Finance Bill

In a manifestly sincere and decent speech, the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) said that one has to read to the end of the Treasury Committee report before finding out whodunnit. I can reveal to anybody who does not wish to read through the entirety of the report that we all know who committed the crime on this occasion: the Prime Minister. The writing of the history of the Brown premiership may be quite imminent. I am not given to betting—not least because it is a good way to lose money—but I see that the shortest odds on the Prime Minister's time of departure are for the final quarter of this year and that the second shortest odds are for the third quarter of this year, the quarter that started today. The end may be fairly imminent. When the history of the Brown premiership comes to be written, people will offer many explanations on how he came to be such a disappointment in the post. They will say, for example, that he should have called the election in November and that that was a great missed opportunity. They will say that the lost tax discs were indicative of a wider malaise in the Government and that the visit to Iraq during the Conservative party conference made it hard for the Prime Minister to sustain the position that the era of spin had come to an end. All kinds of explanations will be offered on why he failed to live up to expectations, but the one that will last longest in the public mind—because it is not to do with Westminster political to-ing and fro-ing, but with the everyday lives of millions of people—will be the fiasco of the doubling of the 10p tax rate. Let us look back, as the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond) did, to the announcement that the Prime Minister made in his final Budget speech as Chancellor of the Exchequer. As the Treasury Committee rightly says, there are huge dangers in seeking to pull rabbits from hats, but that is precisely what the then Chancellor sought to do. It was a manifestly political move—about his positioning, his inheritance and his wanting to be perceived as the rightful heir to Blair, a mantle that he was keen to claim from the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron). Labour Back Benchers cheered with great fury. I have been a Member of Parliament for only three years, so I have not had the opportunity and privilege of witnessing many Budget speeches. The Budget speech that I am talking about was significant, because it was the final one of an extremely long-standing Chancellor who had served in office for a decade. We remember that the Labour Back Benches resembled a football stadium after a winning goal had been scored in the last minute. There was a sense of euphoria that their man had come up with such a brilliant scheme—that he had out-manoeuvred the Conservative party and made it inevitable that he would become the Labour leader and Prime Minister and that Labour would go on to win the next general election. That was emphatically the mood among Labour Back Benchers on that day, so it is hard to believe, looking at them now, that that was ever their belief. As far as I can work out, the only Labour Back Benchers who now attend these debates are those who are critical of Government policy and wish to express their criticism. I am happy to give way to any Labour Back Bencher who thinks that this policy has been handled with perfection throughout the process, and perhaps we can all learn from that. I suspect, however, that there are two types of Labour MP—those who openly say that it was a fiasco and those who believe that it was a fiasco but do not say so openly. The tragedy for the Prime Minister is that this is the man who said,"““best when we are boldest…best when we are Labour””," yet has fallen down in trying to ape and emulate the Conservative party in his appeal to the population as a whole. He wanted to be the Chancellor and the Prime Minister who reached the promised land of the 20p basic tax rate, thereby managing to achieve what the Conservatives did not achieve in 18 years in government. Even his heroine, Margaret Thatcher, whom he invited to Downing street to celebrate her achievements, had not managed to reach the 20p basic tax rate, yet here he was showing how it could be done. It was an extraordinary measure for him to implement. So overtaken was he by this sense of destiny—the sense that he could square the circle, rise above party, become the father of the nation and unite all these discordant political threads—that he completely failed to notice that 5.3 million people, the poorest people in the country, would lose out as a consequence of his policy.