Finance (No. 2) Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his comments, and he is absolutely right in what he says. The tax system we inherited was, as with so many other parts of the previous Government’s economic strategy, full of holes and leaking revenues all over the place. The Labour party had spent all its time on a prawn cocktail offensive in the City, sucking up to the banks, rather than concentrating on making sure that everyone in this country paid the proper amount of tax. As a result of action we are taking, we are raising—so far—an extra £60 billion in this Parliament, and before the election we expect tens of billions more to be raised in revenue that would not have been raised had we accepted the Swiss cheese that Labour left us.