James Duddridge, Member of Parliament for Rochford and Southend East comments on the Spending Review.
James said
“We are spending £120 million every single day just to pay off the interest on Labour’s debt – money that goes to foreign creditors to help pay for their schools and hospitals rather than our own. This equates to every constituency within the UK building a new school, hospital and redeveloping the town centre every year.
Dealing with the deficit is unavoidable, but the decisions about how to do it are not. The Spending Review has set out our choices. Investment in the future rather than the bills of past failure.
Labour left this country on the edge of an economic abyss. The Coalition Government inherited the largest deficit in our peacetime history. Today Britain steps back from the brink. Today we confront the bills from a decade of debt and start to rebuild, putting our public services and the welfare state on a sustainable footing – for the long term.
We have chosen to prioritise the NHS; schools; security and the infrastructure that will help our economy grow. To do so we have cut welfare and waste.
I want to reassure my constituents that fairness is at the heart of this Spending Review. There is absolutely nothing fair about running huge budget deficits and burdening future generations with the debts we cannot afford to pay. There is nothing fair about Labour’s welfare system which traps millions of families in a cycle of dependency.”
ENDS