Daniel Hannan (ECR). – Mr President, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Orwell’s concept of Duckspeak, which he introduces in 1984. He defines it as being able to ‘make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all’. We’ve heard an awful lot of that in the debate about the circular economy. One after another the hackneyed phrases have been coming out, without thought or consideration: ‘protecting the environment’, ‘social justice’, ‘building a better Europe’ – as though anyone is against building a better Europe or as though anyone is against the environment!

What does this actually mean when we translate it into policy? Politicians have every right to cost externalities. They have every right to regulate final outcomes. If we think that there is environmental damage caused by waste or by pollution, it is absolutely our role to say ‘this is the minimum level, now over to you to see how to meet it’. But that isn’t what this debate is about. It’s all about shovelling public money around as an exercise in a kind of massive collective virtue—signalling to show that we’re nicer than the other guy. It’s not the economy that circular, it’s our ridiculous debates in this Chamber!