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Income Tax

I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for letting me make a short contribution to this debate. I want to make only two main points—a practical one and a philosophical one—but first, let me make a brief political point.

I say this as impartially as it is possible for an aligned Member of the House of Commons to be: it is a great tragedy for the Labour party, but actually a sadness for our country, that new Labour has been so emphatically buried by the leader of that party and by the sort of speech we just heard from the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson), who, we must remember, is a former Cabinet member and was happy to pay a top rate of tax of only 40% on his inflated Cabinet salary, but seems happy now to have rates much higher than 50p—he was not willing to stop there.

It is no coincidence that the last time Labour won a working majority without Tony Blair as leader, England won the World cup. The reason why it has been such a long time since Labour—the principal Opposition party and one of the two largest parties in the country—won without Tony Blair as leader is that there is no majority in the country, as we can see now, for avaricious, punitive taxation levels and the punishment of successful, entrepreneurial people who create wealth. It was not a difficult realisation that Tony Blair came to, but it was an important one and it is sad to me that the Labour party has abandoned that.

The New Statesman, the only publication that supported the current Labour leader when he put himself forward in 2010, has published an edition today entitled, “Running out of time”, referring to Labour. The article on Labour states:

“Miliband is very much an old-style Hampstead socialist. He”—