Dave Doogan

I thank the right hon. Member for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North (Liam Byrne) for a fascinating lecture on amnesia—it was dripping with irony given his last role in government. I wish to congratulate the Chancellor on delivering what is almost certainly her final Budget. There is no conceivable way—not politically and certainly not economically—she can remain in post for a further year. Businesses, workers, bill payers, farmers, hospices, industry and the public sector cannot endure another cycle of this Chancellor. It has been just over a year since she stood at the Dispatch Box, delivered her first Budget and boasted that she had made the “right choices”—if anyone outside the real economy believed that, we would not be in this situation right now. She promised to “restore stability to our public finances” and to “drive growth right across our country.”—[Official Report, 30 October 2024; Vol. 755, c. 828.] She told us that growth would be her central Budget mission. However, last month the IMF forecast that the UK will have the lowest per-capita growth in the G7 next year at just 0.5%, compared with the 1.4% average for advanced economies. Labour promised to turn the page on high food prices, but households see food inflation running out of control—it hit 4.9% last month. The Chancellor promised more jobs to tackle poverty, but unemployment hit 5% this month—its highest level since the pandemic—while poverty is at record levels. Government borrowing stands at a five-year high—£17.4 billion for October alone—and Labour is spending double the defence budget every year just to service the UK’s chronic national debt. The OECD has downgraded the UK’s economic prospects, singling out the Chancellor’s policies as exposing the economy to “significant downside risk”. That gloomy prognosis is not borne out only in the SNP’s analysis; just listen to the Chancellor. She has spent the past 18 months insisting that the economy is in a terrible state, while blaming everyone and everything except herself, and misunderstanding what negativity her musings signal to investor confidence. It is as if she forgets that she is the Chancellor, as yet another stream of consciousness resonates—invariably negatively—around the economy. She has blamed the black hole—yes, the one that the SNP told Labour about before the election, and which she pretended only to discover after getting into No. 11. She has blamed the markets for their focus on her fiscal rules—you could not make it up—and she has blamed Brexit, despite having herself voted to trigger article 50. However, this is not just about the fundamental economic incompetence of the Chancellor, nor just about Labour’s inheritance, which, while bad, was not the cause of this malaise. This crisis remains a product the Chancellor’s catastrophic decisions, and she will own them, just as she will own Labour’s compound fiscal bonfire. She is the in the frame for one of the most chaotic preludes to any Budget in living memory. Andy Haldane, former chief economist of the Bank of England, called it a “circus” of speculation around the Budget. The endless leaks, U-turns and media trails created panic in the economy, which, according to Mr Haldane, “without any shadow of a doubt” contributed to weaker than expected economic growth in the UK. There is nothing meaningful in the Budget on energy. The measures on energy bills are a start, but they do not fulfil Labour’s election promise to reduce bills by £300. Bills are set to rise in January and again in April; £150 off energy bills will still leave the Labour party in a debit of £87 a year on its commitment at the election.