Every survey confirms that standard rate tax cuts are not even the priority of the highly paid. The British Institute of Management, speaking for the men and women, who, according to the Prime Minister, need extra incentives and will leave the country if they do not get them, found that three quarters of its members, anticipating this year's Budget, preferred improved services to tax cuts. The summary of its survey states: The principal message put forward was that managers preferred some specific increase in government spending to a cut in taxation.

I invite the Chief Secretary to answer this question directly: why was the cut in the basic rate more important to the Government than an improved Health Service and higher pensions? Why was it more important than more textbooks in schools and an end to the crisis of homelessness? Why, above all, was that cut more important than a cut in unemployment? I hope that the Chief Secretary will not further enhance his reputation for keeping the truth at arm's length with the pretence that a general cut in income tax—the general reflation, about which the Government used to be so scathing—is the best way of fulfilling their obligation to reduce unemployment.

Last month at Question Time I asked the Chief Secretary whether he found the repetition of fraudulent statistics demeaning and he assured me and the House that he did not. With his recently acquired frankness, I trust that he will now admit that the Treasury's economic model demonstrates that tax cuts are the most expensive, least effective and most economically damaging way of encouraging additional jobs.

The Chancellor talked to us about unemployment and employment yesterday and gave us some figures. I would like to ask the Chief Secretary to give today the true figures for the unemployment record that the Government can, rightly, boast. But since he would be reluctant to do that, I propose to do it for him. The Government's unemployment record does not put them in a position which justifies their denial of and refusal to accept all the advice that they are given about how unemployment can he cut.

Since the Government were elected we have lost 750,000 jobs in the British economy—more than the rest of the European Economic Community put together. The whole of the reduction in unemployment last year is accounted for by either special measures or changes in the method of calculation. The triumph which the Government proclaim and the Chancellor attempted to proclaim yesterday is the product of schemes, special measures and statistical manipulation.

The Labour party believes that the money at the Chancellor's disposal should have been used to put Britain back to work in real jobs. At a net average cost or £6 billion the unemployment register could be cut by 1 million in two years. There is now no doubt that the money is available. Yesterday the Chancellor had at his disposal easily enough to finance Labour's job programe. It is not that he could not afford to put Britain back to work; he chose not to put Britain back to work.

We set out a week ago the details of our programme, which should have formed the centrepiece of this year's Budget. The Budget should have been built around four elements. The first is an expansion of employment in the private sector, stimulated by new investment and the carefully targeted incentive of reductions in national insurance contributions in selected areas.