Eurozone

Claire Perry Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

As the hon. Gentleman will understand, that has been kept under close surveillance at the Treasury—certainly for as long as I have been Chancellor, and no doubt before. We are well aware of the exposure of UK banks to the eurozone peripherals. However, we have satisfied ourselves that even with those exposures—as I said, the FSA has made much of the information public—banks such as RBS are well capitalised and liquid and do not have the kinds of problems that some banks on the continent have.

[Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)]

It is my belief that the fiscal activism of this Government has created headroom for the next round of quantitative easing. Will the Chancellor tell us what he thinks would have happened if we had carried on spending under the plans of the previous Government and whether there would have been any room at all for a further round of QE?

[Mr Osborne]

My hon. Friend is right to call it fiscal activism, because one has to step in and take difficult decisions, which the Opposition have ducked, to get the deficit under control, to have a credible plan and to allow monetary policy greater freedom of manoeuvre. We are monetary activists while being fiscally responsible and that is the right approach. The alternative advocated by the Opposition is a big increase in interest rates—[Interruption.] Let me let hon. Members into a little secret. The Chancellor does not set the interest rates. They are set not only by the Bank of England but by the markets and if we abandoned our plan and suffered the credit downgrade that the shadow Chancellor is, in effect, advocating, interest rates would go up, families would face higher mortgage bills, people would lose their homes, businesses would go bust and jobs would be lost. That is not a path we will go down.