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Finance Bill

I am grateful for that point, although we are slightly going round in circles. There are many benefits of globalisation for which the case is not made sufficiently frequently. Not only is globalisation beneficial for many millions of people in this country—I believe in free trade, and in goods and services flowing around the world, because that generates prosperity—but it offers the best prospect for billions of people in China, India and other Asian countries to have levels of prosperity that they have not enjoyed previously. There is no other way in which they are likely to achieve those standards of living. Let me answer the question by flipping it on its head; the onus is on both Labour and the Conservatives to make the moral case for a cleaner who earns £10,000 a year paying a higher marginal rate of taxation than the boss of the company whose offices he or she cleans, who takes home £1 million in the form of capital. There is a genuine debate to be had about that. The hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field), who represents large numbers of people—more than any of the rest of us—who fall into both categories just put forward the argument, as do the Government, that it is morally right that cleaning staff should pay a higher marginal rate. I merely inject a note of controversy into the debate by saying that I do not agree. The changes made by the Government have resulted in a perverse set of consequences. The Budget proposals reward property speculators while penalising people who have run small family businesses, and many small investors—perhaps employee share scheme holders—lose as a result. In addition, because the changes were introduced in a haphazard, short-term fashion with inadequate consultation, many people have been unable prepare for them in a way that most people would consider reasonable. The effect has been, as the hon. Member for Northampton, South (Mr. Binley) described, that people who have worked and planned on the basis of a tax regime that they thought would affect them when selling their small business at the end of their working life, and who had a legitimate expectation that if the tax regime was to change, they would have long enough to change their behaviour to take account of the alterations, have suddenly had the changes sprung on them without adequate time to make the necessary adjustments to their circumstances. That introduces what feels like a retrospective degree of taxation. Although it is not strictly speaking retrospective, that would be the outcome for people in terms of the practicalities of selling a business in a short time scale. Even the Government's U-turn—