Bedford & Kempston Conservatives

Record taxes. Rising unemployment. And working people picking up the bill. New Prime Minister. New Chancellor. Same old Labour.

Is that it? @KemiBadenoch was right to question whether that was really all the Chancellor had managed to come up with at today's Budget. Taxes are at a record high. Unemployment is up. National debt is up. All under this Labour Government. Yet the Budget did nothing to change that. Taxes will remain at a record high, growth is expected to be down, borrowing will be higher every year of the forecast, debt will be up every year of the forecast, and living standards will be down. That is not the change we wanted to see from the new Chancellor. He's just following on from the Rachel Reeves disaster. We heard no plan whatsoever to cut welfare - Conservatives would cut the benefits bill by £36 billion. We heard no plan for funding 3 per cent of GDP on defence - Conservatives have a plan to fund it from reform Housing Benefit to reinstating the two-child benefit cap, so our Armed Forces have what they need to keep Britain safe. Andy Burnham proudly claimed you can’t have national security at the expense of social security. But what he and Labour MPs don’t understand is that you can’t have social security without national security. We heard no plan for action on the youth jobs emergency, instead the Chancellor is waiting for a review - Conservatives would halve employer National Insurance for under 25s, end the debt trap for Plan 2 student loans, cut the red tape for employers and create 100,000 new apprenticeships through our Apprenticeship Guarantee. There were a few positives to take. The Chancellor thankfully ignored calls from some of his Labour cabinet colleagues to increase capital gains tax, and he u-turned on Labour plans to cut the tax-free allowance for cash ISAs, keeping the annual limit at £20,000. This Budget was weak and a missed opportunity to get Britain back on track.