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Finance Bill

We are still working out how coalition politics work. It is welcome that we have a coalition, but I have been given the task of presenting a Liberal Democrat perspective. When I arrived in the House five years ago, I had spent 17 years in tax consultancy, both in practice and in industries. I had studied Budgets in their various forms, professionally and politically, for a very long time. I spent the whole of the last Parliament resisting becoming too deeply involved in finance because I wanted to develop other interests, but our leader, the Deputy Prime Minister, has persuaded me that this might be a good opportunity for me to reacquaint myself with my professional past. I hasten to add that I was never a VAT specialist; my specialism was direct rather than indirect taxes.