It has been the past, the present and the future. My point is about scale. I am not suggesting that the economy will be all digital in the future and that it has been all analogue in the past. That is perhaps a misunderstanding of what I have been saying.
Returning to the point that the digital economy presents challenges for the Treasury in raising taxation, I know that the Treasury is making good progress in working with other countries on developing a multinational response, but that could take a significant amount of time. It is therefore right to take appropriate action now. The direction of travel is a positive one, particularly building on the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) earlier in the debate. The evolving nature of the economy—how we work and how we consume—means that tax has to evolve too. Traditional routes for collection are becoming more difficult, and the Bill is a response to that.
I am not normally keen on finding new ways to tax people. We are already quite a highly taxed country, but we need to raise revenue to fund our vital public services. In Committee, we discussed the fact that this tax could raise up to £2 billion, but there is also something unusual about it, in that it is a tax on revenues. In this case, I think that that is a positive thing, because we are talking about very large companies. The thresholds mean that we are dealing with the largest players in the online marketplace, such as social media platforms and search engines. Basically, I am pleased to see efforts to make tax fairer between offline and online—or bricks and clicks, as it is sometimes referred to.