Fiscal Responsibility Bill

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We clearly need a lot more growth; I think that that is also common ground between the main parties in this House. The evidence of our past successes and failures as a country is very clear. When a Government have had the courage to cut the marginal rates of income tax on people of enterprise and investors and to cut the rates of profits tax and other taxes on employment in small businesses, there has been a proportionate improvement in the growth rate and an increase in the tax take from those sectors. Governments who have gone for extremely high penal rates of tax on the rich, the successful and the potential investors who might do something to improve our economy have had the reverse experience. They have discovered that growth has slowed or gone into reverse, and that lots of bright and talented people have gone abroad because they do not wish to pay such tax at all. That would be even more true today in this extremely footloose globalised world. Surely we should learn the lessons of the '70s, when Governments had high taxes and it did not work, and the '80s, when they summoned up the courage to cut the taxes and it started to work rather well with the enterprise policies that were introduced. The same has been true all around the world. Wherever a country has had the courage to set very competitive tax rates on enterprise, business, success and investment, it has found that it gets a lot more revenue in. As I always try to tell the Labour party, the best way to tax the rich—I would like to tax the rich more as well—is to cut the tax rates, because we then have more rich people in this country who pay more tax, because it is less worthwhile to pay for all the accountancy advice to get around it, and venture more of their money. This morning I spoke to a successful entrepreneur who told me: "I'm on strike. I was a successful entrepreneur. I sold my company because the climate was becoming so hostile in this country. I managed to sell up before the crash. I have no intention of going back in because they're making the climate even more hostile—I'll sit on my backside and do nothing for a bit."