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Finance Bill

That is right. I dare say that even Nostradamus could not tell whether a spike was a spike or part of an ongoing upward or downward trend. That brings us on to important issues about how on earth a baseline could be set and what behavioural effects it would produce. I want to go into some detail here, as these issues keep coming back and many of the practical difficulties with such proposals are skated over by those who make them as if they were really not a problem. I submit that they are. Before I do so, however, let me say on free market economics that there are very few even socialist theorists who would suggest that commodity prices were somehow controllable—certainly not on the global level—as the Tory Front-Bench team now seems to want to suggest. I particularly enjoyed hearing the observations of the hon. Member for Taunton about the range of stabilisers that might be forthcoming if this particular approach to world commodities were to catch on. Amendments 11 and 13 are designed to make provision for a new fuel stabiliser or regulator mechanism that would reduce the main fuel duty rate when international oil prices exceed their forecast levels. One has to think about what those forecast levels would actually mean in this context. In amendment 13, the hon. Member for Dundee, East seeks to establish a system directly, while in amendment 11, the Conservative Opposition have suddenly become much more coy than they were last year: they ask us only to prepare a report, rather than having the courage of their convictions in the consultation paper and actually tabling a specific amendment to the Finance Bill. We have not seen such an amendment, so I detect a retreat from the direct implementation of their fuel duty stabiliser policy as it was announced last year. It has now become a meek request for us to prepare a report rather than being a direct amendment to the Finance Bill. Both the amendments argue that such a mechanism would stabilise fuel prices at the pump by offsetting the impact of oil price fluctuations, but the mechanism is based on the incorrect premise that the Government receive a revenue windfall from high crude oil prices, which can be used to make up the difference in Exchequer revenues as fuel duty revenues fall. In fact, such a mechanism would destabilise the public finances—the opposite of the intended effect—by producing wild swings in duty rates, and pose significant administrative problems to both the Government and fuel producers.