---

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I shall obey your strictures, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is difficult to get back to the Budget. We are debating the Budget—the last serious business of this Parliament before we break up—but it was not so much a Budget as a holding statement. In the middle of a serious economic crisis—certainly the gravest financial crisis that anybody can remember—the Chancellor delivered a Budget that was almost totally devoid of content, which certainly did not answer the only serious question, and which made no significant changes to tax, except for one or two that I shall touch upon. I cannot help commenting on something in passing: I heard the Children, Schools and Families Secretary say, when asked about tax, that he was not going to give any advice to the Chancellor of the Exchequer on tax levels—although the next time he mentioned it, he did at least say, "in future". On behalf of the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, I would like to ask for that in writing, in case it has not been recorded in Hansard, because we know who was responsible for the national insurance increase. The Chancellor did not want to put it in his pre-Budget report; it was not the tax increase he had in mind at all. However, I shall return to that matter in a moment—it just seemed relevant. The Prime Minister and the Children, Schools and Families Secretary told the Chancellor that he could not have the pre-Budget report that he wanted. I suspect that, on this occasion, the Chancellor might have produced a serious Budget, and I strongly suspect that it was the Prime Minister and the would-be Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Children, Schools and Families Secretary, who prevented him from doing so and who gave us the holding statement that we heard.