Government's Management of the Economy

Julie Marson Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Julie Marson (Hertford and Stortford) (Con) [V]]

A decade is a long time. Memories fade—or they do for Members on the Labour Front Bench who would like to rewrite history. My memory is very clear. I clearly remember the desperate state in which the Labour Government left our national finances, and that they told us exactly what they had done at the time. In their own jaunty words:

“I’m afraid there is no money.”

When the Labour party took office in 1997, the deficit stood at around £13 billion. When it left, it was £153 billion. It took the Conservative-led Government almost 10 years to reduce that deficit by 80%, while growing the economy, creating millions of jobs, cutting taxes for 32 million people, increasing the living wage and improving the lives and life chances of millions of people throughout our country. Labour opposed every effort to do that.

Thank goodness we cleaned up Labour’s economic mess. Think of the mess we would be in now if our public finances had been in the hands of the Labour party for the past decade. Think of the mess if current Labour Front Benchers had had their way and the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) was in charge, alongside his overturning-capitalism, little-red-book-waving shadow Chancellor.

That we have had, and have now, a Conservative Government means that we have had the resources to support the NHS through the pandemic and the economic resilience to provide more than £280 billion of economic support for lives and livelihoods and to invest billions of pounds in sustainable public services—our schools, our police and our infrastructure.

The Chancellor will set out new measures in the Budget to support our country and its post-pandemic growth, but many of the foundations are already in place, including a world-beating business start-up ecosystem and a vision to build back better. What has the Labour party offered as its vision for the future? Two policies: one a Conservative policy from 2012 and the other pinched off the centre-right think-tank the Centre for Policy Studies.

My mum grew up in Limehouse. Her MP was Clement Attlee. The Leader of the Opposition is no Clement Attlee, and his party has nothing to offer this country but the same record of economic failure that it had over a decade ago. Attlee himself said:

“In a life-and-death struggle we cannot afford to have our destinies in the hands of failures”—[Official Report, 7 May 1940; Vol. 360, c. 1094.]

I agree with him. We cannot afford to leave our destinies in the hands of those with such a dismal record of economic failure: the Labour party.