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AMENDMENT OF THE LAW

The hon. Gentleman is gracious in defeat, as ever. Of course migration has had an effect on growth, and some of that, although, as far as I am aware, not all of it—I am not in the Treasury—was taken into account by the Treasury in its forecasting. There are some questions on the national debt, and I will come to where we stand and where we were in that regard. Our employment rate is the highest of the G7 advanced industrial countries, and is far higher than the EU27 average. Our unemployment rate is only about two thirds of the EU27 average. In one sense, that is a dry economic statistic, but in another, it is not. We are talking about people’s lives and independence and the dignity of work, so that figure means something very important to the 29 million people now in work in the United Kingdom—a figure that has risen by more than 2.5 million in the past 10 years. That is a fantastic step forward for many people. Besides their own families, work is the central thing in most people’s lives.