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AMENDMENT OF THE LAW

It is quite possible that some pensioners will be better off, but as the hon. Lady indicates, they will not all be better off. It is a complicated Budget. The Chancellor would clearly love to give some money back, because he knows that he is rightly being criticised for over-taxing everybody, but he does not have any money to give back, as he is spending so much in his other public budgets, and he is reluctant to bring those budgets under proper control. I would like to put this Budget in the context of the past 10 years, because there is a ““farewell”” feeling to the Chancellor’s performance today; at least, it is farewell to one job. We were reassured to learn from him that he is not planning to combine being Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer—in name, at least. We will wait and see how it works out in practice. Pity the poor right hon. Lady or Gentleman who is Chancellor when he is Prime Minister. However, that is a story for another day. If we look at the 10 years during which he has been Chancellor, we can see that he, like Gaul, has been divided into three parts. In the first part, from 1997 to about 2000, he was happily married to Prudence. I was upset to see him make such a big increase in tax on pension funds in that period; he began the damage that has characterised his 10 years. We now have much more enfeebled final salary pension schemes, and many people no longer have access to them. However, in fairness I confess that the rest of the Chancellor’s work from 1997 to 2000, while he was married to Prudence, was not too bad. He started to bring down deficits and he kept public expenditure under reasonable control. He did not increase the relatively attractive tax rates that he inherited from the outgoing Conservative Government, and the economy performed reasonably well during that period. In the Chancellor’s second phase from 2000 to about the middle of 2006, we saw the tax-and-waste Chancellor, who tried to reassure all his Labour colleagues that he believed in tax and spend. He took a phenomenal personal interest in all the details of public spending in many of his colleagues’ Departments, which they did not always welcome, because he wished to associate himself with the Treasury’s largesse to different departmental budgets. So big was the tax and waste under the Chancellor that he did quite a lot of damage to what had been a fundamentally strong economic position. In those six years, Britain started to fall further and further behind our international competitors, whom we outshone in the last decade of the previous century. He introduced a large number of stealth taxes—those are the 99 tax increases to which my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition sensibly referred. Britain fell down the competitiveness league tables, losing about 11 places. In particular, we fell down the tax competitiveness league table, because the Chancellor needed to keep tax rates up and find back-door ways of increasing the tax take from companies and individuals as he went about his task of tax and spend.