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Treasury and Work and Pensions

The right hon. Gentleman talks about being patronising! Because of the way that they have been designed, the tax credits have undermined incentives to work. That is the finding of last month’s devastating joint study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation: their report concludes that the indirect effect of Gordon Brown’s policies might be to increase poverty. Such problems arise when one focuses on the symptoms, and not just the root causes: poor education, family breakdown, mental health issues. Unlike the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane), other Labour MPs are queuing up to disagree with their Government. The right hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn), who is not present for some reason, says that poverty has become more entrenched. The current Secretary of State for Education and Skills says that"““it is actually getting harder for people to escape poverty””." That is right: after a decade of a Labour Government, a member of the Labour Cabinet admits that it is harder for people to escape poverty. What an epitaph to the life’s work of the Chancellor of the Exchequer that is—and what an indictment of his approach. The last time we met, the Chancellor completely lost his cool in the Chamber and threw some papers at me. They were covered in handwriting and I have them with me. We sent them to a graphologist—to the principal of the London College of Graphology. I must confess that I was a bit of a sceptic about graphology, but I am impressed by the results. The graphologist says that the writer is not shy—I am sure that Members would agree with that—that the writer shows unreliable and poor judgment and was not in control of their emotions at the time of writing, and that there are signs that the writer can be evasive. It looks like the clunking fist is betrayed by his handwriting. There is nothing that the Chancellor has been more evasive about than the coup he attempted against the Prime Minister earlier this autumn. Of course, he denies that; he wants us to believe that it was a complete coincidence that the chief assassin—the hon. Member for West Bromwich, East (Mr. Watson)—just happened to pop round to his house in Fife a couple of days earlier. He told us that all they did was sit down and watch a ““Postman Pat”” video together; it must have been the episode in which Pat kills the postmaster. [Interruption.] But the question that the country is asking is not: why is the Chancellor so disloyal to the Prime Minister? It is: why does he think he would be so different from the Prime Minister? [Interruption.]