There has been a little bit of criticism today about those on this side of the Chamber who have been a little bit pessimistic in speaking—the glass is half full and so on. Well, I am going to speak this afternoon for those people for whom the glass is, indeed, half empty. When politicians like us wonder why people are lashing out against the establishment, I think that, sometimes, it is staring us boldly in the face. As Adam Price mentioned yesterday, when the Governor of the Bank of England—the bastion of the establishment; the pinnacle of the institutions of capitalism; the original masters of the universe—says that we are facing the first lost decade since the 1860s, or, as he remarked, last seen when Karl Marx was scribbling in the British Library, we had better take notice because history certainly will. Carney told the audience at the Liverpool John Moores University:

‘We meet today during the first lost decade since the 1860s…Rather than a new golden era, globalisation is associated with low wages, insecure employment, stateless corporations and striking inequalities.’

That’s the issue of the glass half empty. There are opportunities that have been mentioned, but for plenty of people, they see no opportunities. He said that the trickle-down economics favoured by some on the right simply don’t work, saying that while trade makes some countries better off—and, in my own words, some people better off and some corporations better off—he said that it does not raise all boats and went on to call for limited wealth redistribution. The instantly famous Liverpool speech will, I suspect, go down in history as the moment when unrestrained free-market capitalism looked in the mirror and saw something ugly and downright nasty. And here is the backdrop for the autumn statement.

Does the autumn statement help reverse this crisis? Does it stack the deck in favour of the ordinary working man and woman, the vulnerable elderly, the young? Does it reconnect our politics and our economics with the people we represent? Well, we all know that working people are now facing a double whammy in living standards of lower wage growth and higher inflation next year. For the best part of a decade, we have had a drag on economic growth—[Interruption.] I will in a moment—productivity growth at negligible levels, and an even bigger, as was remarked, black hole in the public finances. The OBR has revised wages, growth and investment down over the next few years, while the deficit and debt has been revised up. In every single indicator we’re going in the wrong direction. Disposable household income is now expected to grow at a slower rate than previously expected. I will indeed give way to him.