King’s Speech

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, I listened with great interest to the many excellent speeches in this debate and I commend, in particular, my noble friends Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Lord Moynihan of Chelsea for their outstanding contributions.

However, it is to another speech that I return, because I have been turning it over in my mind: the speech on 5 July 2024 that the Prime Minister gave when he stood on Downing Street and delivered his first statement in office. If noble Lords cannot recall it word for word, I do not blame them—the reset button has been hit many times since then. In that first address as Prime Minister to the British people, the current resident of 10 Downing Street—or at least he was when I checked a few moments ago—set out his agenda for the country. When I reread those words, it dawned on me that he made barely any mention of the economy. Given how the Government have performed over the 678 days since, that oversight now makes perfect sense.

Under Labour, the British economy is like a mirror reflecting the worst instincts of the Prime Minister: it is slow to move, overly biased towards an outdated rulebook and now dangerously close to implosion. As noble Lords have reminded us throughout this debate, since 2024, growth has been relentlessly flat, and the IMF has now downgraded the UK’s growth forecast to 0.8%, which is the largest downgrade in the G7—and all this despite the Government claiming that growth would be its watchword and its number one priority. The Prime Minister himself once famously said, “Growth is the answer”, but under this Government it has become only an ever more pressing question.

Hard-working people across the country today see Westminster at its worst. The civil war consuming the Labour Party is more than a story in this postcode district. Outside these confines, Labour chaos is causing real damage to what was already a struggling and fragile economy. Among 6 am Britain—the strivers and risk-takers who build businesses, create jobs and strive for a better life for themselves and their families—they hoped for answers from the gracious Speech, but, again, it has transpired that the Government have nothing to say to them.

The situation is at breaking point for my own generation. Under this Government, unemployment has increased and the OBR says that it will get worse. For young people, the unemployment rate is now a scandalous 15.8%, up 2.4% since Labour came to office. My contribution to this debate is on behalf of the 1 million young people not in work, education or training, a statistic now worse than that of Spain or Greece—the economies that we used to point to as the international high watermark of youth unemployment. The crippling rise in employers’ NICs stole their entry-level jobs. The very opportunity that noble Ministers refer to as one that this Government have tried to create is in fact being crushed by them. That means no first job on the high street to get your working life off the ground, no casual work to fit around your studies and too few high-quality apprenticeships—for example, for families who simply cannot afford university education.

The ITEM Club forecasts that the labour market will weaken significantly this year, and the British Chambers of Commerce finds that 41% of businesses are worried about business rates, up 7% on last year. It is no surprise to me at all that business investment is down, decreasing by 2.5% in the last quarter of 2025.

As we know, on the macro side, borrowing costs are surging: this Government are paying £305 million a day just to service the cost of debt interest. This week, gilts hit an 18-year high thanks to No. 10’s instability, higher than in any other G7 country—all this from the party that told the electorate that

“the grown-ups are back in charge”.

When he was elected, they called the Prime Minister “Mr Rules”, but as he reaches the end of his time in office, we can say only that he is “Mr Chaos”. What is the answer presented by the Government in the gracious Speech? What is the plan set out today? It is to waste endless hours of parliamentary time in this forthcoming Session on unwanted EU integration, turning away from the dynamic and high-growth partner economies that are traditionally strengthened by their trade with the UK and back to the outmoded plans of the past.

I urge Ministers to intercede with their colleagues in the other place and ask them to bring an end to the chaos and instability that we see today, to put jobs and prosperity first, to get the economy motoring and to let growth flower. If they do not, we can conclude only that the economic legacy of this Government will be the same as of every other Labour Administration in history: higher taxes, higher borrowing, higher unemployment and lower growth. Will it be the case that in the desk drawer in No. 11 there will be another note left behind saying, “I’m sorry, there is no money left”? If that is the case, we will be able to conclude only that, once more, Labour has done it again.