Blake Stephenson

I agree that productivity is essential, and everyone in the House needs to focus on it. This is a dishonest and a damaging Budget. This Government promised that they would protect working people; instead, they have delivered a Budget that is tough on work and tough on the causes of work. This is a Budget that taxes employment, with 1 million employers now set to lose out. Combined with an estimated £5 billion cost of expansive employment rights, our economy will be less flexible and starved of risk capital, jobs and investment in our communities. This is a job-cutting Budget. This is a Budget that attacks our farming families, our rural economy and our rural communities—men and women working hard day in, day out, in some of the most challenging economic circumstances, at considerable risk and with low margins, all to put food on our tables three times a day. We simply would not survive without our farmers—it is that simple. But this Government are choosing to hit those very people with a family farm tax, which will drive asset disposals, splitting up land farmed by the same families for generations. It will discourage the next generation from taking up the mantle, and tear apart the communities that these farms are integral to. Last year, the now Prime Minister said: “Every day seems to bring a new existential risk to British farming.” Today, the existential risk is this socialist Government. This Budget fundamentally attacks the heart of economic growth. It crowds out private investment and reduces real business investment by £25 billion. The OBR notes: “by the forecast horizon, government spending comprises a larger part of little-changed real GDP.” When the Government promised growth, the British people might have hoped that it would be growth in the wealth of our country, not just the size of the state. Their own words sum that up best—the Budget says: “Rewarding work with a fair wage is the best way to improve living standards”. This Budget achieves none of that. Instead, it delivers lower real wages, lower real household disposable income, higher inflation and higher mortgage rates. After the Budget, the Chancellor told the British public that working people will not face higher taxes in their payslips, but she knows that is not true. More than 4 million extra taxpayers will be dragged into tax because she has kept the freeze on tax thresholds.