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AMENDMENT OF THE LAW

This Budget is good for those at the lower end of the income tax scale as it were, because of what has happened with tax credits and so on. I refer the hon. Gentleman to page 208 of the Budget book in terms of what has happened with income tax. Yes, there are people who will lose because of the abolition of the 10p rate, but there are people skewed towards the bottom end of the income scale who will gain, so the measures are redistributive and I support that. I think that most Labour MPs, if not all of them, would support redistribution from the upper end of the income scale towards the lower end of the income scale. I am comfortable with that as a Labour MP. I want to move on from some of the macro-economic stuff to pay tribute to the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson) on climate change. He made a couple of remarks on what I might unashamedly call my specialist subject, or aspect, of climate change: adapting to its effects. But apart from those couple of remarks, all his speech—it was very worthy and good and I agreed with quite a lot of it—was about dealing with the causes of climate change and what we can do to cut emissions in this country and encourage people to generate their own electricity, and all those kinds of things. He did not deal with adapting to the effects of climate change. We have a crazy situation in this country, whereby, when we talk about climate change in public or parliamentary debates—whether we are talking about it in some kind of ecological context, or in a Treasury context, as we are today—we talk about the aspect that is beyond our control on a world scale: causes. The United Kingdom is responsible for 2 per cent. of world emissions of greenhouse gases. That is twice as high as it should be given that we have 1 per cent. of the population. But in order to slow down and reverse climate change we need international agreement and action. The Government have a great record on trying to achieve that, but they have not really achieved it so far in relation to China, India, or the USA. The public debate is skewed in as much as we discuss that which is beyond our control, but we do not discuss that which is entirely within our control: dealing with the effects of climate change. The effects of climate change are already upon us. One can see that by looking at how early the daffodils came out this year, or whatever measure one wants to take. Whether one looks at anecdotal evidence, or the hard science, we already have the effects of climate change. But we do not talk about what measures, including fiscal measures, we can use to adapt to the climate change that we already have and that, according to the preponderance of scientific knowledge, we will have for at least the next 40 years, even if the world gets its act together and stops pumping out nearly as many greenhouse gases as it does now. If we stopped pumping out those gases tomorrow, we would still have to deal with the effects of climate change. They would grow roughly on a bell curve over 20 years and then start to come down—that is if we stopped all the greenhouse gas emissions, or the excess ones, tomorrow, which is not going to happen.