For Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer, the chickens are coming home to roost. Last week, we found out the economy is shrinking. And now, growth has been downgraded even more – for both this year and next.
It is the entirely predictable outcome of their anti-business approach to government. Having talked down the UK economy, saddled the country with a disastrous £40billion tax rise and drowned businesses in a tidal wave of red tape, Labour have meted out a triple-whammy of economic damage to the UK and effectively crushed the spirit of enterprise.
They were warned what the outcome would be. It should be obvious to anyone that if you make it difficult and more expensive to do business and create employment, you end up with fewer jobs and lower growth. It really is that simply, but Labour simply do not get it.
Thanks to their job-destroying Employment Rights Bill, businesses will have to contend with hundreds of new regulations which will make it harder to hire people and easier for unions to obstruct them through waves of short-notice, low-threshold strikes.
And having hiked taxes to record highs and talked down the UK as a place to invest, this anaemic growth should come as no surprise.
This is a bizarre approach, especially as they have made growth their number-one mission. Monday’s grim economic news should be a wake-up call. But the Chancellor has her head in the sand.
She claims everything is fine, ploughing on with an ideological agenda whilst the economy suffers and families across the country pay the price.
Her comments bear increasingly no resemblance to reality.
When Labour came into Government, they insisted that they would only need one Budget a year.
But, because of Labour’s economic mismanagement, we are now the Chancellor to deliver an emergency Budget in eight days’ time.
Listening to Keir Starmer at PMQs last week, his message to the public seemed to be “you’ve never had it so good”.
But his selective use of statistics cannot mask the reality of life for many families across the country.
People are getting poorer. GDP per capita has been steadily getting worse ever since Keir Starmer moved into Number 10.
Labour transformed the fastest-growing economy in the G7 to one of the most sluggish. They blame everyone but themselves.
Global events, economic headwinds. But the excuses are wearing thin, and the British people are not fools.
Labour must change course for the sake of the country.
On Tuesday, we will give them the chance to mitigate some of the damage when Labour MPs vote on Conservative amendments to Labour’s jobs tax.
