Indeed I do. That was the third observation that I wanted to make about how people might see us—how we treat our own people.
Let us remember that this Budget does nothing to cancel the attacks on the poor that have been contained in the past few Budgets. We still have the bedroom tax. We still have the cuts to employment and support allowance. We still have, albeit with some mitigation, the roll-out of universal credit and the visiting of penury on the poorest and the most disabled in our country. Any country will rightly look at us and judge us according to how we treat those who are least able to defend themselves. When they look at the record of this Government, I think they will judge them harshly.
Brexit clearly overshadows the whole debate about Britain in the global economy. I remind colleagues that we have not left the European Union. We have not even begun to leave the European Union. Indeed, we do not, as of today, yet have a plan to leave the European Union. All we have is a stated intention—the idea of Brexit, and already the idea of Brexit is having a material effect on the ground. I refer Members to page 14 of the Red Book, where paragraph 1.19 is a harbinger of what is to come. It points out that the drop in the projected growth in GDP is not just because of the per capita drop but because fewer people will be contributing to the economy due to a net drop in migration of 20,000 people. This is only the beginning. If we tell young people from Poland, Spain and Greece that they are not welcome to come and live and work here, not only will our public services be in jeopardy but we will not be able to collect their taxes, and that will have an economic effect on paying for those public services in the first place.
Already the European Medicines Agency and other institutions are leaving just because of the idea of Brexit. Not a mile away, across the City of London many financial organisations are preparing to make an exit and shift their European regional headquarters to another place. The effect of that will be dramatic, and it is irresponsible in the extreme for the Government of the day to come to the House and present a Budget that has no contingency whatsoever for those possibilities. The Government are planning for a series of options on Brexit, one of which is a hard Brexit with all the attendant tariff controls and trade barriers, and yet they have made no contingency for what might happen. That is the height of irresponsibility.
In the final 20 seconds, I want to mention the situation in Scotland. We welcomed the Government’s decision to scrap VAT for police and fire in Scotland, but if it was the right thing to do today, it was the right thing to do a year ago and the year before that. It is intellectual banality for the Government to base their policy on who makes the argument rather than the content of it.
8.10 pm