Rishi Sunak

Labour Members do not like it, but this is the truth: they have fiddled the figures and raised tax to record levels. They have broken their promises, and it is the working people of this country who will pay the price. The Chancellor and Prime Minister have tried to say that they had no choice, but let us be in no doubt: their misleading claims about the state of the economy are nothing but a cynical political device. Today’s situation is a world away from the genuinely bleak legacy that we Conservatives inherited from the last Labour Government. The Chancellor forgot to point out that borrowing was £1 in every £4 that they spent, with debt rising every year and unemployment at 8%. I understand the Chancellor’s shameless political motivations and why it suits her to cook up a false justification for her agenda, but today, the OBR has declined to back up her claims of a fictional £22 billion black hole. It appears nowhere in its report. It is deeply disappointing that she has sought to politicise the independent OBR, which should be above party politics. As the Chancellor now knows, her playing politics has done real damage to our economy. She talked about being a Bank of England economist, but the Bank of England’s former chief economist has said that Labour’s approach has generated fear, foreboding and uncertainty among consumers, businesses and investors. The rhetoric of this Chancellor and this Prime Minister is damaging the British economy for political purposes. We need only to look at the facts to see that the Chancellor’s claims about her economic inheritance are nonsense. Labour inherited an economy with inflation back at its 2% target, mortgage rates cut and unemployment low. When we left office, the United Kingdom was the fastest growing advanced economy in the world. When it comes to the public finances, not once has the Chancellor acknowledged that we took the right decision to spend half a trillion pounds to protect the British people from the impact of covid and Putin’s war. Let me remind the House that not only did the Labour party support all those interventions, it wanted us to go even further. When I made the tough choices to fix the public finances afterwards, the Prime Minister and Chancellor opportunistically opposed me every step of the way, so I will take no lectures from those two about difficult decisions. But because of the decisions we made, the Chancellor inherited lower borrowing than France, America, Italy and Japan, and the second-lowest debt in the entire G7. Any which way you look at it, Labour’s claims about its inheritance are purely ludicrous. These are her choices, so stop blaming everyone else and take responsibility for them. [Interruption.] Let me turn to the substance of those choices. During the election, the Chancellor repeatedly promised that her plans were fully funded. Only a few weeks ago, the Prime Minister said the Budget would “balance the books”, but this Budget does no such thing and reveals that they have not been straight with the British people. [Interruption.]