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Finance Bill

I will cling on to my image of the hon. Gentleman's integrity and await his contribution a little later. I remain convinced that, for him, redemption is still possible. I was about to say in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) that the reality is that the impact on jobs might be even worse than we saw in the Red Book, or even worse than we read about in The Guardian, because the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development tells us that it forecasts that unemployment could continue to rise up towards 3 million. This Finance Bill hits growth so hard—this is a point that I hope the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark in particular will reflect on—that, buried in the back of the Red Book, we learn that the Chancellor has had to raise £9 billion of extra taxes to pay for the lost growth. That is not cutting public debt, but adding to it—in pounds and pence and in the unquantifiable misery of wasted human lives. It is, I am afraid, a philosophy that is all too familiar. It is a distant echo of 1992, when a Tory Chancellor told us that unemployment was "a price worth paying". Back in 1989, another Tory Chancellor, the now noble Lord Major—