Economic Update

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Hunt]

I absolutely do, and I think that there are many economists, such as Paul Johnson, who would say that if we really want the productivity, levels of wealth and prosperity of places such as Germany and Singapore, the skills gap is the biggest gap that we have. It is scandalous that for decades Governments from all parts of the House have not been able to deal with the fact that about 100,000 people leave school every year unable to read. These are important issues, but I want to be honest: this is not something that the Government or I can address in the next two weeks, but it is absolutely something that we will have to come back to.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

For all the hand-wringing and soft soap, I am afraid that I do not think that this Chancellor is any better than the last one. [Interruption.] Well, he has been present at all the failures over the past 12 years: the failure to invest in the NHS; the failure to make sure that we had personal protective equipment in time for a pandemic; the failure to deal properly with the invasion of Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. In all those things, he has been at the scene of the crime. The biggest problem is that, as a result of 12 years of Tory economics, we will have the highest tax take in our history and still the highest borrowing in our history and probably the largest tax cuts in our history. Why is this the only major economy in the world that has not yet grown to the level that it occupied before the pandemic?

[Jeremy Hunt]

I have a lot of respect for the hon. Gentleman as a great parliamentarian, but will he allow me to say that there is not really a polite word to describe the nonsense that he has just uttered? We inherited the worst financial crisis since the second world war from his party, and since then, we have become the third-fastest growing country in the G7. He talked about the NHS, which had a £20 billion increase in funding on my watch—40,000 more doctors, nurses and other clinicians—and there is more to come if we take the difficult decisions to grow our economy that his party always opposes.