I am happy to agree with that point. The weakness of the euro is that across Europe it has locked the German supply chain into an artificially low exchange rate. On the back of that, Germany has generated a massive trade surplus, which it is not redistributing. That is undermining the whole European economy. I perfectly accept that. I was not arguing that the German economy is perfect; rather, I am suggesting that it is too simplistic to link the headline level of corporation tax with the performance of the economy, because we can find all sorts of examples that go the other way.
My real criticism, which I still direct to the Minister, is that the growth that the Conservative Government have trumpeted as their success is based on the shifting
sands of consumer debt, which has now reached a level that cannot be sustained, so we need something else. We definitely do need to increase the level of industrial investment, and that requires a different set of fiscal tools in order to encourage consumer saving and recycle that consumer saving into industrial investment. That is the whole weakness that underlies the Finance Bill: it is a set of small measures based on the assumption that the economy will go on growing because consumers will go on spending. If they do not, the whole rationale of the Finance Bill falls apart.
I will now briefly move on to the second pillar, and the second strategic weakness, of the Finance Bill. In order to maintain the level of consumer spending, this Government have had to pass a series of pieces of legislation to bind their own hands when it came to raising taxes on consumers. If we do that, we then have to find money from somewhere else. Therefore, although this Bill contains a series of small tax rises here and there, in the aggregate what is happening is that this Government are being forced to start distorting the entire tax system because they have no other way to go but to invent new stealth taxes to maintain the level of income to Government.
Let us consider some examples. In terms of the probate —the tax, if it is a tax, on the probating of wills—the Clerks to the Treasury Committee came up with a rather interesting example which I want to share with the House. Under the proposal for the levy on probating added to the cut in inheritance tax, we get the following anomaly. If a father and mother are deceased and wished to leave a house to their children and that house is worth, let us say, £1 million and one penny, the inheritance tax is tiny—it works out at 40p—but the probate that has to be paid will be £8,000. So in effect, cutting the inheritance tax and replacing it with a probate levy gets us back to where we started. We can see that once we start down that road, we will go on increasing the levy on probate simply as a revenue earner.
That is not just happening with the tax on probate; it is happening in a whole series of small tax changes. By legislating to put a lock on income tax and other taxes, we end up having to raise revenue in a series of anomalous and distorting ways, and that makes the Finance Bill even more complicated.