Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-24-Speech-2-345"
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"en.20090324.28.2-345"2
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"Mr President, I see that the Prime Minister has already mastered the essential craft of the European politician; namely the ability to say one thing in this Chamber and a very different thing to your home electorate.
They can see what the markets have already seen – that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government.
Prime Minister, you have spoken here about free trade, and ‘amen’ to that. Who would have guessed listening to you just now that you were the author of the phrase ‘British jobs for British workers’, and that you have subsidised – where you have not nationalised outright – swathes of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks?
Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this House if your actions matched your words. Perhaps you would have more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not going into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country.
The truth is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around GBP 20 000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.
Once again today you try to spread the blame around. You spoke about an international recession, international crisis. It is true that we are all sailing together into the squalls, but not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear their rigging – in other words, to pay off debt – but you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further. As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the waterline under the accumulated weight of your debt.
We are now running a deficit that touches 10% of GDP – an almost unbelievable figure. More than Pakistan and more than Hungary – countries which have already called in the IMF.
The issue is not that you are not apologising. Like everyone else, I have long accepted that you are pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things. It is that you are carrying on wilfully, worsening our situation, wantonly spending what little we have left.
In the last 12 months, 100 000 private-sector jobs have been lost, and yet you have created 30 000 public-sector jobs. Prime Minister, you cannot carry on for ever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit. You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt, and when you repeat in that wooden and perfunctory way that our situation is better than others, that we are well placed to weather the storm, I have to say you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.
You know, and we know, and you know that we know it is nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by 30%, and soon the voters, too, will get their chance to say so."@en1
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