My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, I wish to entirely dissociate myself from anything he said about general practitioners. That was an unacceptable attack on people who have given so much to our society under the extreme pressures of pandemics. The gendered nature of his remarks was particularly disturbing. I do not know if it is something that the House authorities will look at, but I certainly think that they should.
To go back to what I was going to say, it is a great pleasure to take part in this mostly extraordinarily high-quality debate, and its fine level of forensic scrutiny—most notably the tour de force from the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, who is not currently in his place. I also applaud the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, who rightly labelled this as a Johnson tax, with the poorest hit hardest. I will circle back at the end to the reasons why I think that is a particularly accurate label.
We must look at what is happening here in this debate: we have a huge democratic deficit. We in your Lordships’ House have torn this plan to shreds, but we cannot do anything. Such is the state of our antique, dysfunctional political system, Boris Johnson won 44% of the vote in 2019 and now he can do what he likes on anything at all, including taxation. The phrase “no taxation without representation” comes to mind, because the strange thing is that your Lordships’ House is more representative of the country than is the other place. If we had a vote in your Lordships’ House, it would be the Cross-Benchers—the non-party people—who would have the deciding votes.
It is worth thinking about what the words “social care” actual mean. Nobody that I have heard has really defined this or looked in detail at what it means; we tend to talk in the abstract. So I decided to look at Scotland’s definition, where, of course, social care—in a far more democratic political system—is free.