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Finance Bill

Well, that was quite a rant. The Chief Secretary has obviously decided that if she cannot defend her own policies and record, the best thing to do is to come out of the bunker spraying fire in all directions and hoping to get away with it. We will take no lectures from her or anyone on the Treasury Bench about the economy and the challenges ahead of us. The overwhelming sense that I got from that speech, and indeed from the interventions from Labour Members, was that they simply do not get the scale of the crisis that they have created and the challenges that it may fall to others to pick up in an attempt to put this country back on its feet. Hon. Members might be forgiven for experiencing a sense of déjà vu today. It is only last week that we were debating—and unravelling—the Budget. Now we must debate a Finance Bill that was published only last Thursday. Outside experts have scarcely had a chance to digest it, but it will be forced through the House at a pace dictated by the political decision to delay the Budget until after the G20 meeting, rather than by the needs of good government and proper scrutiny. It was a political decision to delay the Budget until after the G20, because the Prime Minister had intended to announce a major fiscal stimulus, which he could present as part of a wider plan delivered by him on his saving the world agenda. That plan was dashed by the Governor of the Bank of England on 24 March when he gave evidence to the Treasury Committee and told the Prime Minister what we had been telling him for months—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne) is right—Britain's credit card is maxed out and the Prime Minister cannot borrow his way out of trouble. We have déjà vu in another sense. Last year's Finance Bill Second Reading was dominated by the Government's attempted sleight of hand on the 10p tax rate and the growing rebellion on the Labour Benches as the impact of that broken manifesto pledge became apparent to them. This year, the split in the Labour party is caused not by any sympathy for the targets of the distraction taxes in the Budget, but by a tug of war for the heart and soul of the Labour party between the adherents of new Labour's embrace of aspiration and the exponents of the politics of envy as the most expedient tactic for a Prime Minister who is already up to his armpits in political mire and sinking fast.