Andrew Bowie

I was actually right here on the Front Bench listening to my hon. Friend, and I agreed with a lot of what he said. However, we are here to debate the contents of the Bill and to decide whether they are something we should support, and I am afraid—to break with the consensus that has been expressed across the House this morning—that we cannot. The Bill would undermine the power of this Parliament and its democratically elected Members and would bind their hands. As the Bill suggests, the Secretary of State would be duty-bound to act as directed by an unelected body. A world with a cleaner climate and with thriving nature and wildlife is one we all aspire to; it is the core belief of Conservativism that we should seek to leave the country and the world in a better place than that in which we found them, for both our children and our grandchildren. But I am afraid that this Bill would not do that. In government, we aspired to be a world leader in the energy sector and to embrace a new energy mix that would reduce our carbon footprint, and that is what we did. We should want to pave the way for other nations, but it should be a path that they would actually want to follow. If the Bill means green levies, soaring bills, the highest electricity prices in the world, boiler taxes, job losses, and rejecting our ability to produce fuel domestically, while increasing imports from abroad and generating lower tax revenues as a result, nobody will follow this path.