The Economy and Living Standards

Alison McGovern Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

Before those interventions, the shadow Chancellor was making an extraordinarily important speech. Does he agree that the fundamental question we face is whether the link between economic growth and the living standards of people doing ordinary jobs in our country is broken or not? Will he return to such points, because those are the issues that my constituents fret about day in, day out?

[Ed Balls]

I will. This is the most vital and difficult issue. We have seen a rise in unskilled jobs in our country in recent years. That is a good thing, but it is not good enough. If that goes alongside falling living standards year on year for people not just on the lowest but on middle incomes, what will we end up with? We will end up with rising poverty among working people and record numbers of working people going to food banks, as well as rising alienation and a view that mainstream politics is not delivering. Unless Conservative Members wake up to that, they will see the consequences of it next year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Osborne]

I was wrong? This is the man who presided over the deepest recession in British modern history and the biggest banking crisis since the Victorian age. He has the nerve to get up and say to the team that is turning the country around that we got it wrong. The truth is that he is the person who got it wrong.

There was a very interesting observation this week by Charles Clarke, who was the Home Secretary when Labour were in office. This is what he said:

“we have rested a great deal on assuming that the Conservative strategy wouldn’t succeed, that ‘plan A’…would not work and that has proved to be an unwise judgment because in fact, the Conservatives have succeeded in getting the economy onto a more positive path which leaves us”—

the Labour party—

“very little place”.

[Alison McGovern]

I think the Chancellor gave himself away at the beginning of his speech when he described “long-term economic plan” as just a catchphrase. He said he would close the budget deficit and he has not. If his policies are such a success, why not?

[Mr Osborne]

It is not a catchphrase; it is a plan that has cut the claimant count in the hon. Lady’s constituency by 45%. That is a plan that is working. The budget deficit has been halved. If her argument is that we should be cutting faster or trying to get the deficit down faster, that is a novel argument because it is not one I remember being made at any one of the economic debates when she and the rest of the Labour party trooped through the Division Lobby against every single change we have made to try to bring the public finances under control.