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Finance Bill

May I begin by congratulating hon. Members on a series of excellent maiden speeches? My hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) spoke. I did not know that area of the country at all before he did so, and I feel much better informed as to its great beauties. The hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) told the House, to its considerable relief, that he is not going to be a pugilist, as one of his predecessors once was, so I am glad to note that, if he disagrees with my speech, I may not end up with a broken nose—[Interruption.] I could not quite catch that, and I expect the Hansard reporters could not, either. My hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer), as Edmund Burke said of Pitt the Younger, is not so much a chip off the old block, as the old block itself. And finally, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Cambridgeshire (Stephen Barclay) told us that he was—on the internet, under the same name—a cabaret artist. I may be rare in the country at large, but in this House probably not, in that I much prefer a political speech to a cabaret artist, so I am very glad that we had the wrong website for the gentleman who spoke. Let me come to the matter at hand, the Second Reading of this incredibly important Finance Bill. It is, like the one in 1981, of considerable controversy but great importance. We have heard at length, but interestingly, from Opposition Members that, actually, this is not a serious circumstance, and that, if we pay off the debt, though a bit too high, in dribs and drabs, all will be well. Sadly, that just is not correct. The deficit that we have faced has reached levels that in peacetime we have never had, and a key factor about the funding of the deficit last year has been missed. It was that almost all the gilts that were issued were bought by the Bank of England under its programme of quantitative easing. That programme has now stopped. Even with this Finance Bill, we face an increase in the amount that the Government need to raise from £40 billion to £160 billion, and if we had stuck to the Opposition's proposals it would have been higher still. Where does that money come from? Who is willing to give this country £160 billion? As it is collected, who finds it harder to borrow? The answer is the very businesses that Opposition Members say find it difficult to make investment decisions. If we borrow and borrow, and the Government use up all the money, we force up interest rates for mortgage holders and squeeze out the investment that private companies need to make.