Budget Resolutions

Julian Knight Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Julian Knight (Solihull) (Ind)]

I am conscious of time, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I will not be giving way in this short speech. As someone who passionately believes in a free market and a small state, I find the national debt figures in this Budget truly appalling. Let us be clear: we have gone from a position where our national debt figure was 37% just prior to the financial crisis to one where it is close to 100% today. That is a two and a half times increase, most of which has come on a Conservative majority Government’s watch—of all things! There have been tribulations, but there have also been huge missteps since 2010. That means that we have seen an increase in national debt equivalent to that of the first two years of the second world war, when we were fighting for our very lives against the Nazis; no one can say that anything in this period remotely approaches that. In the 1960s and 1970s, Governments of the day had an excuse: they were still recovering from the economic dislocation of the second world war. We have no excuse for this appalling financial mismanagement, apart from our indolence and lack of political will.

What has gone wrong? I would set a lot of the blame at the door of George Osborne and the public school, dyed-in-the-wool establishment clique who run the modern-day Conservative party. In 2010 and 2015, we had huge opportunities to reset the relationship between the state, the individual and businesses, which are the only means of growing the tax base in this economy. So-called “austerity” was nothing more than a reduced increase in government expenditure. Government should have been made slimmer and fitter, and supply-side economics should have been the core of everything we did. Instead, we had George Osborne talking about parking the tanks on Labour's lawn—if we look at the Ipsos polling, we must ask: how has that worked out?

The second reason we are in the state we are in is that we have failed to grasp the opportunities of Brexit. It should have been an opportunity to deregulate en masse, to make our economy fitter and stronger and to out-compete the Europeans. Instead, our very first move post-Brexit was to impose VAT on tourists, which has been devastatingly counterproductive. It is just an example of the way in which we have failed on Brexit. We have lost and we have shown absolutely no will to grasp those opportunities. If we are going to support Brexit, we have to do it properly. That is the only way to have done it, if we believed in it; we have failed in our will.

As a nation, as the borrowing figures show—this is in addition to the fiscal and monetary policy—we are addicted to debt and printing money in order to not face the hard choices, which could be golden opportunities. As a result, this country’s finances are more vulnerable than they have ever been. We are no longer part of the European financial ecosystem—we are alone. All we are doing is borrowing more and paying ourselves more, for producing less. Unless the supply side is properly tackled by a bold Government, I can see this nation being back at the door of the International Monetary Fund, just like it was in 1976. Saying that we are not as bad as the Italians is a joke. This Budget was supposed to be, “Do or die”, but from looking at the documents and the wider polling, we see that it is more, “Not do and then, unfortunately, we die”. The crying shame is that at least Blair had to work for his landslide.

Finally, I reflect on my last words in this place before I chose to recuse myself voluntarily. They were:

“frankly…I have had enough.”—[Official Report, 5 December 2022; Vol. 724, c. 57.]

I have been speaking to the British people on the doorsteps and talking to my constituents, and I am sorry to say that that is precisely the verdict that will be delivered on the Government in the very near future.