Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I absolutely recognise the figures that my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) laid before the House, and of course I think that they are accurate. He is right to say that we are talking about a cut—a cut in what people were, with legitimacy, expecting. That is the point. It was legitimate for somebody coming up to pensionable age to expect that their retirement could be based on the figures that they were using. They had a promise from the Prime Minister that that would be the case. That promise was not honoured, and they have experienced real hardship as a result.
I want to focus on one other aspect of the debate: people’s behaviour at different rates of taxation. Let me be clear that I do not, in principle, want a 50p rate of tax to continue in place in perpetuity. Indeed, the Labour party does not want that, as was made very clear when my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling), as Chancellor, introduced the tax before the 2010 election. He made it quite clear that we felt it was necessary in the short term, but would ultimately wish to get rid of it. There is no desire on the Labour Benches to see a 50p tax rate imposed for ever more.
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However, as for the idea that one year was a sufficient period in which to be able to assess the revenue take for the Treasury, we know that, always, in the first year of a new rate of tax, people adjust. They adjust where, in tax years, they put their income. They can carry over, and use the degree of arbitrage between tax years to make sure that the full impact of the new tax level does not hit them. To have used the figures for that one year as the basis for any assertion of what the tax take would be in the long run was clearly—I will not say “disingenuous”, because that would not be appropriate—mistaken. It was a mistake, because it was only a partial view. That is clearly the point. A shift in policy is being justified on the basis of imperfect information.
Let us look more carefully at the argument that if we reduce the percentage of tax, the net revenue to the Exchequer will rise. The hon. Member for Dover spoke about days gone by, when there was a drop in taxation levels from 80% to 60%, and from 60% to 40%. He said that we then saw net revenue to the Exchequer increase. Of course, he did not talk about the growth in national wealth and in the economy at the time, or say what part of the revenue take for the Exchequer was a result of that growth. Those are figures that he was not prepared to give the House, or perhaps he did not know them. I do not know them either, but a significant element of the increase in revenue would be covered by growth in the economy, if one included that in the calculation.
Let us follow the logic of the argument made by the hon. Member for Dover. He was ably supported by the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), his colleague on the far, far end of the Benches, who said, “Why stop at 40%? Why not go to 30% or 20%?”