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Finance Bill

No, the hon. Lady must be quite wrong about that. I remember Lord Lawson, as he now is, was Chancellor of the Exchequer when I entered the House, and the medium-term financial strategy, which he had devised as a junior Treasury Minister long before I entered the House, was the framework for economic policy at that time—a very successful framework. It would therefore have been extraordinary to have drafted the Red Book without making reference to the medium-term strategy—rather like drafting the Red Book now without reference to the golden rule or the sustainable investment rule, and I certainly do not protest that those two things are dealt with in the Red Book.