Finance (No. 2) Bill

The hon. Lady might well ask her own Front-Bench team why they increased the top rate of tax for their last few days in office, given that it was clear that it was not going to raise the money it supposedly would have raised. We have made sure that the wealthiest in this country are paying a far greater share of income tax than they did in any year under the previous Government—[Interruption.] Let me respond to her point before she seeks to come back on it; I listened to what she said, so she can listen to what I have to say. Measures in that Budget raised five times more from the same group of people. The analysis from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs showed that this tax was not raising any money, and I would prefer to have the substance of actually raising revenue from people than the pretence of measures that do not raise any money.