Treaty of Lisbon (No. 8)

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. If the House will allow me to make progress, I am about to touch on that very point. We need a new politics in the face of an unprecedented challenge. Our approach must not be tactical or short term, geared toward electoral advantage; it must be long term. We do not need insular and self-interested policies; we must be global and generous. As the hon. Gentleman said, climate change is not just an environmental or economic challenge. It is about our economy and the world's, our society and some of the most vulnerable societies in the world. Ultimately, it is very possibly about our ability to survive at all. Climate change needs to be debated but, above all, it needs action. So far, the Government have been long on words but desperately short on effective action: the rhetoric and the reality are far removed. This country's climate change emissions have increased since 1997, and now key environmental projects are threatened by the latest consequences of DEFRA's financial difficulties. Given the absence of dispute between the main political parties on the seriousness of the threat of climate change, it is astonishing that so little progress has been made towards dealing with the problem. What I have been struggling to understand is why we have been invited to discuss climate change here and now, in the debate on the Lisbon treaty. The Lisbon treaty matters, too. It might not literally be a matter of life and death, which is what irreversible climate change might ultimately become, but it does go to the heart of how we are governed, our democratic values and our right to determine our own future in years to come. It is uncomfortable to say this, but I really think that the fact that the Government have devoted so much time to the issue of climate change in debates on the Lisbon treaty betrays a serious misjudgement of the importance of both issues. It may betray something worse: a cynical willingness to use the issue of climate change as a decoy, a means of avoiding more thorough debate about the constitutional implications of the Lisbon treaty. We have already heard how many words in the Lisbon treaty are devoted to the issue of climate change: six. [Interruption.] When I say six, I mean literally that there are no more than six words in the whole treaty devoted to the issue of climate change, and I shall quote them:"““and in particular combating climate change.””" It is hardly groundbreaking stuff. There is nothing in those six words or anywhere else in the treaty that will help our collective efforts— [Interruption.]