Mark Tami
Main Page: Mark Tami (Labour - Alyn and Deeside)Department Debates - View all Mark Tami's debates with the HM Treasury
(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Ms Eagle
I will give way in a moment. If we reach the stage where we have an appropriate analysis of how our economy got to be in this situation, we will stand a far better chance of having a reasonable discourse about how we can best move forward, rather than having this gross caricature being made by those on the Government Benches.
Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)
The Government seem to forget that when they were in opposition they promised to match our spending. The Liberal Democrats have great cheek to say now that they did not support the increased level of borrowing—I recall that they certainly did.
Ms Eagle
That is true. Clearly, the Chancellor and Prime Minister are on record, up to and including in 2008, as doing precisely what my hon. Friend says and supporting our spending commitments as they were at the time.
Although the recovery remains distinctly fragile, the June Budget took a huge and risky gamble with it. Since then, confidence in the UK’s economic prospects has fallen off a cliff and business surveys, such as that by Deloitte which I asked the Exchequer Secretary about, demonstrate that economic sentiment is darkening. There are increasing signs that the tentative recovery is stalling and that the economic storm clouds are gathering once more.