The Chancellor is piling up debt, draining growth with punitive taxes, and running down the nation’s wealth. In the last financial year the UK borrowed a staggering £148billion as the nation’s finances spiral out of control.
Instead of cutting expenditure, Reeves loaded on £40billion of tax rises in her first Budget and borrowed another £30billion on top. The result is weaker growth, a debt spiralling past £3trillion and a deficit that keeps widening.
Across 2024/25, the fiscal deficit rose from 4.8% to 5.3% of GDP. Taxes already swallow 37.7% of national income, a post-war high, and will climb even higher after her next Budget.
With Labour MPs blocking any meaningful spending restraint, the outcome is clear: taxes will soar, growth will slow and borrowing will climb and climb.
We’re heading for a fiscal and social disaster. One country is already there, to show us what that looks like. Scotland.
Scotland’s finances, revealed last week in the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland report, are in a deplorable state.
The country’s deficit widened to 11.6% of GDP in 2024/25, more than double the UK figure. Strip out North Sea oil and gas revenues, and it’s 14.3%.
Spending jumped 5.6% to £117.6billion, while revenues grew just 1.5% to £91.4billion. Officials admitted “Scottish revenue is growing more slowly and Scottish expenditure growing more quickly than the UK.”
Scottish taxpayers already pay higher income rates than those in England, and the government spends around £2,700 more per head than the UK average.
As Scottish secretary Ian Murray noted, “people in Scotland will rightly expect to see better outcomes” from this generosity.
They aren’t getting them. Scotland spends a massive 52% of GDP on public services, well above the UK average of 44.4%. Yet the outcomes are WORSE.
Scottish NHS waiting lists are longer, social care weaker, life expectancy shorter and its once-admired education system is in disarray.
Scottish pupils are plunging down the educational rankings, while English students have been climbing.
Even the left-wing Guardian knows who’s to blame, writing in 2023: “The Scottish decline has happened on the watch of the self-styled progressive SNP”.
Scottish schools spend more per pupil, class sizes are smaller and the results are far worse. We can now expect the same in England, as Labour’s left-wing education secretary Bridget Phillipson unleashes the progressives on its education system too.
Labour is now making a bad situation worse for Scotland, as Ed Miliband’s net zero charge destroys thousands of well-paid jobs and billions in revenue.
I take no pleasure in pointing this out. It would be far better if Scotland was a beacon, as its education system once was, showing the rest of the UK how to combine fairness with success.
Instead it shows how progressive policies fail, despite their apparent good intentions.
Tragically, Labour won’t learn the right lessons from this. Instead, Reeves is rolling out Scotland’s failing tax-and-spend model across England, dragging us all down together.
