And while the interest rate reduction will bring down the cost of borrowing, there is still a desperate shortage of credit, loans and mortgages because confidence in lending has collapsed.There can be no doubt that Labour’s plans to revive the economy have failed. Their VAT cut cost £12 billion but has done nothing to stop the slide into recession or stem the flow of job losses. After we proposed a National Loan Guarantee Scheme to get lending to business flowing again and deal with the crisis of confidence, Labour dithered for weeks before announcing they would introduce a pale imitation of our ideas.

And they have yet to catch up on our proposal to help savers and pensioners by abolishing tax on savings income for all basic rate taxpayers and raising the pensioners’ tax allowance by £2000 to £11,500, paid for by efficiency savings in government. Labour’s answer to the debt crisis has been yet more borrowing.

Britain is trapped in a downward economic cycle; savers are being penalised but lending is still as frozen up as the bitter winter weather we experienced in Barnet last week.  As Gordon Brown’s slip parliament last Wednesday suggested, there is a real danger now that the country will slide from recession into depression.