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Next week’s Budget is crucial for Britain’s future. The Tories have left our public services in crisis, housebuilding is at its lowest since the 1920s, and Brexit threatens to wreck our economy.

Chancellor Philip Hammond knows – with a hefty potential £60billion divorce bill for leaving the EU – he’s not going to have the money to fix the mess the Tories caused unless he borrows.

But there is a much greater threat to Britain that’ll make Brexit look like a tea party.

One that will come to dominate politics for decades to come.

Climate change .

More frequent flooding in the UK already costs the economy £2.2billion a year. But research shows that climate change could cost our country as much as £75billion a year by 2050.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

Labour’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell gets this.

His idea to make the Office for Budget Responsibility, which oversees Government spending, factor climate change in to all future financial forecasts is a smart move.

Governments around the world have all woken up to the fact that climate change is the greatest threat to the planet and the global economy.

I’ve been in Bonn for the latest climate change talks. A lot has changed 20 years on from me helping to broker the Kyoto Treaty, which saw 44 countries sign up to cut carbon emissions.

Some 196 nations have now backed the Paris Protocol to tackle climate change, though Trump is threatening to take the US – the biggest polluter – out.

I remember that the oil, car and coal industries bitterly opposed us getting a deal at Kyoto, even questioning the science of climate change. They’re not arguing now. But big industrial nations like the US and UK and countries across Europe had our economic growth fuelled by oil, gas and coal.

Developing countries, which account for two-thirds of nations, took the view that the pollution was caused by the industrial West and that we should pay.

(Image: Getty Images Europe)

These countries want the growth we had to lift them out of poverty. But they need our help so they can get their growth using low-carbon power sources, such as solar and renewables.

These countries on the front line of the effects of man-made pollution told me at the conference they are still not getting the money promised to them by the biggest polluters.

But the scientists made it absolutely clear that even if we all move to low carbon – reduce fossil fuels, introduce electric cars and switch to renewables – it still won’t limit the temperature rising.

They say that what is necessary is to produce a more radical set of policies and accepting we need a new sustainable model of growth that puts the planet, not profit, first.

Labour’s idea to put the effects of climate change at the heart of its economic plans is spot on.

Thanks to the changes we made in Government, between 1990 and 2016, the UK GDP has grown by 67 per cent while carbon emissions have fallen by 42 per cent.

Climate change is a massive threat.

But it’s also a great opportunity to grow our economy responsibly.