At the end of October, it’s a familiar sight for groups to dress up, gather outside front doors, and hold out their hands in hope. Which is not too dissimilar, now that I think of it, from the scene outside 11 Downing Street this week when the Chancellor held out the famous red box.
Before I turn to the contents of that box, it is worth acknowledging that the Chancellor has made history as the first woman to deliver a British Budget. I know that will mean a lot to many aspirational young women in our area and across the country, just like it did when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister forty-five years ago.
In this Halloween Budget there were some eye-catching treats – such as additional funding for the NHS – but this money must be put to good use and improve people’s lives here in Lincolnshire, especially when you consider where it came from. The Chancellor’s trick was to raise taxes and increase borrowing, relying on redefining pledges made in the Labour manifesto.
One of those pledges was not to raise taxes on working people, but this was the biggest tax raising budget in over 30 years, and we now face the highest tax burden in British history. The burden has been laid on British businesses, but working people will still pay through higher prices and lower wages. Meanwhile, tax changes for hard-working family farmers will make it harder for future generations to produce food from Lincolnshire’s fields.
Another key pledge was for debt to fall, but the Chancellor has redefined debt to allow nearly £140 billion in extra borrowing this Parliament. The cost of interest on our national debt is already over £100 billion a year, which is enough to more than double the amount we spend on education – so we are quite literally borrowing against our future.
While it is true that tax and debt levels were already too high, that was in response to the enormous costs of the pandemic and energy support. Those crises are now behind us, and we have had the strongest economic growth in the G7 with inflation back below 2%.
I am concerned that many of the Chancellor’s announcements will put the economic recovery Labour inherited at risk, by adding new burdens just as the old ones were lifting. But more than that, I am concerned because we live in an increasingly dangerous and unpredictable world. If we are taxing and borrowing even more as things get better, where does that leave us in the event of a future emergency?
If we are to be truly better off as a country, it is vital that every extra penny the Chancellor now spends out of higher taxes and more borrowing is used wisely and effectively. I have made it my mission to do all I can to provide constructive opposition to that end – this money is rightly yours and future generations’, not the Government’s, after all.
