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Finance Bill

Thank you for calling me to speak in this debate, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am surrounded by four excellent gentlemen: my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood), two knights of the shires—my hon. Friends the Members for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) and for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton)—and my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash). I am sure that if he pulls his finger out in the next few years, he, too, will be a knight of the shire or even a right hon. Gentleman. This has been an excellent debate. I am not taken to acts of naked partisanship in the run-up to a general election, and I shall resist that temptation for at least the next 30 seconds. I have read the Finance Bill from cover to cover and it is very grim reading. It is a very concerning document. Its 167 pages are a metaphor for this Government's failing over the past 13 years. This is what we are left with: impenetrable clauses talking about figures and numbers that nobody could possibly understand unless they were working in a bank inventing impossible figures and numbers that would eventually bankrupt this country. It is not a document for growth: it is a document for further contraction in our economy. We, in this place, have every right to be hugely concerned about this document, but the issue is not whether we are concerned: it is whether our constituents are concerned, and they should be. In this document, we have yet more hidden taxes—hidden taxes on middle-class families, hidden taxes on working-class families, frozen allowances and higher duties. Those will all damage people's quality of life. This is going to be a very short speech, as we prepare for the general election. The only people who are doing well out of this document are the people who publish "Tolley's Tax Guide", which has trebled in size over the past 13 years. If we have much more of this, it will treble again in just the weeks ahead.