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Capital Gains Tax (Rates)

It is interesting to follow the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid). There was one thing in the past 14 minutes that I am glad that he acknowledged; otherwise there was little with which I could agree. However, I agreed with the admission that the Budget is ideological and that the Conservative party has delivered the sort of change that it always wanted to make and scrapped the massive improvements that the Labour party made in the public sector. It is not an economic but an ideological Budget. The hon. Gentleman's honesty, at least about that, does him great credit. I want to consider the huge and unnecessary gamble that the Chancellor has taken with our economic recovery, and why a genuine growth strategy would enable us to grow our way out of the economic crisis without threatening thousands of people with the dole, and without threatening those who rely on housing benefit or the economic recovery. I shall also talk about the Budget's impact on my constituents in Chesterfield and Staveley. First, I shall deal with the myth that the Chancellor had no choice and that the measures were taken out of economic necessity rather than, as the hon. Member for Bromsgrove admitted, political ideology. That is nonsense. The Chancellor's Office for Budget Responsibility's report confirms that the borrowing requirement this year was £8 billion less than that forecast by my right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor in March. Before the Chancellor's intervention in the Budget, we were on target for the growth forecast for 2011 of 1.25% that the shadow Chancellor had made. The OBR admitted that the shadow Chancellor's plans for spending restraint over the next four years would have halved the budget deficit by 2014-15, just as he said they would when he delivered his Budget in March. Uniquely among the main parties, the Labour party is putting forward policies that we campaigned on in the general election a month ago. This could catch on: we could go into elections telling the public what we wanted them to vote for, and then we could come to this place and deliver those policies.