This isn’t a miraculous realisation on my part. Many other Governments have found themselves in a position where they had no choice but to impose austerity. I’m old enough to remember the Labour Government in the 1970s, and I remember Jim Callaghan, the former Member for Cardiff South East, who, making a speech at a Labour Party conference in 1976, said,

‘We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession, and increase employment by…boosting Government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion…by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.’

Indeed, we don’t have to go back as far as Jim Callaghan, because we can read the words of Alistair Darling, and this is the final sentence or two that I shall say in the course of this speech. On 24 March 2010, asked by the BBC how his plans as the Labour Chancellor at the time compared with Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to slim the size of the state, Alistair Darling replied,

‘They will be deeper and tougher—where we make the precise comparison…is secondary to…an acknowledgement that these reductions will be tough’.

I’m afraid there is no escape from reality at the end of the day.