Budget Resolutions

Jeevun Sandher Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dr Jeevun Sandher (Loughborough) (Lab)]

Today’s Budget is when we start to turn this country around, rebuild prosperity and rekindle the belief that things can get better. With this Budget, we begin to rebuild hope. I became an economist and then a Member of Parliament to help set Budgets in this Chamber, because what we spend, tax and invest determines our future. In my teenage years, I had the privilege of growing up under a Labour Government, and I saw great Labour Chancellors, from this Dispatch Box, deliver Budgets that built a better Britain—a Britain where wages grew, where hospitals were built and where poverty fell. More than that, I saw a Budget and the creation of a country where hope and graft were rewarded, renewed and refreshed by a Labour Government who delivered on their promises.

But then I became an adult, and I grew up under a Conservative Government: a Government who cut investment and created a no-growth economy with the worst fall in wages since Napoleonic times; who cut home insulation and blocked clean energy, leaving us dependent on fossil fuels supplied by dictators like Putin; who blocked house building so that young people in my generation saw house prices soar while their wages only fell; and who cut defence and weakened our armed forces. We on the Government Benches understand that amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics. That is what this Conservative Government left us with and gave us for my entire adult life—until now.

Winning the last election means that this Labour Government can rebuild our nation’s prosperity and rebuild a country where wages rise and things do get better, with investment in our schools so that kids can learn more today and earn more tomorrow, investment in our NHS so that temporary illnesses do not stop us from working permanently, investment in clean energy so that we get bills down for good, investment in our police so that we can go to the shops without fear—and investment in homes for my generation; mum and dad, we love you, but it’s time for the kids to move out.

Rebuilding this nation brick by brick is hard and patient work. We will not notice how each brick changes this country, as we do not notice the inches that make up a mile, but slowly, surely, certainly, as we invest in this nation, we will create a more prosperous Britain, where each of us can and will thrive. Some of us, including me, will measure that progress in numbers and graphs, but what we create will be defined by so much more: a country defined by hope and pride, where tomorrow is better than today; and a country built by a Labour Government upon Budgets delivered by a Labour Chancellor.