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Finance Bill

The hon. Gentleman has had enough of a turn today. He needs to scuttle back to No. 10. I hope that the purpose of his being here is to take the pulse and feel the mood. I hope that he will go back to No. 10 and tell his master what the mood is. Let me finish the quotation. The report stated that"““the group of main losers from the abolition of the 10 pence rate of income tax seem an unreasonable target for raising additional tax revenues””." The Prime Minister claimed that that was all done in the interests of tax simplification. The Conservatives are in favour of tax simplification, but we would not propose, nor can we support, a reform of the income tax system that is carried on the backs of the poorest. It is morally abhorrent. The truth is that the package had nothing to do with simplification. Why should it? Its author, after all, is the man who has doubled the length of our tax code and given us the most fiendishly complex tax system in the developed world. He simply does not do simplification. It had nothing to do with a long-term strategy either. Indeed, it undid that man's own long-term objective eight years after he had achieved it. As I have said already to my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Angela Browning), it was all about trying to convince the Labour party as it moved to choose its new leader that he could reach out, Blair-like, to middle England. He might have fooled them at the time, but if proof were needed of the extent to which the Prime Minister is out of touch with the British people, this debate delivers it. When the parliamentary Labour party met a few weeks ago and discussed the doubling of the 10p rate, a nameless Minister was quoted as saying:"““Gordon did not seem to understand what they were talking about and kept insisting that nobody would lose out by the change. He…gave the impression he was living on another planet.””" Last week, the Prime Minister was not on another planet, but he was on another continent. He was still insisting that no one would lose out and he could not understand what all the fuss was about. The inner circle in the bunker with him remained in denial. The Minister for the Cabinet Office airily dismisses the fate of the 5 million people who are worse off as a result of the changes as a ““matter of regret””—a minor piece of collateral damage in the path of the clunking fist. The Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families apparently thinks that raising tax on the poor is part of the process of taking forward ““the fairness agenda””. Others understand; they get it. They come from all Opposition parties and from Labour, and include some Members on the Treasury Bench. The Lord Chancellor understands; so does the Minister for the Olympics. It appears that the penny is even slowly dropping for the Foreign Secretary. Perhaps even the Chancellor of the Exchequer was hinting last week in China that he understood. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Ms Smith), who we are delighted to see in her place today, appears to have got the message. In her case, it was drowned out by another message that came across the Atlantic in a display of long-distance bullying that would put the Kremlin to shame. Those Members understand because they have been listening to their constituents, holding their surgeries and reading the letters and e-mails, as we all have, from people who are just working out what the Prime Minister's simplification means for them.