Robert Jenrick

I will give way in a moment. Mass migration remains rampant. The public finances are getting worse. Look at what the markets are saying: the cost of borrowing is going up and the pound is falling. Unemployment is rising. Great, proud industries, such as one in my constituency, NSK, a business that makes steel ball bearings, are going bust because of uncompetitive energy prices and unfair competition from China—hundreds of people thrown on the scrapheap and now looking for new jobs in north Nottinghamshire. Youth unemployment is the worst that we have known it. We have record high taxes and borrowing. Our country is in a mess. Britain is broken. Yet so little is being done. Even where the Government have acted, they have made things worse. Look at our farmers: the attempt by the Chancellor to impose the family farm tax, only partially U-turned on, has caused immense pain and suffering to thousands of farmers across our country, including many in my rural Nottinghamshire constituency. I went last year to meet a farmer in West Yorkshire whose father had taken his own life, by hanging himself in a barn, the night before the Budget, because he had read the briefing that the Chancellor had put out; the briefing was correct, but he wrongly feared that the measure would come in the next day. He killed himself. He is not alone. Think of the pain and suffering that some of the members of our armed forces have felt as a result of the thus far failed attempt to deal with issues in Northern Ireland. The bravest of the brave—the men who served in Northern Ireland during the period of the troubles—now face a knock on the door or a letter through the letterbox. The previous Government, for all their failings, attempted to give a degree of immunity to those men, so that they would never have to live out the last days of their lives facing prosecution in the courts or wasting their life savings on legal fees. Think of what is happening to businesses the length and breadth of our country. The cost of employing people is going through the roof as a result of the Chancellor’s national insurance increases, making it more difficult to employ people at a moment when unemployment is rising and AI is transforming our economy. We are a 90% to 95% service-based economy, and one of the most exposed economies in the western world to AI—just the moment to increase the cost of employing people. Look at small businesses like pubs, being battered by increases in business rates and every single cost. On every measure where the Government have tried to do something, they have made things worse.