Andrew Griffith

Let me make some progress, because this debate is about the whole Budget. There will be plenty of opportunities to talk about defence, which we can come back to. Let me give the Government some credit for some of the few positives in the Budget. The Chancellor was right to U-turn on his party’s manifesto commitment to equalise the youth rate of the minimum wage. One in six young people under this Government—shame on them—are looking for a job and cannot find one. Equalising the youth minimum wage would have made a desperately tough situation harder. He should have gone further and halved the jobs tax for young people as we would have done. The Chancellor was also right to ignore those on his Back Benches who wanted to raise capital gains tax. In fact, it was not just the Back Benchers; the Defence Secretary was also calling for that. Thank goodness the Chancellor did not listen to him. It would have meant many more wealth creators joining the thousands who have fled our country under Labour. The public were not asking for much from this Budget and yet even their lowest expectations have not been met. Ordinary people wanted the Government to get a grip on out of control welfare spending. They wanted a Budget that properly funded defence. They wanted the Government to tackle the deficit, with tax cuts for their families to be better off. That would have been real breathing space. Against all and any of those tests, the Budget has comprehensively failed. It could have been a moment when a Chancellor resolved to live within our means. Instead, this Government will have added—do they know the number?—more than £300 billion-worth of borrowing over the course of this Parliament. Borrowing is up in every single year of the forecast. The national debt now stands at the equivalent of £100,000 for every household and it is set to grow by a quarter in the next five years. Britain is walking along a fiscal cliff edge and the Government have decided that this is the moment to close their eyes. Yesterday, the OBR confirmed that the Government are spending £124 billion a year on interest alone—up £14 billion and more than the Government spend on defence, policing and prisons combined. That money goes straight out of the door to our creditors. It was so out of control that the Bank of England, in the run-up to this Budget, was forced to make an extraordinary £200 billion intervention to try to reduce the cost and still the 30-year gilt rates rose above 6%. It is not fair, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is not fair to our children or to their children. We cannot continue to kick the can down the road for future generations of taxpayers. Instead of getting a grip, the Chancellor doubled down. He repeated his predecessor’s mistakes and cut the fiscal headroom to just £15 billion, the equivalent of just three-and-a-half days of public spending. Is that recklessness why the Defence Secretary want us all to have three days’ worth of stockpiled food? The Chancellor said in his conference speech that “these levels of debt are an assault on our common sense, they are an affront to our values.” That was just a month ago, so what has changed? He is now raising debt in every single year of the forecast. A month ago, it was an affront to his values; now it is front and centre in his Budget. The Prime Minister may not care about the debt we hand on to the next generation, but he really ought to. And so should Labour’s faithful little helpers, the Liberal Democrats, who are so enraptured by Europhilia, so desperate to crawl back into the clutches of Brussels, that they have not noticed a glaring problem: the nation’s figures are so poor that we could not rejoin the EU even if we wanted to. EU rules say that a member country’s national debt should be under 60% of GDP, yet the UK is approaching 100%. The EU’s deficit limit is 3%, yet the UK’s is one-and-a-half times that. Despite all that debt, the Chancellor still has not found the money to properly fund 3% of GDP on defence. We welcome that the Government are finally funding their own defence investment plan, but it is not good enough.