Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 3:45 pm on 7 April 1998.
I anticipated that the Secretary of State would raise that issue, and I can imagine the thrill of delight, in the team meeting that he must have held at the Department, on the discovery of that fascinating precedent, which he must have thought proved his case. Sadly, it does not, because it is an utterly different case.
On that occasion, I was talking about a retrospective measure which decided not to take from people tax that would otherwise have been taken. The Inland Revenue has always had a power, by way of extra-statutory concession, to do that. There is nothing revolutionary about that, and what I said at the time was correct.
However, it is unprecedented for the Secretary of State to take a decision without parliamentary sanction—without legal backing—to take money from existing good causes to give to a good cause that has not even been set up. It is not even a question of waiting for the ink to dry; the thing was not even written.