Gordon Brown was last night accused by the Tories of having "raided people's retirements" to the tune of £100bn by scrapping tax relief on pensions.
Moving a rare motion of no confidence in the Chancellor's handling of occupational pensions, George Osborne, his Conservative shadow, accused him of building a reputation on "stealth and dishonesty" and claimed the abolition of dividend tax credits in New Labour's first Budget in 1997 was Mr Brown's "first and worst stealth tax".
The Chancellor - more animated than usual, regularly slapping the despatch box to make his point - defended his record. He stressed how the previous Tory government had begun the reduction of the pension tax relief and that the strength of the overall economy had meant the income and assets of pension funds had more than doubled in 10 years.
He pointed out how the Opposition had no plans to reinstate the dividend tax credits and accused it of "short- termism" and "opportunism".
The Commons debate was rowdy and full of point-scoring on both sides with Speaker Michael Martin having to intervene at various points to warn front benchers and back benchers from barracking.
The Conservatives decided to use one of their Opposition Day debates to attack Mr Brown on pensions, an issue reignited over Easter with the release of Treasury documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The reports were seized on by the Tories, who claimed the Chancellor ignored the advice of officials when he decided to scrap the pension tax relief.
This point was again forcefully made by Mr Osborne when he opened the debate yesterday. To Conservative cheers, he said: "The abolition of dividend tax credits was, in the words of the Prime Minister's own economic adviser at the time, a mad thing to do, quite crackers'."
The Shadow Chancellor, flanked by David Cameron, began by tearing into Mr Brown's record, accusing him of presiding over rising inflation, a record tax burden and the recent "con-trick" Budget.
He told MPs: "This Chancellor's boast of economic competence is unravelling before our eyes and the first and worst of all his mistakes was that raid on pensions."
This, he insisted, had left millions with a shortfall in their retirement funds and 125,000 people with little or no pension at all.
While the Shadow Chancellor acknowledged that the stock market crash in 2000 and rising life expectancy had impacted on pensions, it was Mr Brown's "Great British pensions theft" which had caused the most damage.
The Chancellor predicated his counter-argument "upon the rock of the economy".
He was adamant that he would not apologise for three long-term decisions which he made in 1997 "in the interests of stability and growth".
These were the granting of independence to the Bank of England, creating a fiscal framework that allowed the doubling of public investment and removing the bias against long-term investment which included a 2p cut in corporation tax.
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