Sir John Hayes

G. K. Chesterton said: “It is human to err; and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred.” Yesterday’s Budget brought into stark relief the fact that the Chancellor and this Government have erred and, worse, are in denial about their error. The UK faces a twin-pronged fiscal crisis. Public debt is at around 100% of GDP and rising, with debt interest making up about three quarters of the deficit. Public spending, at close to 45% of GDP, is near to a high in the post-war years. Much of that failure is systemic—Governments of all colours have failed to address some fundamental macroeconomic challenges—but yesterday’s Budget not only failed to fix that entrenched mess, but did not even acknowledge that it is happening. As the global liberal order decays, we face global economic challenges on a scale we have not seen for 100 years. Artificial intelligence risks transforming the jobs market. A recent study by the National Foundation for Educational Research forecast that up to 3 million jobs could disappear by 2035. Employment in sales and customer service occupations has fallen by more than 10% since 2021, and around 12 million people in England currently work in occupations deemed to be in decline. That requires Government to play a role. Government can be a force for good. This House took far too long to recognise the damage that would be done by the internet, and finally, when those horrors were obvious, it legislated. We need to restrict AI where it does similar damage, rather than indulging this naive faith in technological change at all costs. The old, comforting bourgeois assumptions about the benign nature of globalisation and the faith in technological change risk endangering many of the jobs I have described, and the purpose and pride they fuel. The US President was right to impose tariffs on cheap goods that were destroying vital US industries. In response, China is dumping surplus goods in Europe, and it has been estimated that 3 million industrial jobs in the EU are at risk from that surge of subsidised imported goods. In response to these existential threats, the Government seem frozen in time. Too much of the establishment remains wedded to dysfunctional orthodoxies. We are playing by the rules of the game when the important players have left the table. We cannot continue to proselytise for unbridled free trade when the two biggest economies in the world, China and America, have given up on it. We have to protect those industries that are critical to our national economic interests, building greater economic resilience by reindustrialising and by manufacturing again, so ensuring that more of what we consume is made here in Britain, with the jobs, skills and reassurance that provides. An economy can nourish communal health, but it cannot do so in a world that is wedded to globalised, multinational, corporate companies that are careless of the difference they make to communities such as mine in Lincolnshire and those across the country. Here in Britain, and across the western world, living standards are stagnating, productivity growth has all but disappeared, and the state grows ever bigger in the face of rising poverty and worklessness. Why, then, does the political class continue to profess a blind faith in an economic model that has delivered record levels of state dependency? The assumption that little can be done to reverse the inevitable process of industrial decline is simply wrong, as the experience of the United States suggests. Once we tune out the noise surrounding President Trump’s on-and-off tariffs, we can hear the faint stirrings of industrial revival. A detailed study of the impact of tariffs during the President’s first term found that once the pre-existing decline in manufacturing employment was accounted for, tariffs contributed to rising employment in areas with a large presence of protected industries. Neither did consumer prices surge in the United States, despite the predictions of liberal economists. Just imagine the potential benefits of a consistent and coherent trade policy that puts the needs of British industry first.