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Finance (No. 3) Bill

The VAT increase that the Government have introduced is clearly highly regrettable. I might just take the opportunity of the Minister's intervention to correct a common way of phrasing what happened under the previous Government when my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling), the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, temporarily lowered VAT. Government Members often say that Labour increased VAT, as though the decrease was not intended to be a temporary measure to help the economy. There is a difference: the Labour Government helped people through with a cut in prices, but this Conservative-led Government think that the future of taxation in this country should be higher prices in the shops.