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Economy, Pensions and Welfare

I shall make a little more progress and perhaps give way to the hon. Gentleman later. I was speaking about the lack of evidence that the stamp duty holiday, the VAT cut and so on had made the slightest difference. There is plenty of evidence that the prospect of a trillion pound national debt and the tax bombshell to pay for it is undermining national confidence in the future, and that makes the recession worse today. We will begin to see proof of whether the Prime Minister's tax and borrow recession plan is working when we see the unemployment figures later this week, and particularly when we see the unemployment figures in January and February, by which time the Government will have been dealing with the recession for more than half a year. The Prime Minister has staked his claim to office on the performance of the economy. Let him, then, be judged by it, just as we are prepared to be judged by the positive action that we now urge on the Chancellor—action that really would help reduce the length of the recession and instil the confidence that we need for a future recovery. That action begins, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood) said, by addressing the problems in our credit markets, for this is a credit crunch, and until we address the lack of credit, the Government are only scratching at the surface of the deep problems that we face. The problem for the Government, and particularly for the Prime Minister, is that it requires an admission that he does not want to make. That admission is that the bank recapitalisation may have rescued the banks back in September and October, but it has not rescued the wider economy. There remains an acute shortage of credit. An over-leveraged economy is de-leveraging—[Interruption.] The Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who survived the fire that was taking place behind her on the Andrew Marr programme yesterday, is obviously very excited by the incident and is gabbling away. If she wants to make an intervention, she is more than welcome to do so—