Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation — Amendment of the Law

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:57 pm on 22 March 2016.

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Photo of George Osborne George Osborne Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Secretary of State 12:57, 22 March 2016

I will give way in a moment to the Member for the taxi business.

It is the easiest thing in the world to do this job and say yes to every new demand for Government spending and to please all the people all of the time, but we know where that leads. We know that because before me we had a Chancellor who spent a whole decade going around the country saying yes to even more spending and ever higher welfare bills, and we know what happened then: it brought our country to the brink of collapse. That was not compassion; it was economic cruelty, and the people who paid the price are those who always pay the price when Government spending gets out of control and welfare bills spiral. It was not the politicians at the time who paid the price—no, they are happily sitting on the Opposition Benches—it was the poorest who paid the price and the most vulnerable who suffered. Those people lost their jobs and had their livelihoods snatched from them, and those are the people I am fighting for—real, decent, hard-working people, not numbers on a Treasury spreadsheet: people whose lives would be impoverished, and whose hopes and aspirations would be crushed, if we had gone on spending more and more than the country earns. Getting things right for those people is what I am all about, and that weighs on every decision that I have taken as Chancellor over the past six years. Those are the people whom we in the Conservative party have been elected to serve.

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George Morley
Posted on 23 Mar 2016 4:54 pm (Report this annotation)

Getting things right for those people is what I am all about, and that weighs on every decision that I have taken as Chancellor over the past six years.
Oh you forgot to add - to the exclusion of the Frozen Pensioners. Why ?