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Income Tax

In a moment—the hon. Gentleman has only just come into the Chamber. It seems to me that those people should be lauded and celebrated for their achievements, and they should pay a reasonable amount of tax—and they do under this Government—but they should not be reviled by politicians. The reason why unemployment is falling and the economy is growing is that we have more wealth creation, and that is what we need to do more to encourage.

The Labour party—not just Labour; there are others, I am sure, Madam Deputy Speaker—seems to me to have an extremely narrow, parochial focus. There are economies right around the world that are expanding and are wealthier than ever before. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia are being lifted out of material poverty because those countries are embracing the basics of free-market economics and wealth creation. Those countries are seeing the benefits of improved health care systems, improved life expectancy, reduced infant mortality and improved education outcomes. We must not allow ourselves to adopt an approach of insular

socialism in just this one country. That approach involves a belief that we can continue to penalise a small number of wealth creators for being successful, which is completely counter-productive.

We need to step back and ask ourselves what a country would do if it wanted to be competitive in a globalised economy. What could we do to encourage businesses not to locate to France, Germany or the United States or, increasingly, to Mexico, Brazil or India? What could we do to encourage them to locate here? Could we ensure that we had competitive levels of corporation tax? I congratulate the Government on achieving that. Could we ensure that we had competitive levels of personal taxation? In my view, we are in a reasonable place on that. We would be in a worse place if the gist of this motion were accepted.

Perhaps we could ensure that the percentage the state took from overall GDP was sustainable. At the moment, the Government spend a much bigger proportion of GDP than they did in any of the 10 years that Tony Blair was Prime Minister, and in my view that is too much. It is unsustainable. Could we ensure that we were not borrowing too much and living beyond our means? At the moment, we are clearly living beyond our means. These are all straightforward propositions for a country that wants to be successful in a global marketplace.