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Occupational Pensions

Rather like one of my colleagues, I want to treat the debate as what it is. It has been set up by the official Opposition not for a serious discussion of pensions, but as a purely political debate. I welcome the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) back to the Chamber. If one were to consider the debate as a prosecution of the Government by Conservative Members, the hon. Gentleman, in what others have called a thoughtful address, acquitted the Chancellor of the main charge. However, he then strangely declared that he would vote with the official Opposition. That is a matter for him, but I suggest that he is taking a populist stance. If there is no conviction, there can be no real support for the Conservative motion. Like many hon. Members, I have listened to the debate as it has unfolded. The contributions made by senior Conservative Members were revealing, unlike the sixth-form debating style of the shadow Chancellor. The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), who has some unclean hands here, was long on rhetoric but short on facts. I suggest to the House that that encapsulates what he was like when he was in office. When my hon. Friend the Economic Secretary to the Treasury forensically probed the right hon. Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell) about what the Dorrell review would have shown, if we had seen the papers, there was a strong suspicion in my mind that the review would have supported what my right hon. Friend the Chancellor went on to do and that the proposal was rejected by the former Chancellor, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe, on the basis of not argument, but politics. It seemed to me that there was some mileage in the accusation made by my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, North-West (Mr. Robinson), in his cuddly way, that the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe did not have the guts to take that political decision. The House will want to ponder that. We then heard the speech of the right hon. Member for Charnwood. The charge sheet for today’s debate is:"““That this House has no confidence in the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s handling of occupational pensions?," and the basis of that charge is the cut in DTC, but the right hon. Gentleman ended up saying that what the Chancellor did was, to use his words, relevant at the margins. It seems to me, as it might seem to the House later on, that it is difficult to convict someone of an offence if what they did was relevant only at the margins, even if that were true. The next senior Conservative Back Bencher from whom we heard was the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley). He got himself in a twist by seeming to accept at one point that there was probably no deficit as a result of the DTC cut. If we were relying on that speech to convict the Chancellor of the charge in the motion—it is a serious charge, and I will come on to the motion’s wording in a moment—it would be very flimsy evidence. The next senior Conservative figure to make a speech was the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood). He seemed to take a different tack from the shadow Chancellor. The burden of what he said seemed to be that the Chancellor’s decision to cut DTC had had an effect on the stock market. The problem with that argument was not only that it abandoned the main burden of what the hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) had been saying, but that—I pointed this out in an intervention—if the right hon. Gentleman’s logic was right, the stock market could not have recovered under this Government, although it has. It seemed to me—[Interruption.] Does the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond) wish to intervene?