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TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTERS BROADCAST ON ECONOMIC POLICY FRIDAY 30 JUNE 2000 In a few weeks time, Gordon Brown will announce to Parliament and the country the Governments spending plans for the next three years. I cant, of course, reveal the details here. But I can say that this Comprehensive Spending Review, as its known, will deliver sustained extra investment to continue modernizing and improving our key public services - that is hospitals, schools, transport links and the police. But we can only promise this extra investment - and be confident we can deliver it over the next three years - because of the strong state of the economy and the strength of the public finances. But the fact that we are repaying billions of pounds of our national debt now, that inflation is low, on target - the lowest at the present time in the whole of Europe - and that nearly a million more people are in work than when we came into Government. None of this has happened by chance. Its a result - at least in part - of the difficult decisions, sometimes tough decisions, we took in the early years of this Government. Its the reward in other words for the economy being run competently and for the good of all the country. When this Government came into office, we inherited an economy where annual borrowing was running at ￡28 billion a year, the national debt had doubled, we were paying out more just in interest payments on that debt than we spent on the whole of the UK school system. One in five families had no breadwinner and inflation was creeping back into the system. We had to act and we did act to put things right. We gave the Bank of England independence in monetary policy to help in the fight against inflation and to keep interest rates under control. We kept, as we promised, to tough spending limits for our first two years. That included keeping the last Governments fuel escalator which I know has pushed up petrol duty automatically above inflation each year. We also tackled