We can't go on with Labours debt crisis

Today, new figures show the first signs of economic growth after 18 months of recession, the longest and deepest since the war. 

Of course, the end of the Great Recession is good news, even though we were one of the first big economies into recession, and the last out.  Now we are coming out of recession, Labour’s Debt Crisis is the biggest threat to our recovery.

As the Director-General of the CBI says in the broad sheets today, ‘one of the troubles with the Government’s programme [of debt reduction] is that it’s long on aspirations and short on details, and it’s stretched out over the lifetime of two whole Parliaments.’ 

We can’t go on like this.  We need change and a Conservative government to get a grip on our debt crisis. As any family with a credit card knows, the more we spend and the longer we wait to pay off our bills, the worse it gets.

Five facts about Labour’s Debt Crisis

·         We’re borrowing money at a rate of around £6,000 every second - every five seconds, the Government borrows more than the average British person earns in a year.

·         This year, we’re expected to borrow almost 14 per cent of our GDP – almost twice as much as when we nearly went bust in the 1970s.

·         We’re spending more money on the interest on our debt than on almost anything else.

·         We have the biggest budget deficit of any large economy.

·         Last week, we had the worst public borrowing figures for any December on record.

We desperately need a change of direction.  A Conservative government will take three key steps to rebuild our broken economy:

1.         First, we still face a financial crisis.  So we need to get banks lending again.  For nearly a year, we have been calling for a National Loan Guarantee Scheme to underwrite bank lending to businesses, to save businesses and protect jobs. And we think that instead of paying our significant cash bonuses, retail banks should be rebuilding their balance sheets so they can start lending to businesses again.

2.         Second, we face a debt crisis.  To restore investor confidence, we need a credible plan to get the £175 billion annual deficit under control.  That means taking the tough choices in public spending we have set out, such as a one-year public sector pay freeze except for the lowest paid.

3.         Third, we face a jobs crisis.  So we need a plan for growth. We will abolish all tax on jobs created by new companies for two years; we will introduce a radical new programme for everyone who is unemployed so we can Get Britain Working again; and we will create a high-skill economy by building a new generation of technical schools, creating 100,000 new apprenticeships, and funding 10,000 extra university places.

Britain has the resources, people, ingenuity and ideas to get us out of recession.  We just need a government that will help, not stand in the way.