This is a terrible Budget from a busted-flush Government. We have heard from the other side, “Give them another chance—the new Tory dynamic duo of Rishi and Jezza.”
They certainly talk the talk on growth, debt, inflation and the NHS, but do they walk the walk? The answer is no.
We have seen stagnant growth for 13 years, with no real prospect of it being any better than the worst in the G7 in the year to come. Let us compare that with what happened under a Labour Government. In 10 years we saw the economy grow by 40%, and we used the money to double investment in health and education and lift a million children and a million pensioners out of poverty. With that level of growth—that trend growth—we would have been £11,000 better off in terms of average wages. The Prime Minister says “That’s not my fault”, but during much of the time during which we have seen this decay and mismanagement, he was the Chancellor.
What about debt? Since the last Labour Government, debt as a share of the economy has doubled from 45% of the economy to 90%. That is an appalling record, and an indictment of this Government’s failed austerity platform. As for inflation, the Government’s ambition is to halve it from 10% to 5%. According to the forecasts it will be 3%, so it should not be that difficult. People seem to think this will reduce prices. Obviously, if inflation is 10% and then becomes 5%, prices will have gone up by 15%; and if the Government are offering workers at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Swansea 2%—in fact, a 13% pay cut—it is no wonder that they are on strike. This Government are busy causing strikes left, right and centre. If the RMT’s original bid of 7%, from before it went on strike, had been accepted, we would not be in the position where now the workers are—deservedly, in fact—getting 14%. We have had this disruption and chaos because of Tory mismanagement, because the Government will not negotiate. They just create strikes.
We are told that we have to live within our means. That is all very well for the Chancellor, who is a millionaire, or indeed for the Prime Minister, who is a billionaire. He has his hedge fund Theleme, which appreciated from £7 billion to £39 billion after the Government decided to buy the Moderna vaccine as recommended by the then Health Secretary, who has since made his money in the jungle.
What about waiting lists? We have waiting lists of 7 million people—are we going to get those down under this Government? We know that the cost of treating someone with low nourishment is something like £7,000 compared with £2,000 for someone who is properly fed, yet in Britain today one in four people are in food poverty. The inequality created by this Government is making the health service worse, not better, and the billion pound that they have put into pension fund tax relief will not make it better. The workers are being blamed, of course, for inciting pay demands, but wage growth is in fact down now, year on year, from 6% to 5.7%, at a time when inflation is well over that.
Who else is going to pay? Of course, homeowners have to pay. They have to help bring down inflation. How? By bringing down the price of houses by 8%. So new homeowners will see mortgage rates double or triple from 2% to 6% at a time when the value of their houses is going down—and they are supposed to be the growth creators of the future. The Bank of England’s base rate has gone from 0.1% in November 2021 to 4% now. The economy has gone out of control under Tory mismanagement.
And what about businesses? The Government talk about businesses, but we now have record insolvencies. They are up 30% since 2020. Material prices and energy prices are going up, borrowing costs are going up and demand is weak, so businesses are struggling.
We have heard about R&D in this debate, and as I have mentioned, in Wales 1,000 university staff at the cutting edge of developing green growth initiatives are being sacked because the promise of us getting “not a penny less” after the withdrawal of the EU structural funding has been broken by this Government. We are talking about losing innovative projects to turn waste plastic into nanocarbon tubes for electric vehicles. We are talking about converting steel slag heaps back into raw materials such as iron ore. We are talking about work with Tata Steel on cladding for homes that stores solar energy as well as absorbing it. On infrastructure, Wales has had just a 1.5% share of rail enhancement for decades for 5% of the population—we are not even getting our 5% for HS2.
There has been profiteering—we have seen the oil companies and the retail companies making profits out of the Ukraine war and the pandemic respectively, and we have seen natural monopolies such as the water companies profiteering. It is not good enough. The Tories are saying, “Trust us again”, even after the inflation, after the debt, after the lack of growth, after one in four have been living in poverty and after a 15% cut in trade. No, no, no! We want a stronger, fairer, greener future, and that will only come with a Labour Government. Let us have an election, put the country out of its misery and build a better future with the Labour party.