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Investment Exchanges and Clearing Houses Bill

I begin by declaring an interest—my husband recently advised Deutsche Börse on its bid for Euronext. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable), who treated us to some meaningless statistics yesterday. I would not say that his arguments this afternoon were meaningless, but we have become used to the Liberal Democrats proposing totally irresponsible and completely inconsistent public finance legislation. This afternoon, they have adopted a similar posture toward what is in fact one of our strongest economic sectors. If we went down the path described by the hon. Gentleman, we would lose a valuable exporter and employer to this country. The City of London is one of the most successful sectors of the economy, and we employ more than 1 million people in financial services in this country. As has clearly been demonstrated, the days when Labour Governments had an ambivalent attitude toward the City have long since gone. So I welcome the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Minister. Under this Government, financial services growth has reached 10 per cent. a year. Last year, the financial services trade surplus was some £19 billion. During the past 10 years, foreign equity turnover has increased by 260 per cent., and foreign exchange turnover by 60 per cent. While my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, East (Kerry McCarthy) was worrying about the Bank of Credit and Commerce International in those far-off days, which were not so halcyon, I was the Treasury official on the foreign exchange desk. The contrast between the situation then and now can be illustrated by the fact that I was authorised to agree to the Bank of England’s intervening up to the figure of £50 million a day on the foreign exchange markets in order to stabilise sterling. Nowadays, we do not pursue such economic policies; moreover, £50 million is now such a paltry sum that it would have no impact, anyway.