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Occupational Pensions

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s advice that I should be gentler with the Chancellor in future. Will he explain something, because he is in an almost unique position to do so? He explained why the decision was made to raise taxation, and he made the point that the then shadow Chancellor thought that he had to tackle the budget deficit. Why was that decision kept secret? Why were those tax plans developed in such detail in opposition, kept, so he claims, in a safe in his hotel room, and never revealed to the public or perhaps even, as I understand it, to the leader of the Labour party at the time? If that difficult decision, as the hon. Gentleman says, needed to be made, why was he not honest about that to the public before the general election?