It hurts my ears. Plus it also confirms my suspicions that they don’t know what they’re doing. Because they keep banging on about generating economic growth, while doing everything they can to destroy it.
Yesterday, Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey made it clear just how much damage Labour’s Budget has done.
Bailey said the economy is stagnating as businesses respond to Reeves’ £40billion tax onslaught by raising prices and cutting jobs.
The economy was going “gangbusters” in the first half of the year but Bailey says he now expects “zero growth” in the final quarter of the year.
Personally, I think he’s being optimistic. The economy shrank in October and November. If it shrinks again in December, we’ll be halfway to a recession.
When grilled on this, Starmer told MPs: “One of the biggest mistakes, I think, of the last 14 years was the idea that everything could be fixed by Christmas. It can’t.”
That’s odd, because it can be destroyed by Christmas, as Starmer has shown.
When Labour took charge we had the fastest growth in the G7. Now it’s the second lowest, marginally ahead of Italy.
It got worse.
Starmer defended the Budget, arguing that tax rises were necessary to stabilise the economy. “I’m strongly of the view that one of the things that’s held back growth is the fact that we haven’t had a stable economy.”
That isn’t a “strong” view. It’s a meaningless view. It makes no sense.
Especially since the Budget has brought only instability, as every UK business to decide whether to respond by hiking prices or firing staff.
Rising inflation, falling growth, mounting job losses and striking farmers aren’t signs of stability either. The forecasts are in and they’re horrible.
Yet Starmer bizarrely insisted that Britain would defy them saying: “The forecasters are predicting on the back of the circumstances as they now are.”
That’s right, Sir Keir, that’s what forecasters do. And the circumstances as they are now are horrible.
Starmer then informed us that forecasters are “not able to take yet into account things that haven’t happened”.
That’s the thing with forecasts, Sir Keir. They’re about the future. which can be reasonably described as “things that haven’t happened”.
Like the first answer, this wasn’t an answer at all.
So what about our highly qualified chancellor? This is where things get really horrible.
Yesterday, she said: “We want to put more money in the pockets of working people, but that is only possible if inflation is stable and I fully back the Bank of England to achieve that.”
But inflation isn’t stable. It’s going up as a direct response to the actions she’s taken. Rather than backing the Bank of England, she’s sabotaged it.
Reeves added that improving living standards is her number one focus and “why I chose to protect working people’s pay slips from tax rises, froze fuel duty and increased the national living wage”.
Yet living standards are falling again, directly thanks to her decisions.
And while it’s true the freezing fuel duty and increasing the living wage will help, she hasn’t protected working people’s payslips from tax rises at all.
Quite the reverse.
The independent Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that 80% of her employer’s national insurance hike will be passed onto workers in the form of lower wages and 20% to consumers via higher prices.
Pretty much everything Starmer and Reeves have done has sunk the growth and stability they claim to crave. No wonder they’re talking nonsense. It’s the only way to defend their nonsense policies.
