Anne Main
Main Page: Anne Main (Conservative - St Albans)Department Debates - View all Anne Main's debates with the HM Treasury
(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Osborne
It sounds like the shadow Chancellor wrote that question. Let me repeat what I said earlier: the proposal Barack Obama put forward in his speech at the George Washington university is for a deficit reduction in the United States of the same pace and scale as the one we are pursuing in Britain. That is because in America, too, they understand that they have to deal with their budget deficit.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
Europe is making increasing demands on our pension pots and our benefit pots and, indeed, it recently made a demand on our VAT. Is it not time that we had a debate on how much we pay towards Europe? The Chancellor says it would be economically disastrous if it broke up, but there should be a debate. Some 75,000 people have signed a Daily Express petition asking for a debate on this, so surely there should be an autumn debate?
Mr Osborne
We do debate the European budget in this Parliament, and they are often quite lively debates. We are fighting hard for a real-terms freeze in the European budget not just for next year but for the coming new financial perspective from 2014, and we have enlisted a number of allies. There is now an understanding across Europe that, with very tough public expenditure decisions at home in every European country, we also need to get control of the European budget.