Amendment of the law

Bought off, I hear from my friends and comrades. I welcome the ritual denunciation, but I ask them to hold fire because there is a gap between that appointment and the fact of not having a single meeting with officials at the Treasury or the Department of Energy and Climate Change to drive that through. All my experience suggests that there is an intellectual inertia at the core of our civil service that blocks the introduction of radical and dramatic changes, because civil servants have been caught up in a 20-year culture of non-interventionism. They would just like someone else in the market to do it for them, rather than taking hold of the responsibility for driving the change. To make matters easier, in default of the civil servants doing any work on the framework for introducing feed-in tariffs, I have produced a document myself, which sets out exactly the sort of tariffs that would make viable the introduction of feed-in tariffs on photovoltaics, biodigesters, solar thermal—the whole range of renewable technologies that we could and should be supporting. It will require someone to drive that through, and that, for me, is what is missing from the Budget: the willingness to drive aspirations into deliverable and measurable policy changes within a defined timetable. If we are to do that, it would be a great advantage to recognise the points that were recently made about where our current business-as-usual case would take us in UK energy accounts. The business-as-usual case will take us into a huge deficit in the balance of payments for the consumption of energy by 2020. That is on the conventional plan. However, a fascinating report came out this week from Delta Energy and Environment which points out that a dramatic shift into UK renewables would not only see us delivering more than 15 per cent. of our energy requirements from renewables by 2020, but more importantly would see us with a £12.5 billion surplus on our energy account—primarily because the jobs and services would be delivered for ourselves, rather than our being dependent on external suppliers for our energy security. That is the direction in which we must drive our efforts. The same applies to our existing housing. The reality of environmental transformation is not to be found in how many eco-homes we start to build after 2016. It is what we do with the 25 million properties that people live in today. If we want a jobs agenda that makes consistent sense with the environmental and training and skills agendas, we need something that will radically transform the quality of life of people in this country's 25 million housing properties. That is why I began my speech with a reference to Churchill's wartime Budget statement. I suspect that, for the remainder of my lifetime, we will have to address crisis—mobilisation-style—Budgets to take us through one crisis after another. I say that not to scare people but simply to point out that the situation requires us to step up to the plate—to be big enough to govern our way through that transformation and those crises. It will require us to mobilise people in a way that we have not been used to doing for 20 years or more. My pitch to the Prime Minister and to the House is that Gordon needs a carbon army. That carbon army should comprise many of the 2.1 million people who are out of work and hungry for meaningful, secure, long-term and transformational jobs. If we could harness the desire for work to structured plans for transformation, we would have a Budget that was the saving, not so much of this Government but of this society for future generations. We require Budgets that live more lightly and sustainably on the planet. Sadly, today's Budget is several steps away from that. I urge Ministers to think again and find the courage to step in and act in transformational terms to save the ecological future of our society and our country. It is infinitely more important and urgent than the situation in which they found the courage to intervene to save a banking system that, some would argue, would have been better left to collapse. We can survive in this society if we rebuild banks on the basis of securing people's savings, not of guaranteeing speculative debts. We cannot survive as a society if we squander the ecological capital that our children and grandchildren will need to draw on if they are to survive and prosper.