Finance Bill

I think it is legitimate to explore the motives behind the new clause. My fear—I may be wrong—is that the Conservatives tell different audiences what those people want to hear, even if the messages are contradictory. For example, they tell people who are, rightly, concerned about the size of the budget deficit that the Conservatives are the party that will get to grips with it. Then I read today on the front page of The Daily Telegraph that they have a wish-list of extra, completely uncosted spending commitments aimed at pleasing people in rural communities. How that is compatible with getting to grips with the budget deficit is a mystery to me. They tell groups who complain that the tax system is insufficiently simple, "Don't you worry—we're bringing in new clause 3 to set up a quango to deal with that", yet the day before they told another group concerned about the growth in the number of quangos that they intended to cut their number. To another interest group that wants great complexity in the system because that would change it to its advantage the Conservatives say that they too favour that greater complexity because they share that interest groups' concerns. Let me offer the Conservative party some advice. My party has been in opposition for decades, and my colleagues and I have come to the conclusion that the path that the Conservatives have decided to take is not the right one. It looks superficially attractive to a party that has been in opposition for a long time, as the Conservatives have been, because it seems that it can thereby appease all those different groups and that approach will cumulatively add up to something credible. However, the problem with that approach, as I fear that the Conservatives are increasingly discovering, is that those individual initiatives are less than the sum of their parts and do not add up to an alternative prospectus for government.