any difference whatever to the country’s GDP. The annual investment allowance which he doubled will, it says, have a negligible effect. That did not surprise me, because I doubled it when I was the Chancellor and it had no effect then. At least the advice from the IFS and the Treasury is entirely consistent. What is worrying is that we must increase the capacity of our economy. If we do not, we are locking ourselves on to a path where austerity will be unavoidable, because we will not have the wealth to pay down our debt, reduce the borrowing and generate the capacity needed in an economy.

This is an issue for Members on both sides of the House. We must decide how we are going to get more capacity into the economy. I hope the measures announced last week in the Budget work, but whether firms come to this country will be determined far more by big issues such as our infrastructure than by simply fiddling round the edges with tax reforms.

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend speaks with great authority on these matters. Does he agree that unlocking potential capacity and creating more employment in turn creates more revenue?

[Mr Darling]

Absolutely, and the argument that has been with us throughout this Parliament has been about how to ensure that we generate growth to pay down the debt. Part of the problem that the Government have at the moment is that the plan that they started out with did not achieve significant results—it is not the same plan as they are operating now, by the way, because it is running some four years late and is significantly different from the one set out in 2010—because we simply did not have the economic growth that people expected.

One of the most worrying points in the OBR’s report is that it expects our economy to be at full capacity in just four years’ time. Normally, when growth recovers after a recession, as it did in the ’80s and ’90s, it peaks at 3% or perhaps 4%, because spare capacity is being used up. The OBR says that there simply is not spare capacity in the economy at the moment. That should worry us, because if our economy is operating at capacity in four years’ time and inflationary pressures start kicking in, how on earth will we meet the future bills of a mature economy with an ageing society?

I understand that some Government Members are more ideological than others about public expenditure, and understandably, many of them expressed concern about the flooding in the west country earlier this year.

[Mr Tom Clarke (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (Lab)]

Before my right hon. Friend finishes his interesting speech, will he respond to the concerns among Labour supporters about how the Conservative party keeps reminding us of what it claims was the mess that Labour left behind? Are we therefore to believe that the international recession, which had an impact on Ireland, Iceland, Japan, America and so on, did not have an impact on Britain? Was that his experience?

[Mr Darling]

Having been around at the time, I rather got the impression that it was having an impact on everybody, from communist China to the republican United States and throughout Europe and the whole world. If there is a banking crash, it is not surprising that it has consequences.

To return to my point about the west country, we have to recognise that there are some things that the private sector will never do, and flood defence is one of them, so there will always be a role for the public sector in the economy. I firmly believe in a mixed economy and I am enthusiastic about anything that we can do to help the private sector innovate and invest, but it has to be complemented with investment in science, innovation and so on. The Government have a role in such things.

The Chancellor talks seriously about reducing public expenditure to levels last seen in 1948, but I say to the House and the country that the world in which we lived in 1948 was hugely different from the world that we live in today. Expectations are different and the population is getting older—many Members, not just me, may be grateful in a few years for what the state is willing to do as opposed to what we can do as individuals. That issue affects all parties that will be standing at the 2015 election, and we need to address it, because we cannot allow ourselves to drift into a situation in which it is almost inevitable that our economy will stall and hardly grow. That would lock us into unpalatable and difficult consequences. It is dead easy to sign up to cuts in a debate such as this, but living with the consequences of them—60% of them are still to come—will cause a great deal of pain to constituents of Members on both sides of the House.

Of course we have to deal with the immediate consequences and fall-out of what has happened over the past five years. Some sensible reforms have been announced in relation to savings, but we need to get pensions right, because we have got them wrong in the past. We need to get our economics right in the long-term interests of this country and of future employment and jobs, and I am not sure we are doing that yet.

Universal Credit

Lord Darling of Roulanish Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The reality is that this NAO report is very clear about the benefits and very clear that if we get the resets right—it gave us a list of them—and every one of those items has been done, it will save £38 billion. More than that, it will help improve the lives of the least well-off as they are delivered back into work. We should remember that I inherited from the previous Labour Government a chaotic system costing billions—and we are putting it right.

