The hon. Lady has chosen the wrong Member to accuse of not reading the Budget papers properly; I am normally accused by my right hon. Friends of reading them too closely. If she read on through those Budget papers, she would see that that top rate led to an almost 10% reduction in the amount of top-level income tax coming in, which is a very foolish position to get into when we need all the money we can get. My right hon. and hon. Friends are very sensible to try to correct that, in order to get more money off the rich. We need more money off them and less money off people at the other end of the income scale. The way to take less money off people at the other end of that scale is to take them out of tax altogether, and good progress is being made in that regard.
I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke), who has not stayed for the rest of the debate but who wisely said that it was more sensible to let people keep the money they earn at the low income levels rather than taking it off them through an expensive tax system and then giving it back through an expensive benefits system; by definition, they get back less overall, because we have to charge them a handling charge, as the rich will not pay all the money we need—they pay only quite a bit of it—and so we also have to tax the poor in order to give them benefits, and that can be silly.