My hon. Friend makes the point particularly well. I am pretty confident that the majority of the public are on our side on this issue. It is important to note, in relation to new clause 6 and the percentage of GNI, that the OBR’s figures, published only this week, show that spending in every Government Department—that includes spending on health, defence, schools and education—will go down as a proportion of GDP over the next five years. I suspect that the majority of my constituents would want to protect the health budget, if anything, as a proportion of GDP.
Is not it extraordinary that we are effectively being asked to rubber-stamp a provision that will ensure that although spending in every other Government Department will go down as a proportion of GDP, spending on overseas aid will remain the same as a proportion of GDP? I cannot accept that that is the will of the British public. In fact, I am not entirely sure that we will see that it is the will of the House. I have proposed that 50%
of the public should have to vote for it, but I suspect that we will not get anywhere near 50% of MPs voting for it today. Let us have some democratic legitimacy for the policy. Let us have it out in a referendum. Let the people decide what they want their taxes to be spent on.
I suspect that I will be proved right and that those arguing for the Bill will be proved wrong. Of course, if they are right, they have nothing to fear from a referendum. I want to know why they fear the public’s opinion so much—we did not hear it today because they were so determined to rattle through their speeches. I think that we should put this to the people in a referendum, given that we seem to be embarking on a new constitutional settlement. In our constitution we have never gone down this route of protecting spending for one Department as a proportion of GDP. Let us see whether the British public are in favour of that new constitutional arrangement. I fear that they are not.
Of course, if the Bill is not amended today, overseas aid will become a bigger and bigger proportion of Government spending every year, because spending by every other Department will go down as a proportion of GDP. Nobody has admitted it so far, but that, in effect, is what the Bill will sign us up to. Is that really what Members think the public want, when there is so much pressure on our public services, our military and our transport system? Do they really think that they want a higher and higher proportion of Government spending to go on overseas aid? I do not think they do. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) has given us the polling, which suggests that is not the case either. I would like other Members to trust the public with their own money.
Subsection (3) of new clause 7 states:
“This Act shall only have effect in those years where the United Kingdom records a budget surplus.”
We are borrowing more than we expected this year. The Chancellor gave us the figures this week. He has done an excellent job in getting the deficit down—I am the first to praise him for that—but it is still far too high. It is about £5 billion higher than he anticipated it would be at this stage. The hon. Member for Luton South (Gavin Shuker) talked about how much money the British public give to charity. We are very generous in this country when it comes to helping those less fortunate than us. That is a proud tradition that I suspect and hope will continue. I would much prefer individuals to decide which charities to give their own money to, rather than the Government deciding what they should and should not be supporting through their taxes. That is an essential principle of mine.
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I do not think that any Member of this House would advise their next-door neighbour to get into debt by giving money to charity. I am pretty sure that we would all say, “Yes, that’s a very good cause, but give only what you can afford to and don’t get into debt as a result.” So why do some Members think that the country should live on a completely different footing? Why do they think we should effectively be giving to charity money we simply do not have?
We are literally borrowing money from other countries around the world in order to hand it over to different countries. In fact, when the Labour party was in office, we
were borrowing money from China and giving overseas aid to China—you could not make it up. Thankfully, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), who is in his place, ended that ridiculous state of affairs when he was Secretary of State.
It is absolutely ridiculous that we borrow money from countries around the world—money we do not have—hand it over to other countries and then pay interest on it to the countries we borrowed it from. It is not clear from the Bill, but I suspect that because we will have to pay interest on the money that we will have to borrow to fund the 0.7% promise, the cost to the taxpayer will be much more than 0.7%. That does not seem to have been included in the Government’s plans either.
That is why new clause 7 proposes that the Act should come into effect only when the United Kingdom records a budget surplus. We would therefore be spending only money that we had and could afford to hand over to other countries. It is ludicrous that we are spending about £12 billion a year at the same time as borrowing about £91 billion a year. That cannot make sense.