My Lords, I will not detain the House for long, but I want to just say one thing. I may be the only person who speaks up for the Government Front Bench, for which I do not expect them to thank me.
It is appalling to suggest that Members of this House are somehow personally lacking in social conscience when it is other people’s money, rather than their own, that we are talking about. Again and again, we see this conflation between the public need for economy and people’s personal morality, as though it was their own meanness or generosity. We had the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, talking about them as Scrooge. Scrooge was dealing with his own assets, not somebody else’s. The noble Lord, Lord Morrow, who knows how much I admire him, just said that the Minister has a chance to re-establish her social conscience. It is not her social conscience.
We can disagree with this policy. I would have done many things differently from this Government, as they know. One thing, which will make me even more unpopular, is that I would not be putting up the cost of energy as we do in this self-congratulatory way in vote after vote and then complain about the consequences, as we have been doing today. But can we please conduct our debates on the basis that, if you happen to favour the idea of benefits as a last resort for the needy rather than a universal entitlement, that does not make you a bad person? People on both sides of this issue are motivated by humanity and decency and, ultimately, by a concern for the welfare of the nation as a whole.