Mr Speaker, listening to the Chancellor's speech, no one can doubt now that the Prime Minister's claim to have abolished boom and bust was one of the greatest deceits ever told to the British people.
The Chancellor has just announced the largest amount of borrowing ever undertaken by a British government in the entire history of this country.
What he did not admit is that he is going to double the national debt to one trillion pounds.
And that a national debt that has accumulated over centuries he is going to double in just five years.
That is the bill for Labour's decade of irresponsibility initiated by this Prime Minister.
Mr Speaker, to pay for it he has placed a huge unexploded tax bombshell timed to go off underneath the future economic recovery.
He talks about a 0.5% adjustment to national insurance. He didn't tell us what this means so I'll tell you. It means a £20 billion temporary giveaway but £40 billion is permanent higher taxes.
It is confirmation of the time-old truth that in the end all Labour Chancellors run out of money and all Labour governments bring this country to the verge of bankruptcy.
Stability has gone out of the window. Prudence is dead.
Labour has done it again.
Massive borrowing. Rising unemployment. Tax giveaways for Christmas paid for by tax rises for life.
This Budget is all about the political cycle and not the economic cycle.
Mr Speaker these borrowing figures are of a scale never before heard in this House of Commons.
£78 billion is almost double what he forecast just eight months ago.
£118 billion next year is a record percentage of national income.
He has added £512 billion to the national debt over the next 6 years, and by the way his growth forecasts are vastly more optimistic than most independent forecasters.
That means the Chancellor has borrowed more on the nation's credit card than all previous governments put together - and now he's taking out another credit card.
For still, like the gambler who can't give up, he thinks they can borrow their way out of debt.
These are the excuses he has deployed.
First, he claims that the recession has nothing to do with the people who have been running the country's economic policy for the last ten years.
'It is all America's fault', he says. What total nonsense.
Was it America that gave Britain the biggest housing boom in the world? No.
Was it America that gave Britain the highest levels of personal debt of any country in history? No.
Was it America that gave Britain the largest budget deficit in the developed world? No.
No it was this Labour government.
Mr Speaker, no American politician said they had rewritten the laws of economics.
No American Treasury Secretary boasted he'd done away with the trade cycle and abolished boom and bust.
It was the Prime Minister who said those ludicrous things, over and over again.
He mistook a boom for stability, and never prepared Britain for the bust.
The second excuse the Chancellor made today is that he faces this position from what he calls a 'position of relative strength'.
If he spoke to anyone other than the Prime Minister, he might find that his is a view not widely held.
If he is right that Britain is better prepared, then why is the recession predicted to be worse here than anywhere else?
He reels off that list of countries in his statement - I give him this one from the IMF.
Britain's recession, they say, will be more severe than: America, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Spain and every other major economy in the world.
Or this one from the Commission. Britain's structural deficit is almost double France's, three times Italy's and over ten times larger than the deficit in Germany.
The truth is that the Prime Minister built our economic growth on the pillars of finance and housing and government spending - and never once stopped to think what would happen if the pillars collapsed.
He ran a huge budget deficit on the unstable premise that he could milk the City every year - and never considered to think what would happen to the public finances when the money ran dry.
He did not fix the roof when the sun was shining.
And that leads us to third excuse used by the Chancellor today.
That he believes the temporary tax measures he's announced will deliver some huge demand boost to an economy they have led into recession.
Let us be clear that half of those measures he just announced are just compensating people for their 10p tax con and delaying the tax rises he himself announced eight months ago.
The Labour MPs opposite cheered them when they were introduced; now they cheer them when they are scrapped.
I doubt the rest of the country will be so pathetically grateful that the Chancellor is going to wait a year or two before clobbering their family cars and empty properties and small businesses.
As for the temporary VAT reduction, we will see if it has the great economic effect the Prime Minister expects.
He didn't tell us that today the German and French Governments have ruled out a similar move this lunchtime.
He didn't tell us that today already many retailers are already questioning the cost of implementing it and the impact it will have on the high street when many shops are already selling things at 20% or 30% off.
Borrowing money for a temporary cut when prices are already falling, and telling people their taxes will go up to pay for it is not much of a stimulus.
Now what will make a difference are the massive new taxes on ordinary incomes and jobs coming just around the corner.
He got a cheer from his own benches when he announced the higher top rate of income tax. No surprise there. So that raises less than 5% of the black hole he has to fill.
And it is designed to distract attention from the billions of pounds of extra taxes that on their way for millions of hard-working families.
Now we know at least one of those tax rises.
National Insurance. An income tax in all but name. He didn't give these figures so I will.
A £4 billion tax increase on families and jobs.
More in tax for a qualified nurse every year, more for a police officer.
£100 million pounds of the annual NHS wage bill.
£2 billion from British business.
This is not just a bombshell - it's a precision-guided missile aimed at the heart of a recovery.
And then there is the final excuse we heard from the Chancellor today.
That despite all the economic evidence of the last forty years, Britain can borrow and spend our way out of this recession.
Does he not see any parallels with what happened in Japan, who followed the path he advocates today and found itself saddled with debt and stagnation for a decade.
The international bodies he quotes in his defence state very clearly that a fiscal stimulus is only an option for countries with strong public finances.
Or perhaps this generation of Labour politicians need to be reminded of what Jim Callaghan told them the last time they led Britain into an economic crisis.
"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that option no longer exists"
And if the candour of the last unelected Labour Prime Minister won't do, listen to what the current unelected Labour Prime Minister used to say.
"we have learned from past mistakes [that] you cannot spend your way out of recession"
Well it turns out he has not.
He has forgotten past mistakes and now he is condemned to repeat them.
Mr Speaker,
The Chancellor could have taken a different path - the path of radical monetary action and responsible fiscal policy that is the right route out of this recession.
...The right honourable gentleman is getting excited about getting his u-turn on vehicle excise duty increase that he has been campaigning for, for so long. There'll be rises along the track.
Instead of boasting about his bank rescue abroad, he could have made sure he was rescuing the real economy here at home.
He could have got credit moving through the veins of the economy by telling us he was directly insuring business lending, so small businesses are kept going - instead of storing up tax rises for them in future.
He could have helped the private sector get back on its feet with properly funded help on tax bills and employment costs, instead of piling on the crippling debts and national insurance bills that will take ages to pay off.
Instead of yet another phoney efficiency review, while the public sector waste runs rampant, he could have brought proper restraint and independent oversight to the way public money is spent.
He could have got a grip on government spending so that in future the state lives within the country's means.
That is what we would do and he would not.
Instead he offers are temporary tax giveaways paid for by a lifetime of tax rises on the British people.
The national debt doubled and the future mortgaged to bail out the mistakes of the past.
This is exactly the road Britain is now on with this Prime Minister and this reckless Budget.
Far from being an action plan, it represents the greatest failure of public policy in a generation.
It will make the recession worse because it will make the recovery more difficult.
If Denis Healey had had to announce these figures today - he wouldn't have turned around at the airport, he would have kept going.
Mr Speaker, when the Chancellor rises to reply let him answer just these three straight questions on his fiscal plan:
Does he accept that the national debt will now double to one trillion pounds?
Does he have an explanation for why Britain is forecast to have the worst recession of any major economy?
And will he confirm that families will be worse off because the tax cuts he announces are temporary while the larger tax rises are permanent?
I know he will not want to answer these questions.
But the choice at the next election could not be clearer.
A record borrowing binge and a lifetime of taxes rises under Labour.
Or fiscal sanity and lower taxes that last under the Conservatives.