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Finance Bill

We may be quoting the same article. It was not that the shadow Chancellor, as he was then, had said, "Well, I'm not going to comment prior to the election on whether we need to increase VAT or not." He said that the Conservative plans did not require an increase in VAT. The Liberal Democrats were totally opposed to an increase in VAT and, as far as I can see, the party retains a policy to this day of opposition to it, but the Conservative party has form. I do not know whether everyone in the House has the same length of memory as me, but if we go back to the time before the 1979 election—I was not in the House then, but I was interested in politics—it turns out that the Tories, if they won the election, would inherit a VAT rate of 8%. A document has now been leaked to the press—it is printed in The Independent—that arose from a secret meeting at Sir Geoffrey Howe's home in Lambeth, 12 months before the 1979 election. The document, which was numbered—only about six people had a copy—clearly agreed that the Tories would double VAT from 8 to 15%. Yet for the whole of the period up to that election the Tories denied that they had plans to increase VAT, let alone to double it. So the Tories have form. They clearly had plans to increase VAT before the last election, just as they did in 1979. All the humbug about the Labour Government planning surreptitiously to raise VAT is precisely that—it is humbug. Labour has never increased VAT; the Tories always increase it. They took it from 8% to where it will be—20%. That is the truth of it, and they have hidden the truth from the public.