---

Occupational Pensions

He indicates that he did not vote against it, and I am prepared to accept that, but he certainly was not very vocal in his support for the measure. As for the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe, the former Chancellor, in the weeks after we took the decision, he said that it was a mistake. Those were the two fundamental decisions that we had to take. Part of the issue, and I see that we must confront it as honestly as I did then, was that we had to raise money, via the windfall tax, for our welfare to work programme, which was £5 billion. We raised a bit more than that in the end. The programme was successful, and people were successfully employed. Another issue was a general closing of the gap, which we successfully achieved, perhaps even to a greater extent that we dreamed that we could. We then went into budget surplus, but we did not do that by dodging the difficult decisions, by finding some local bandwagon that we could jump on, or by flirting with a superficially attractive idea that makes a brief apparition on the political stage. We did it by facing up to the fundamentals and taking difficult decisions. The shadow Chancellor, who is a recent convert to the idea of facing up to the issues, has the courage to say to his party’s Back Benchers, whatever groups they are in—there seem to be so many of them; I cannot keep up with them these days—