[Mr Alistair Darling (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)]

Like many Secretaries of State for Work and Pensions, I looked at something like universal credit some 12 years ago, and I was advised then that it was technically very difficult, if not impossible, to implement it at anything like an acceptable cost and that whatever the cost I was quoted, it was likely that it would end up costing an awful lot more. I have listened to the right hon. Gentleman this morning claiming that this project is on track and on budget, which I find extraordinary when the NAO says that it is anything but that. I have also listened to him blaming all those around him for letting him down, so will he tell us what advice he received when he gave this the go-ahead in 2010?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I can tell the right hon. Gentleman, whom I usually respect—and he may recall that we were facing each other across the Dispatch Box at the time when he was looking into the matter—that the advice I received then made it absolutely clear that universal credit could be delivered and a timetable could be set in the Department. I take full responsibility for the delivery of universal credit, and I will not shirk that responsibility. I intend to deliver it on budget and on time.

The NAO is an historical report. It relates to the period during which I was making the changes. Those changes have now been made, and all the outside advisers and experts believe that universal credit is deliverable. The right hon. Gentleman’s party has said that it supports universal credit, and I was happy to receive that support, but Opposition Members have continually voted against it and carped about it. I think that it would be far better for him to ensure that they stay the course.

Amendment of the Law

Lord Darling of Roulanish Excerpts

Tuesday 29th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Alistair Darling (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)]

In the short time available, I shall not follow up on any points made by the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley), except to say that when he talks about any element of fairness in the Chancellor’s last Budget and this Budget as regards those on the top incomes, I think he will find that some of the things he talks about have more to do with measures that were announced by the previous Government than with those announced by this Government.

In many ways, the Budget is an annexe to last June’s Budget, which set the direction for this Government and the tone for this year’s Budget. I want briefly to consider how that will impact on this country as well as what is happening in other parts of the world. Although it does not quite fit the Tory story, what is happening to our economy will be very much influenced by what is happening in other parts of the world.

In some ways, it is quite remarkable that the global economy is growing at all. Three years ago, when the International Monetary Fund reported for the first time that it had stopped growing, it was possible that we were in for a serious downturn. It is now growing, but it is a two-speed recovery that is strong in Asia and far less so in the west. In Europe, we see strong growth in Germany and far less growth in southern Europe in particular. Here at home, manufacturing is doing well because the pound has depreciated, but the service and business sectors are not doing so well at all.

The recovery in this country and in Europe is fragile. We saw the economy grow more strongly than we expected in quarters two and three—the summer and autumn of last year—although again that had an awful lot more to do with measures that were implemented before rather than after the general election. We saw a sharp slow-down after that, which was largely brought about by people’s fear of what was to come. People are losing confidence—we saw the confidence survey published just after the Budget last week—and that should worry any Government. If we continue to get sluggish growth, the risk is that we will bump along the bottom and we will not get the jobs or growth on which this country depends.

Incidentally, I followed with interest what the Secretary of State said but one question that he failed to answer was that put by my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds): if our spending was so wrong, how come the Conservatives supported it right up until the end of 2008 and the Liberal Democrats supported it until a week after the general election, when they promptly changed their minds? The Secretary of State has revealed this afternoon that he is not quite the details man I remembered, but he might care to note that our structural deficit in 2006, according to his Government’s own measure, was 0.4%. It is simply not true to suggest that all our problems today are the result of spending. The main problem that we faced was an acute banking crisis that hit us and hit other countries in the world. That is why we are not the only country to have a very large deficit.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I am listening to the right hon. Gentleman with great interest and respect, but I want to get this absolutely straight because one of his right hon. Friends said this the other day. The OECD measurement of the UK’s structural deficit in 2007 was 3.9% of GDP, the highest in the G7. Can he confirm that?

