I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. As in virtually everything, Lady Thatcher was right about that. To be honest, it is a pity that her views do not carry more sway today because we would not find ourselves debating such a ridiculous and pointless Bill if she were still at the helm.
New clause 6 is about the calculation of gross national income, which, in many cases, is one of the most important parts of the Bill. We certainly should not gloss over this quickly because it involves the spending of a considerable amount of taxpayers’ money based on whatever happens to be the calculation at any one time.
This is very serious. The Minister is a good man normally—I have no idea what has come over him today. He should be ashamed of himself for not treating the matter with the seriousness that it deserves. He should explain the Government’s position.
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The Bill supposedly puts into law a pledge that this country made back in the 1970s. We can argue the merits of Governments and Parliaments binding their successors, but our principle in this country is that that cannot be done. To try to fulfil a pledge that was made 40 years ago in completely different economic and financial circumstances is idiotic, but we are where we are and we have to deal with the Bill as it is. The pledge made then referred to about 0.7% of GDP. I still hear Members speak about that, but since those days there has been a recalculation. We now speak of gross national income, which is calculated differently.
Those who say that we are entrenching a promise that we made back in the 1970s, no matter how foolhardy that in itself may be, are not correct. The Bill tries to fulfil a completely different promise from the one that we made then. As the Bill stands, the Government are trying to base their spending on a calculation of what GNI will be. That is why it is so important that we get this element right. The money spent will be based on an ongoing calculation through the year of what GNI will be at the end of the year. The Government will, in effect, be spending money on a guess of what the figure will turn out to be.
We saw a good example of that this year. The Government were bragging, although I am not sure it was anything to brag about, that they had hit their 0.7% spending target, but as we saw in the autumn statement—I
am sure we are all grateful for this—our GDP or GNI, whichever one wants to call it, has been revised upwards this year. From that recalculation of the country’s economy, we found out that we did not hit our 0.7% target this year; we hit about 0.67%, rather than the 0.72% that the Government thought they had hit.
On that basis, in order to meet the law that we are passing today, the Government will at some time in the future have to dig out from somewhere hundreds of millions of pounds—I know that the Opposition do not care as they think money grows on trees—to spend on a non-existent project somewhere in the world that had never before been contemplated, in order to hit an arbitrary target that we are passing into law.