Dave Doogan

My hon. Friend is right to highlight that issue, which is so important to many people across the UK but especially in the north of England, and in Liverpool in particular. But it is not just that. It is the way Labour rushed during the campaign to stand shoulder to shoulder with WASPI women before abandoning them when they got into office. It is about the family farm tax, which the Labour party expressly said before the election that it would not introduce but then got in and did exactly that. That was a gross betrayal of our agricultural industry and our rural communities. The change to employer national insurance was self-evidently anti-industry, self-evidently inflationary and self-evidently a tax on jobs. It was going to have one potential outcome. The £25 billion that the Government said that it would bring in was complete fantasy; by the time they had compensated for the public sector, it was down to single figures of billions, and even that did not take into account the drag on the economy and the lower fiscal receipts as a result of that disastrous, self-defeating policy.