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Finance Bill

I did not claim in my opening remarks that the Government had done nothing at all; I said rather that the scale of their ambition was far too puny, timid and lacking in ambition. That is very much true of the Climate Change Bill; in fact, I could not have come up with a better example if I had sat in my office and given considerable thought to the matter. That Bill is a proposal put forward by a Government who have been in office for 11 years, during which time the issue of climate change has become considerably more acute. It would be fair to say that my party was talking about environmental issues to a greater extent than the other parties in the 1997 election and before, but the Government have put this proposal forward and made some progress. The Bill, however, does not go far enough. Instead, we had a Budget that confirmed how small and how visionless Labour in government has become. If I were a Labour Member, that—beyond any specific proposals in the Budget package—would depress me most: the sense that the momentum of the whole exercise and the entire reason for being in government have come to a halt. The Government are petering out, running out of ideas for the future of this country.