---

Finance Bill

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that point again. When I was a union official in the early 1980s, I used to negotiate 27 per cent. wage increases as my contribution to improving the state of the British economy. She will know that the Conservative years in the 1990s had average annual inflation of more than 10 per cent., and between 1981 and 1991, that figure was worse. There is no scope for the hon. Lady to say that we might have won the growth argument, but that we can be challenged on the inflation argument. Inflation is a reasonable test of the direction of the economy, as it affects expectations, which are colossally important for investment. It is the right measure to consider, but I am not sure that the conclusions drawn are accurate.