Contribution
This is Labour’s third Budget in office, this time with a new Chancellor. I welcome the right hon. Gentleman to his place. I believe there is a term in rugby called a hospital pass, which sums up the inheritance he received from his predecessor, the right hon. Member for Leeds West and Pudsey (Rachel Reeves). Last year, she gave us the Budget for “Benefits Street”; I said that it would be her last Budget, and I was right. The Chancellor may want to blame external events, but Labour’s last two Budgets weakened our economy before any wars. He has got a big job to do cleaning up her mess, and this Budget fails to do it.
The Chancellor is giving this Budget at a time of great economic danger. We are spending more on debt interest than on the Army and schools combined. The rate of interest we pay on our debts is higher than that in Greece, Latvia, Slovakia and even the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Next year, under Labour, the tax burden will be the highest in our country’s history, and our benefits bill is going up by tens of billions of pounds because this Government have put welfare first. We are overspent, overborrowed, overtaxed and drowning in an out-of-control welfare system, and this is the Chancellor’s answer? It is simply not enough—not good enough, not strong enough, and not bold enough.
Last week, the Government published their resilience plan. I am afraid that three days of baked beans and a wind-up radio are not going to save us. Labour’s Britain has no resilience. There is no household resilience, because families are struggling to make ends meet. There is no fiscal resilience, because we are borrowing just to pay the interest on our debt. There is no economic resilience, because businesses have been taxed so much that they are closing down and shedding jobs, and there is no national resilience, because we are not ready to meet the security threats of today—certainly not after that speech. We all know why the Chancellor has delayed until tomorrow difficult decisions that he should have taken today. It is because the Prime Minister wants to keep the option of an early general election open, putting his party’s interests before the country’s.
There are, however, some things in this Budget that I welcome. Some of the Chancellor’s colleagues—the Deputy Prime Minister, the Defence Secretary and the Energy Secretary—were calling on him to increase capital gains tax. I thank him for ignoring them—they were wrong. Tens of thousands of wealth creators have already fled Labour’s Britain, and if he had listened to his colleagues’ bonkers ideas, many more would be heading for the departure lounge. I am also glad that he has broken Labour’s manifesto pledge on the minimum wage for young people; that pledge was wrong, and breaking it is the right thing to do to help young people get jobs.
I welcome the Chancellor’s U-turn on ISAs. He is reversing his predecessor’s raid on ISAs—thank you—but his new tax on savers will penalise the prudent and all those people who have done the right thing. I am glad that he has agreed with our campaign on the previous Chancellor’s fuel duty rise. Motorists will be pleased—that rise would have inflicted real pain, especially while petrol prices are so high—but those prices will go up in July. Why? We froze fuel duty for 14 years; Labour can do better than that.
I know that Labour MPs probably did not like those bits of the Budget, but can I take a moment to say to the right hon. Gentleman that I have been appalled to see the brutal briefing about him from his own side in this week’s papers? One Labour MP called him “slow”. “A dud.”
“Visibly out of his depth”,
said another. [Interruption.] We have all read it. They are not my words—they are Labour MPs’ words. One of them said it, and another came in after, but I can assure the Chancellor that he will not be hearing that kind of language from Conservative MPs today. With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Most people in the country listening to the right hon. Gentleman’s Budget will be thinking to themselves, “Is that it? Really, is that it?” The Prime Minister came in promising to reverse “40 years of neoliberalism”; instead, we got 4p off gherkins. Unfortunately, just like every other Labour Budget, the headline story is the same: more borrowing, more tax rises and—surprise, surprise—more money on benefits. This Budget does not come close to meeting the moment.
Last week, Labour MPs were asking for a Budget that did no harm. That shows how little ambition they have for this country. Let me tell them: the harm has already been done. Not facing up to the tough decisions we need to take is itself an act of immense harm. Many Labour MPs do not understand that our national debt is now more than £100,000 for every household in this country. They do not understand why it is a problem that a quarter of all working-age adults are now claiming some form of benefits. They do not understand that if Russia launches an attack on NATO in the next three years, as the Government’s own intelligence suggests, we will be at war without the means to properly defend ourselves. [Interruption.]