Charlie Maynard

They are interested in what costs them money, and their mortgages are more expensive because of the decisions the Conservatives took three years ago—[Interruption.] Well, read the Financial Times. Moving on, I suggest that the digital services tax is another way we should be looking at to raise revenues. We would increase it from 2% to 10%, which would raise roughly £4 billion a year and get some of the biggest and wealthiest corporations in the world to finally contribute their fair share of tax here in the UK. We would also increase gambling taxes, because gambling really beggars some of the most vulnerable in society. Of course, the biggest one of all is that we should rejoin the customs union with the EU. Nobody voted to leave the customs union, but we are now in a market that is more than seven times smaller than the one we used to be in. As somebody who founded and ran a business for 24 years, I know that that hurts. It has done huge damage to small, medium-sized and big businesses and we are living with that loss. The quickest thing we could do is to negotiate a new, bespoke customs union with the EU. This would unleash the potential of British business. With every month and year that goes by, it becomes clearer just how economically damaging the previous Government’s Brexit deal has been. The OBR has forecast that it will harm economic growth, reducing long-term GDP by 4%. However, according to Frontier Economics, a much closer trading relationship with Europe—not even a customs union—could boost UK GDP by 2.2%. These are enormous numbers, so when we are looking around for solutions, there is one right in front of us. It stands to reason that a new customs union would probably raise more than £25 billion a year for the Exchequer. There it is. Grab it, please. With the autumn Budget just two weeks away, the Liberal Democrats’ message to the Chancellor is clear. Instead of asking hard-working households and struggling small businesses to pay even more tax, she must take growth seriously and repair our broken trading relationship with Europe.