If the hon. Lady had listened to my earlier remarks, she would have heard me talk about small businesses then. I have done a significant amount of work with small businesses.
The Government are trying to persuade the public, and to justify what they are doing to working people. We know that, on the whole, it is working people who will be affected. Half the 13 million people who are living in poverty are in work, and two thirds of children in poverty are in working families. The Government are trying to construct a narrative to justify the tack that they have taken—the “divide and rule” narrative about people being feckless—but it is the working people who will be affected most.
Another thing that the Government regularly do is a source of immense frustration. Although I have consulted the Ministers’ code of conduct and many other sources, I have been unable to identify a responsible use of statistics on their part. The Chancellor, for example, tried to suggest in his Budget speech that we were one of the most generous welfare-spending countries in the world. That is simply not true. It is absolute rubbish. If we compare the UK’s spending as a percentage of GDP with that of developed countries in the European Union —as my hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) tried to do earlier—we find that it is ranked 17th out of 32.