[Mr Darling]

The structural deficit was 0.4%. Throughout the past decade, we were spending money, but I must say, as a Minister in that Government, we were greeted with calls from the then Opposition not to spend less but to spend more on just about every occasion. They cannot have it both ways.

What worries me is that as we look forward, we face a number of pressures that are a threat to sustained recovery in this country. We, along with most other European countries, are following a deflationary policy and we are doing it together. This is not like Canada or Sweden 10 years ago, who reduced their deficit on the back of rapidly expanding neighbouring economies. That will have an effect. America, sooner or later, will have to deal with its very large debt problem that has been overhanging that country since the Bush years. That is not a recent phenomenon but it will have to be dealt with and it will have a knock-on effect on the rest of the world’s economies.

On inflation, for 10 years we in the west have lived off cheap goods coming from the far east. Now what is happening, as one would expect, is that those economies are growing and there are inflationary pressures. Commodity prices are increasing and wages are starting to go up, so those days are finished for us. It worries me that we are likely to face deflation as a result of Government policy with inflation as well. All that will result in lower growth, which is exactly what the Office for Budget Responsibility has said.

[Mary Macleod (Brentford and Isleworth) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that many measures in the Budget will stimulate growth in future?

[Mr Darling]

I think there are many measures in the Budget, such as the reduction in corporation tax, the reform of planning law—if the Government can see that through their Back Benchers and councillors—and some others that will be helpful, but the thing that drives whether companies set up, take on more people or put in more investment is whether they can sell their goods and services. For as long as companies doubt that that is the case, we are going to have this problem with lack of confidence and we simply will not get the levels of growth that we expect.

That is why the story of this Budget was in many ways what the OBR—now independent of Government, which is a good thing—had to say. For the third time in 10 months it has downrated the growth that it expects in this country over the next couple of years and that should worry us. Yes, it picks up after that, but I suspect that is a function of the model that the OBR adopts: if growth is depressed in the short term, it is automatically assumed that growth comes back. However, I cannot see any evidence of where that growth is going to come from, either in the world economy or in Europe, especially if the eurozone insists on following what I regard as punitive policies towards those peripheral countries that are getting into trouble—visiting on Greece and Ireland conditions that I do not think they will be able to meet. Sooner or later, they will have to renegotiate or default, and the eurozone countries—principally Germany, which is the main driver of what is happening in the eurozone—will have to rethink the policies they are currently adopting. Otherwise, there will be a risk not only that Europe will fail to grow but that parts of it will go back into recession. That would be an absolute tragedy for the people living there and would also be extremely bad for us.

I have mentioned the uncertainties in the United States, but here at home we still have problems with the banks and their inability to lend. I recognise all the difficulties in that regard. I endured much criticism from the parties now in government when I was in charge of these things, but interestingly they have come up against exactly the same problems that I did, which is why their attempts to make the banks lend have had exactly the same reception as mine did. Next month, we will have the Vickers report into the future of banking but there is a risk that if we spend a long time discussing these matters and there is a lot of uncertainty about what should happen with the banks, that uncertainty will lead to lending being depressed. I hope there will be a full debate on the Vickers inquiry after the Easter recess, but I hope also that the Government will move to a conclusion one way or another in reasonable time. There is still uncertainty about banking regulation, particularly in Europe, and I regard the stress tests now being put in place as wholly inadequate and repeating the same mistakes that were made last summer. It is high time that we got to grips with this problem, which has not yet been resolved.

On the financial services sector, there is a lot of talk about rebalancing our economy and I am in favour of that, but we need to make sure that we build up other sectors of the economy and that we do not end up inadvertently running down one sector, which happens to employ more than 1 million people in this country.

Finally, it is important to recognise that in 2008 and 2009 international co-operation managed to prevent our collapsing into the abyss. There is a limit to what can be done through international agreements but they do matter when we are dealing with currency imbalances, trade talks, energy and so on. I hope that the Government will re-engage in that regard and will recognise that the policy they are currently pursuing within the United Kingdom runs the risk of derailing the recovery, meaning a long, slow recovery that will not bring the growth and jobs we need.