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Business of the House

I thank the right hon. and learned Lady for her statement, but may I, once again, ask for a debate on Equitable Life? Last week, the right hon. and learned Lady twice used the word ““compensation”” with reference to those who have lost out from the collapse of Equitable Life, but the word appears in neither the oral statement given to the House by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury on 15 January nor the Command Paper published immediately afterwards. Can the right hon. and learned Lady confirm that the Government will indeed be giving compensation, and not just means-tested payments? Is she aware of what the ombudsman—or, to use her favoured form of words, the ombudsperson—was complaining about last week when she said that the Government's response to her report had twisted her words and was spinning deceits? Leaks to the press have suggested that the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are considering delaying the Budget announcement. Given the seriousness of our current economic plight, can the Leader of the House tell us when the Chancellor will deliver his Budget to the House? Some companies facing a slump in demand for their products have decided simply to shut down for a few months; have the Government decided to do the same? Last week, the right hon. and learned Lady declined to answer a question from my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight) about her plans for the Modernisation Committee. That Committee has not met since July. May we have a statement on whether she plans to abolish it—as some of my hon. Friends would like—fold it into the Procedure Committee, or revive it? May we also perhaps have a debate on moral authority, so that this House can help to establish a code of modern manners for privacy, humour and comment, which can be practised and agreed by everyone, in place of the current chaos, which provokes animosity and condemnation when it all could be so much better handled? It seems that we have more inclement weather moving in. Perhaps the right hon. and learned Lady can dismiss the scurrilous rumours circulating this week that she spent most of Monday building a snowperson? We are now learning that some councils have been forced to scale back and even halt their gritting and salting programmes owing to national shortages, so may we have a debate on this country's lack of preparedness for snow and ice? The report by the Select Committee on Business and Enterprise on the annual report of the Department criticised the lack of proper accountability caused by the large number of Ministers, including the Secretary of State Lord Mandelson, who are not in this House, but in another place. That report, which was published more than two months ago, called for urgent action by the Government to investigate possible solutions to this imbalance, but there has still been no formal response—when will there be such a response from the Government? We are all in favour of Ministers flying the flag for Britain but, unlike Lord Mandelson, we like to do things the right way up. Given that flying the flag upside down is an internationally recognised sign of distress, was his appearance in front of such a symbol a mistake or a desperate cry for help? The truth is that the Prime Minister has moved from recession to depression, the country has run out of salt, the Government have run out of grit and now they are flying the flag of distress. How long will we have to wait before this Government follow the lead of Iceland and simply decide to pack up and go home?