Budget Resolutions

Debate between Graham Stuart and Wendy Morton

Wednesday 6th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the Budget debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh) on making her maiden speech, and wish her well.

Last Wednesday, we sat in this Chamber to listen to the Chancellor’s Budget of broken promises, and as each day has gone by, we have witnessed the mask slip from this Labour Government. Even before the Budget, we saw the Chancellor start to set out her stall with the callous cutting of the winter fuel allowance, and just this week Labour has attacked students with a monumental hike in tuition fees—a tax on aspiration and on young people and their hard-working families. As the week has gone by, we have seen the Budget unravel as manifesto promise after promise has been broken. I have constituents —from pensioners and farmers to businesses, charities, community organisations, GPs and many more—coming to me with anxiety and worries.

My local farmers are devastated. Promises made to them have been broken with no consultation, giving them no opportunity to plan. The Government have shown that they are no friend of the farmer, the producer of our food and the guardian of our countryside. Farmers have gone from food heroes during covid to being abandoned in the cold. The Government seem to have failed to grasp that family farms are not only farms; they are much more. Family farmers invest in their businesses for the long term, for the next generation. The Government need to keep their promises, reverse the changes to agricultural property relief and business property relief, and abolish what I and others now term the family farm tax.

[Graham Stuart]

I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said that honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the way that this Government are serially breaking all the promises they made during the election is corrosive for our politics?

[Wendy Morton]

Absolutely. Small businesses also face a tax on aspiration and entrepreneurship. Inheritance tax will be the death of enterprise. The increases to employer national insurance and the minimum wage will stymie growth and investment. Inflation looks set to be higher than growth under the Chancellor’s measures. In fact, far from this being a Budget for growth, the measures set out by the Chancellor will be a hindrance.

If we put all this together, who does it hit? Working people. Even the Chief Secretary to the Treasury admitted that on TV. Think, too, of the jobs for working people that will be lost, or never even created, thanks to the Budget of broken promises. This is a Budget that punishes pensioners, destroys our countryside, chases after our motorists, denies working families and their children choice over education, and saddles young people with more student debt. It is a Budget about ever-increasing spending, ever-higher taxes and an ever-expanding state. Prosperity has never been the result of the state handing out more taxpayer money; it has come from empowering businesses, entrepreneurs and families, and it is about enabling opportunity.

Once upon a time, Labour would have been thought of as the party of working people, but not now. Far from fixing the foundations, it is digging an even bigger hole.