Contribution
It is good to see the Chancellor in her place, and I thank her for advance sight of her statement. I know that she has been away, so let me update her on the mess that she left behind. The pound has hit a 14-month low; Government borrowing costs are at a 27-year high; growth has been killed stone dead; inflation is rising, impacting millions; interest rates are staying higher for longer; and business confidence has fallen through the floor. The Labour party talked down the economy and crippled businesses with colossal taxes, breaking all their promises. This is a crisis made in Downing Street.
It should hardly surprise the Chancellor that international markets are uneasy. The UK’s long-term borrowing costs have risen to their highest in almost 30 years. But while the Government were losing control of the economy, where was the Chancellor? Her trip to China had not even begun when my urgent question was taken in the House last week. She was still in the country, but she sent the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, rather than facing up to her failures. May I ask her why she chose not to respond herself?
The Chancellor, of course, ducked the difficult questions by jetting off to Beijing. I believe that in Labour circles they are calling it the Peking duck, but whatever was on the menu in China, was it really worth the unedifying sight of an increasingly desperate politician scampering halfway around the world with a begging bowl? The Chancellor’s deal pales in comparison to Labour’s black hole, which opened up in the public finances while the right hon. Lady was absent from her station.
Let me give the House a sense of scale. The deal that the Chancellor has announced amounts to £120 million a year. The rise in our borrowing costs, due to her disastrous Budget, has added about £12 billion to our annual spending on debt interest alone: literally 100 times what she says she has brought back from Beijing. That is money that cannot now be spent on the public’s priorities. That £12 billion is enough to pay for 300,000 nurses or to cover Labour’s pernicious winter fuel payments cut for eight and a half years—and, of course, even before this latest market reaction, the Budget meant spending tens of billions more on servicing our debt. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast, two thirds of the money raised from the Chancellor’s jobs tax will be swallowed up by additional debt interest. Forget those billions going towards better public services; they are going on paying the price of Labour’s mismanagement.
We on this side of the House know how this sorry story goes. We have seen it all before: socialist Governments who think that they can tax and spend their way to prosperity; Labour Governments who simply do not understand that if you tax the living daylights out of business, you will get stagnation. They do not understand because there is barely a shred of business experience on the Government Front Bench. May I ask the right hon. Lady which of her promises she will break if the OBR judges in March that she is now in breach of her own fiscal rules? Will she cancel promised spending, will she ramp up borrowing, or will she raise taxes yet again?
This whole sorry tale is nothing short of a Shakespearean tragedy being played out before our eyes. This is the Hamlet of our time. Labour promised the electorate much, while pouring the poison into their ear. And the end—you can feel the end; the Chancellor flailing, estranged, it seems, from those closest to her; those about her falling; the drums beating ever closer. To go, or not to go, that is now a question. The Prime Minister will be damned if he does, but he will surely be damned if he does not. The British people deserve better.