Today has been a hectic day in Parliament with the Chancellor of the Exchequer making his Emergency Budget statement as to the measures that the Coalition Government will be taking to start to deal with the effects of years of Labour’s overspending. A budget comprising largely of spending reductions and tax increases is not what anyone would want but it is in the circumstances completely unavoidable and it must never be forgotten that the cuts announced today are Labour’s cuts. As a country we simply can not go on borrowing £1 out of every £4 the Government spends. I think that the scale of the problem is most starkly revealed on page 72 of The Red Book which sets out the detail of the Budget. Table B1 shows that in five years time even after all the measures announced today it is forecast our Country will still not be in a position to start repaying its debts. The forecast is that we will still have to borrow some £20 billion pounds a year to balance the books in 2015-2016. I must remember to remind those who constantly plead for more Government spending of this fact!