Amendment of the law

One of the things that has annoyed and confused me over the years is the nonsensical view of incentives. Whenever we talk about what is required to provide incentives to work for the poor, it is compulsion and punishment. But apparently the rich have to be courted, wooed and induced to work. We need a consistent view of what mobilises people. This may be an appropriate time to reverse the presumptions that I have described and, for experimental purposes, woo the poor but punish the rich, but I do not want to go down that path. I want to go beyond presumptions about whom to punish and reward, because the real challenge as we make our way through this recession is to find a different and visionary description of how society can work. For me, the answer is unquestionably to be found in the greening of all future Budgets. I am pleased that the Chancellor today introduced the first of the annual carbon budgets, and that he has recognised it as a benchmark commitment that is important in global terms in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit at the end of this year. However, it is important to put the UK's performance in the context of the performance of other countries that are not necessarily making the same strategic claim. The most recent appraisal of the green proportion in governmental intervention measures and stimulus packages introduced around the world puts it at an average of around 15 per cent. In the UK, the proportion is just less than 7 per cent. That makes it hard to describe us as a world leader in that context. Moreover, the most recent analysis of that 7 per cent. suggests that the carbon savings in the green measures are outweighed by the carbon impact of the 520 carriage miles of new road construction that are also part of the package. Our attempts at carbon balancing must achieve carbon-negative Budgets. We cannot disregard the carbon damage caused by one part of the stimulus package that outweighs the carbon gain in another.