Most people now realise that one of the Coalition Government's top priorities must be to cut the massive deficit we inherited.

This has to be done - and for many reasons: for example, to reduce future rises in interest rates for homeowners and business, and to cut the huge cost of debt interest payments, so there can be more money in the future for key services.

A key objective for me is that this is done as fairly as possible.

Introducing a levy on the banks and raising capital gains tax for the wealthiest show we are asking the richest to shoulder their fair share – and rightly so: Vince Cable has been criticised by some for standing up to excesses in the City, but I think he's spot on.

And we've also restored the link between pensions and earnings and increased the income tax allowance by £1,000, to take nearly one million low paid people out of tax altogether: proposals straight from the Liberal Democrat manifesto. Plus we increased child tax credit for the poorest families to shelter them totally from the rise in VAT.

Of course people are worried about future spending cuts. Yet even there, we've made clear NHS funding won't be cut. And a key focus is cutting bureaucracy - for example, with the plans to abolish or merge huge numbers of 'quangos' – the unaccountable bodies past Governments have spent billions on.

Nonetheless, overall cuts will be large and difficult, and I doubt very much if I will personally agree with all of them. But I do strongly agree that government had to stop spending money as if it grew on trees.