Autumn Budget 2024

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to be able to welcome, with that wonderful maiden speech, my new noble friend Lord Booth-Smith. It is also a pleasure, if I may say so, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady. I understand that it may have been her birthday over the weekend. I have a birthday in a couple of days too, so at least we Scorpios have this to share even if we share nothing else in the Chamber today. I thought some of our Budgets over the years were pretty rubbish.

I went to bed last night counting the various definitions the Government offered about what a worker is. I had reached 23 before I fell fast asleep, so I guess I missed a dozen or more. Labour is, of course, the party of the workers, for the workers—up the workers. The trouble is, there are going to be fewer workers as a result of this Budget. You cannot raise £40 billion without hammering ordinary people. The increase in national insurance will be passed on to employees, not matter what the Chancellor has offered. In ordinary English that means lower pay, slower hiring, fewer jobs and fewer workers. It is sad, it is unintended—I am sure—but it is inevitable.

This is a Government of change. They have said that, and perhaps they will change this. After all, they changed their chief of staff pretty quickly. Did your Lordships notice, by the way, that they changed their policy on freeports? Two days before the Budget, the Prime Minister announced that they would create five new freeports. I thought that was rather a good idea, but then that policy changed too—no new freeports at all. A No. 10 official explained what had happened. They had misread the email from next door. It was, in his words, “a total cock-up”. No change there, then. There will be no flood of exports as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, wanted—not from those non-existent free ports.

Instead, noble Lords may have noticed that Labour has been concentrating on exporting dozens and dozens of advisers across the Atlantic to help its relentless battle against Donald Trump—a masterstroke. Then there is the Foreign Secretary’s view that President Trump, the next leader of our biggest export market and trading partner, is a “neo-Nazi … sociopath”. It is a fascinating negotiating tactic.

This Budget is an attack on workers. You cannot live, work, farm, go to the shops or even die without getting clobbered, unless of course you happen to be a train driver. It is not just the farmers, factory owners, service industry and supermarkets. Our charities, GPs, care homes, schools and even hospices are all being beaten under Labour’s national insurance hammer. Some workers are luckier than others. Some can find a helpful handout: the odd football ticket, an occasional concert ticket, even a friendly local clothes bank. That was something else that was changed, of course, once it all became public—another policy that, how can I put it, seems to have been tailored swiftly to the moment.

In its entire history the Labour Party has never been further from real workers than it is right now, and it must be our ambition on this side of the House to fill that gap between now and the next election. To govern is to choose, and the Chancellor has chosen badly. It is a Budget that will hit workers. This is another Labour Government who will leave office with unemployment higher than when they came in. The other day the Chancellor said that this is a Budget she does not want to repeat. I commend the Chancellor’s conclusion.