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Finance Bill

It is a great pleasure to participate in this debate, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is great to see my hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban) on the Front Bench, where he can respond to the cogent points made in the debate. A few years ago, I was on the Front-Bench Treasury team and he was a distinguished member of the Finance Bill Committee. He may recall that we discussed whether it was sensible to have targeted attacks on certain types of drinks, or to deal with alcohol in general. In his important contributions to the deliberations of that Committee he emphasised that we should not legislate in favour of one alcoholic drink over another beverage. I hope that no amendment that he moves in Committee will undermine that important principle that we established all those years ago. Those thoughts take me back to the time when my hon. Friend the Member for Fareham worked as a research assistant for me. He was still at the London School of Economics, and he worked extremely hard without remuneration. We were under the great, happy glow of the prime ministership of Baroness Thatcher. It was wonderful when my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mrs. Lait) referred to the great baroness earlier. On Monday we celebrated the fact that it was 30 years since Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister—