This week in Westminster we’ve had the formal start of the new Parliament with the Queen’s Speech. All the pomp and circumstance looked very splendid. From the other side of the House of Commons, it all looks very different. The feeling of sitting on the other side of the Chamber feels much stranger than I thought it would.

The big topic of the week for me was not necessarily the Queen’s Speech, but the announcement made, not in Parliament, but in the Treasury’s garden, by the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne of the £6.2 billion cuts in public expenditure.

As a Labour MP, I’m not going to automatically criticise everything the new Coalition Government does. I think opposition for opposition’s sake is tedious and blunts your argument: when you criticise everything your opponent does nobody tends to listen when opposition and criticism are valid and necessary. So, in that vein, I think the new Government’s pledge to give Equitable Life policyholders a payout seems a fair thing to do. People in Hartlepool have been affected by this, and they will be pleased that this has finally been resolved.

But the cuts proposed by the new Chancellor will undoubtedly affect services in Hartlepool and, crucially, the speed and ability of the town to continue the recovery and secure economic growth.

Everybody accepts that there needs to be belt-tightening with public finances. All parties pledged during the recent General Election campaign to tackle the big budget deficit. But I have been going over the new Chancellor’s statement on the cuts. The details as to how the Government will meet these £6.2 billion cuts are a little vague. But it is clear that there could be big repercussions for Hartlepool.

One of the worst things that governments can do in a recession is cut help to young people finding a job. The experiences of the 1980s and 90s in Hartlepool showed that if young people were left on the dole for a long period of time, it turns into whole families and different generations who haven’t gone out to work. We in Hartlepool are still trying to come to terms with the social and economic consequences of the Thatcher era. So cutting the Future Jobs Fund, which was working so well in Hartlepool and was giving a degree of hope for hundreds of young people in the town, just seems ridiculous!

A large part of the cuts comes from Vincent Cable’s Business Department. He has to find almost £900 million of savings, and this will be achieved by cutting help to businesses wanting to grow and help the recovery. It seems madness to me that, at a time when government should be helping businesses come out of recession, the biggest cut is focused on the government department with the responsibility to help business.

The biggest chunk of the cuts comes from local government. Over a billion pounds will be saved by reducing the grant to local authorities. That means that less money will be provided this year to Hartlepool Borough Council. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that this could mean a cut in Hartlepool Borough Council’s budget immediately of £6million. I’m not a councillor and don’t run the council, but I accept that the local authority can help drive economic activity and social fairness in the town. Big cuts this year can only mean fewer jobs, fewer services and big rises in Council Tax next year.

As I said, everybody accepts the need for difficult decisions in public finances. But where the Chancellor has decided the first axe should fall does seem to stop our ability to grow as a town.