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Finance Bill

I shall deal with both those issues. The hon. Gentleman suggested that I was seeking to be unduly party political and partisan. I was not. I was seeking to explain the Prime Minister's motivation for introducing this policy. His motivation was unduly party political and partisan, and it is very difficult for me to explain that without appearing to touch on the same ground myself. It remains crucial to understanding this fiasco that one also understands what motivated the then Chancellor to introduce the policy in the first place. I can tell all those Members for whom the scales have not yet fallen from their eyes that it was not a concern for the poorest people in this country. If that had been his motivation, he would have rejected the policy instantly. It was done because he wanted to position himself in a way that was politically advantageous over the Conservative party in particular, and to a lesser extent, over other Opposition parties. That was the motivation and that is what has led to the woeful state of affairs within the governing party at the moment. The Liberal Democrats have made it abundantly clear—after all, we have not suffered from a lack of debate on this subject and the Finance Bill, which has been discussed for months—that our priority for taxation is to reduce the burden on people on low and low-to-middle incomes who, we feel, are paying too much. Why has this become such a salient political issue at this time? It is because food prices, council tax bills and petrol prices are rising and the sort of people who might not have felt the pinch quite so badly when the then Chancellor announced this policy—the economy was then still growing at a reasonable rate—are now feeling that pinch very acutely indeed. That is why, when the history of the Brown premiership comes to be written, this issue will be seen to symbolise the entire failure of this Prime Minister and this Government.