Daniel Hannan (ECR). – Madam President, this is really where you see the racket exposed, this idea of defending green policies in economic terms. If you wanted to say: ‘there is a price to be paid for ecological goals, we should be prepared to suffer slower growth in order to slow global warming’, that is fine and that is a perfectly reasonable argument with good and sincere people on both sides.

But to say that this will, of itself, stimulate the economy is such a basic economic fallacy that I do not really believe the proponents believe it themselves. It is the exact equivalent of arguing that if the government employed more people, that would create more jobs and therefore they would pay more tax and therefore the economy would grow. It was tried in the Soviet system and we all saw where it led.

The reason it does not work is because of what Frédéric Bastiat calls the theory of seen and unseen costs. You are always taking more out of the economy to create these jobs than they can ever put back into it. The reality is that it is the other way round. It is not the green policies that create the growth. It is the growth that creates the green policies. We have cleaner air and water in developed countries because we can afford it.

(The President cut off the speaker)