Part of Internet Regulation (Material Inciting Gang Violence) – in the House of Commons at 4:21 pm on 8 November 2011.
I would like to see Governments, and in particular our Government, using their veto from time to time in a more bold and radical way.
The wording that I am particularly concerned about is that which talks about
“tough decisions being taken…to bring deficits under control and stimulate economic growth”.
Those things are incompatible. If one wants simply to bring down budgets by cutting, that will not stimulate economic growth, but reduce it. The wording should be the other way around. If one wants to bring deficits under control, the best way to do so is to stimulate economic growth. Economic growth would bring down unemployment, increase tax revenues and reduce the burden of benefits.
If we encourage all the member states of the European Union to deflate collectively, that is the route to depression. There are lessons from the 1930s on that. I hope that we will quickly come to our senses and realise that we are in a pre-1930s situation. If we do not reverse it, we may head towards depression.
In questions to the Chancellor the other day, I talked about the Labour Government of 1945, who had a gross debt much larger than we have now. They chose not to cut spending, but to create the welfare state, bring in the national health service and run a full-employment economy. Full employment was sustained for two and a half to three decades. That is what brought the deficit under control, and that is what we should do again.
There are other bad examples from history, which I have mentioned before. After the first world war, there was the Geddes axe. There was a deficit after the war—there are always deficits after wars—so we thought that we should cut our way back to a lower budget. What happened, of course, was that for a decade we had low growth, high unemployment and the deficit got worse, not better. We are in danger of doing that again.
In the short term, we have to spend. We could reduce our contribution to the European Union budget and spend some of that money on areas of labour intensity with low import content. Those areas are obviously construction and the public services—precisely the areas that are being cut. Cutting is exactly the wrong thing to do and we should do the opposite if we are serious about bringing the deficit down. That would be beneficial for everybody because the people who do not have jobs would have jobs, the public services that are now suffering would not suffer, and the people who are dependent on public services would not be hurt.
I agree with the objective of reducing our contribution to the European budget and constraining it in the short term, but I do not believe that we should emphasise simply cutting deficits without recognising that that could make unemployment rise and the deficit get worse in the long term. That could lead us into a very serious economic situation.