It is interesting to see that the hon. Gentleman has changed from his red braces to blue braces—and very nice, too! I obviously do not regard the whole City of London and the banking community as parasites, as they are a major engine for exports, growth and productivity in Britain. The issue is about managed capitalism and what is the acceptable face of capitalism. It seems to me that many people on the hon. Gentleman’s side are not at all concerned, as more and more money is given to people who have already acquired enormous pots of money.
The distribution of income has shifted massively since 2010. We have seen the incomes of a large number of people in the top 10% growing by 5.5% each year over the past two years—at a time when most people have had pay cuts or pay freezes, certainly in the public sector, or lost their jobs. We have heard the Government boasting—this is their latest creative thought—that an extra 1.2 million people are in jobs, yet that has been contradicted by the Office for National Statistics. Even if there were another million extra people in work, with no extra growth and no extra output in the economy, productivity is going down and things are not going well. Nevertheless, the answer from the Government is still to give more and more money to the richest people and less to the poorest, and that is supposed to get us out of the mess, but it does not.
This stamp duty on transactions is the tip of an iceberg. I am sorry, Mr Deputy Speaker, that I have come on to describe the entire iceberg rather than the tip at the top, which we are talking about. It is important for people to stand up and be counted on this issue. There is no justification for these extra few buckets of money being thrown in the direction of those who have
most. There is a great need for a more balanced growth strategy, whereby there is investment in infrastructure across the piece and where the opportunities for tax and spend are more fairly spread, so that together we can build a future that works and a future that cares—a one-nation Britain of which we can all be proud. I do not think that this suggestion makes sense, so I am very much in favour of putting a halt to this £145 million handout to people who are already rich, as it will not make any appreciable difference to the competitiveness of the City of London.