Kwasi Kwarteng: What steps his Department is taking to reduce the level of the budget deficit.
Kwasi Kwarteng: Has the Chancellor received any more correspondence from the former Chief Secretary?
Kwasi Kwarteng: It is a great honour to be called to deliver my maiden speech. First of all, I want to give hearty thanks to David Wilshire who, amidst difficulties and press distortions, managed to keep up his work as a fine constituency MP. Very often, people would open the door to me and say, "Ah, so you're the new David Wilshire," and I would reply, "Well, sort of, but I want to continue his traditions...
Kwasi Kwarteng: I have been privileged to hear maiden speeches by my hon. Friends the Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) and for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman), who illustrated very well the nature of the threats that we face. My hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet talked about carers, and about the particular character and fortitude of the people of her constituency. The House...
Kwasi Kwarteng: May I retort that Mussolini was originally a socialist? He was a left-wing journalist. It is no accident that those people had many shared ideas. However, whether Perón was a socialist or a syndicalist is neither here nor there. The hon. Member for Rhondda alluded to our problem as a country. He suggested that we had problems with education. He rightly mentioned that many people in this...
Kwasi Kwarteng: That is the whole point-that happened because of grade inflation. The results reached a high every year for 13 years. One must conclude that either students are getting much cleverer or exams are getting easier. You take your choice. [Interruption.]
Kwasi Kwarteng: I am happy to take them.
Kwasi Kwarteng: I was making a broad point about 13 years of Labour failure, which is central to the debate. If we are serious about competing with China and India, we must have much more rigour and a little more discipline and focus in our education system. Those are obvious facts, but Labour Members seem to ignore them completely.
Kwasi Kwarteng: With respect, I am talking about the emerging economies, and the point about education is central to the debate. If the country is to improve and compete with other countries, we need much more rigour and discipline. That was palpably lacking in the Labour Government's actions in the past 13 years. We must approach the problem much more broadly. Britain was so successful in the past because...
Kwasi Kwarteng: This is the first time I have had the privilege of speaking while you are in the Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker, so I congratulate you on your appointment. We are in a bit of a déjà vu situation. Labour Members cry about Tory cuts, yet they forget why the cuts have to take place. They are suffering from collective amnesia and forgetting that for the last 13 years they ran this country and the...
Kwasi Kwarteng: I remember that very well, but I would point out that, in the five years before the crisis that the hon. Lady speaks of, we were running completely needless deficits. We did not have to run those deficits; we did so because of the concerted attempt by the then Chancellor to expand the state and to keep spending money.
Kwasi Kwarteng: During the 2005 election, we were- [ Interruption ] . If I may continue. The general Aladdin's lamp approach was shown to be absurd. As the then Government kept rubbing the lamp and the genie came out, they asked for money, but the genie suddenly became rather less giving. At one point, the genie-in form of the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne)-wrote a letter and said,...
Kwasi Kwarteng: With respect, the idea that, somehow, our wealth was purely predicated on Government spending is exactly the principle that Conservative Members have problems with.
Kwasi Kwarteng: I am fully aware of those facts. The figures show that the ratio of our debt to GDP is 12%. That is higher than any other country in the west. [ Interruption. ] I am sorry; I stand corrected. The deficit-to-GDP ratio is the highest of any other country in western Europe and, indeed, in the western developed world.
Kwasi Kwarteng: The hon. Lady is being quite clever and fixing the measuring rod. Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister, openly boasted of abolishing boom and bust. That was the central claim that he made. He predicated his entire policy on that premise. The premise was wrong. As we all know, and as hon. Members have commented, we went into a recession and we were faced with a huge deficit. That was a huge...
Kwasi Kwarteng: I am not talking about the 18 years from 1979 to 1997. I am talking about the 13 years in which we lived under Labour. To finish my contribution, I want to talk about the private sector and the public sector. Someone described trying to grow an economy by focusing on the public sector as a man sitting in a bucket trying to lift himself up by pulling the handle. It does not work. The only way...
Kwasi Kwarteng: The hon. Gentleman said that he accepts the need for cuts-for the deficit to be dealt with. Where does he, as a representative of his party, see those cuts falling?
Kwasi Kwarteng: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Kwasi Kwarteng: In a debate that took place yesterday, the Minister for Universities and Science pointed out that manufacturing had collapsed even further under the Labour Government than under 18 years of the Conservative Government. I quote from memory, but it went from some 22% to 18% of GDP between 1979 and 1997, and had decreased to some 11% by 2009.
Kwasi Kwarteng: What does the hon. Lady think about the sovereign debt crisis in Greece, to which my right hon. Friend the Chancellor referred in his Budget statement?