Finance (No. 3) Bill

My hon. Friend makes a valid point, which I will come on to in a moment. [Interruption.] Ministers are peddling the line that it would take six years to achieve such a derogation from the EU. I ask them, have they even tried? I suspect that the answer is no. It is a fairly defeatist attitude to say that we will not even ask because we know what the answer will be. That is not fighting for Britain's corner in the European Union. As I was saying, there was an alternative for the Government. We called on the Chancellor to scrap the hike in VAT on fuel, which would have been of genuine help to families and businesses. It could have been paid for from the £800 million more than expected that was raised from the bank levy. Unlike the stabiliser proposed by the Conservatives in the run-up to the general election, that would not have been ““unbelievably complicated and unpredictable””, to use the words of the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. The stabiliser is based on the idea that taxation will vary according to fluctuations in petrol prices, so that"““when fuel prices go up, fuel duty would fall. And when fuel prices go down, fuel duty would rise””," to use a direct quotation from the Conservative party consultation document on the issue. The stabiliser was a flagship policy for the Conservatives in the general election campaign. The present Prime Minister made an issue of it when he visited a Coca-Cola plant in Morley just a week before polling day, where he said that"““it would give you certainty as you go about your lives, knowing what your salary is, knowing what your mortgage is, we'd be helping with the cost of living by trying to give you a flatter and more constant rate for filling up your car””." When the Conservative party got into government, it soon realised that that was an empty promise, made glibly without doing the homework required, as we have seen with so many of its policies in its year in government. In the Budget, the Chancellor resorted to a different so-called stabiliser by increasing the supplementary charge on North sea oil. We will discuss that issue later tonight when we come on to the next group of amendments. It is true, as my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) mentioned, that asking for a special rate of VAT would require our asking for a derogation from the European Commission. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury said that the Government could not afford to ““sacrifice income willy-nilly””. However, he was willing to go to the EU to ask for a derogation for remote islands, although not for the rest of Scotland or the UK. Even members of the Conservative party agree that the solution should apply to the rest of the UK.