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Finance Bill

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The national minimum wage has less effect in London, where wages and the economy as a whole are geared at a higher level because the cost of living is greater. Raising the minimum wage by, for example, 50p will therefore have a less profound impact in this part of the country than it would elsewhere. Many questions remain unanswered. The truth is that Labour MPs have been fooled twice on the 10p rate. They were fooled on 21 March 2007, when they waved their Order Papers and decided that the Prime Minister was somebody they could place their faith in to lead their party, and they were fooled again last Wednesday when the Prime Minister wobbled in the face of their threats and they thought that they had achieved a victory, which has turned out to be built entirely on sand. Two claims were made about the Prime Minister prior to his taking office, one of which was that he cared deeply about the poor. We now discover that his main obsessions are positioning and political manoeuvring. He is making fumbling attempts to appeal to middle England, which he does not understand. Let us have no doubt about this. After all, what was the motivation for cutting the basic rate from 22p to 20p, paid for in large part by doubling the 10p rate? It was so that the Prime Minister could say to the Daily Mail and to other representatives, as he saw it, of middle England, ““Don't believe for a moment that Tony Blair leaving as leader of the Labour party means that new Labour is dead as a concept. I am still able to carry new Labour—the election-winning coalition which has got us through the last three general election and which can still be held together with me as leader of the Labour party. My demonstration of that is that I am able to trump the Conservative party on the basic rate of tax.”” That was the motivation—it had nothing to do with the poor.