My Lords, we have much less than when I was young between the wars, and much less than in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But besides dealing with child poverty, governments have to deal with education problems, the health service, housing problems, drugs, terrorism, and unemployment. It is taxpayers at all levels of society from whom the money has to be obtained to deal with those problems.
Governments have to have priorities.
They cannot pour out money on every good cause, as I have said. I do not know whether any noble Lord on the Opposition Front Bench can correct me, but I read in one of the Sunday newspapers that the Leader of the Opposition in another place is reported as saying that he would not, if there were a Labour Government, increase government expenditure. Let him tell that to those who want to cause the Government to increase the large sums already being spent on asylum seekers and other people trying to get in here, of whom, as has been said, there were 55,000 last year of whom only 5 per cent. were granted asylum on arrival. Of the many more who appealed, only 3 per cent. There has been a far greater increase in the number of people trying to come in and settle in this country than in any other European country.