Esther McVey

I think I need to pull the hon. Gentleman up straight away. This is not in any way an entertaining speech—indeed, I would put this down as a horror speech. This is a disgrace of monumental proportions, so the word “entertaining” was used absolutely incorrectly. Let me talk about the choices that different Governments have made, and where money could have been saved. One example is GB Energy, which the new Government thought they could find money for. They could not find money for the pensioners or the farmers—this Government are giving away half a billion pounds a year to farmers overseas, but they cannot find that half a billion pounds here. We would stop money being spent on things like GB Energy, which does not produce any energy; it seems to me like another quango that will cost money. We would not have increased foreign aid, and I can tell Members one thing that we would not have done: we would not have capitulated to the rail unions, finding money for the railway workers without any modernisation whatsoever. There is a big list of things that we would not have been paying for.