Dr Ben Spencer

I have to apologise to the hon. Member. I came into the House in 2019, and it strikes me that this debate is probably better suited to 2018, before I was elected. On the situation that we find ourselves in, many Labour Members have spoken about the Chancellor or the Government bringing in free this and free that. The Government do not have money and the Chancellor does not have money. It is not even just taxpayers’ money that they are pledging to spend; it is our children’s money. That goes to the core of the problem that we face. The decisions that the Government are taking to keep on and not cut spending and to keep on borrowing and borrowing are not on my head. They are not on the heads of anyone in this room. Those decisions are on the heads of our children. Families know how to budget, and this is the equivalent of a parent saying, “We fancy going on holiday to—I do not know—Lanzarote this year and we are going to borrow money to do it. I am not going to borrow it on me, though; I am going to borrow it on my kids. They will take out the loan and they can pay it back in future.” It is fundamentally and morally unacceptable that we are in this position and that the Government do not have an approach to try and drive down the deficit and pay back the debt. That is why I am so pleased that the Leader of the Opposition announced the golden rule for making sure that policies going forward recognise that we cannot keep on spending money that we do not have. In the last Government, from 2010 onwards, we worked really hard on driving down debt, and we had almost got there, in terms of reducing the deficit, when covid kicked off. Can people imagine the situation we would have been in if covid had kicked off without the work we had done to balance the books and without the fiscal firepower that we had to get through it? I remember the debates that we had around covid, and I remember well the first year—I am sure everyone in this Chamber does, whether they were a Member or not. I remember early on being desperately worried that the shadow of covid would loom long and loom hard, and that, over the next decade, we would see the impact of turning off the economy for two years.