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Finance Bill

Again, I wholeheartedly agree. I am not sure what is worse, that measure or the suggestion—the rehash that we heard only last week—that people should get on their bikes, get out of places such as Pontypridd and go to other parts of Britain where, allegedly, work will be created through the magical 2.5 million jobs that we are going to see each year. I am about to finish, and I shall do so on a highly topical note, by returning to my quotation from Sir Alan Budd's interview for a documentary programme some 10 years ago. He was asked whether he was worried that economists such as himself were being used to cover the political motives of the previous Tory Administration, and in response he said: "The nightmare I sometimes have, about this whole experience, runs as follows. I was involved in making a number of proposals which were partly at least adopted by the government"— the Thatcher Government—""and put in play by the government. Now my worry is…that there may have been people making the actual policy decisions…who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation.""They did, however, see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes—if you like, that what was engineered there in Marxist terms was a crisis of capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make profits ever since."" I wonder whether that might be why Sir Alan Budd has decided to leave the service of the current vintage of Tories.