This is all the inevitable result of the Worldwide Banking Crisis, and it is no use the Tories and their friends, or the bankers and their apologists, trying to blame this Government in general or the Prime Minister in particular.

It is all very well trying to blame the Worldwide Banking Crisis for the problems experienced by this country's financial sector-certainly events outside this country have played their part-but the blame for not seeing what was coming, for not having a regulatory system better able to understand banking and the market place and better able to cope with and foresee the problems which will inevitably occur from time to time, lies fairly and squarely with the tripartite arrangement set up by the Government.

Analysts at the firm also warned that the private sector was not providing the necessary growth to substitute for the withdrawal of the investment that the public sector provided in response to the Worldwide Banking Crisis.

Will he now accept that there was a Worldwide Banking Crisis in 2008, and that the action that was taken to reflate the economy had contributed to the size of the deficit by 2010?

I remind the hon. Gentleman that there was a Worldwide Banking Crisis and that it was Margaret Thatcher who deregulated the financial markets.

It was a Worldwide Banking Crisis.

In followingthe hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately), it is worth setting the record straight: it was a Worldwide Banking Crisis that caused the recession, not Labour investing in teachers, nurses, doctors and shiny new buildings, as she called them.