Budget Resolutions
Debate between Nigel Farage and Matt Western
Nigel Farage (Clacton) (Reform)
I think we have to give credit to the Chancellor for a Budget that, in political presentation, was very clever. The SNP has had an absolutely rotten day, and the decision to put money into potholes was clever. The fuel duty freeze is very welcome, especially for those living in rural parts of our country. But for me, the big one is of course the 1p off a pint off draught beer. I have worked out that it will save me over £1 a week, so I am particularly thrilled about that.
I sat listening to the numbers thinking that this Budget is economically illiterate. I do not know who is doing the sums—perhaps it is the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott)—but the sums do not work. The markets now agree with me, because just in the last couple of hours we have seen a very substantial spike in gilt yields. We are not yet quite back to the mini-Budget of 2022, but clearly people are saying that this is not going to work. Even more concerning, I suppose, is that the new head of the Office for Value for Money, David Goldstone, served for many years on the board of HS2, which I would suggest is the very opposite of value for money.
Nigel Farage
I have had plenty of jobs—well, apart from being in the European Parliament, which doesn’t really count, obviously.
What is dismal about this Budget is the growth forecast. If the ambition of our Chancellor is that in four years’ time growth should be 1.5%, that is very bad news for everybody, particularly because it takes no account of the rise in population that will happen through legal immigration. It basically means a rise of 0%. Nobody has even mentioned the fact that gross domestic product per capita—wealth per capita—has been falling consistently nearly every quarter for the past two years. The bigger our population becomes the poorer we are becoming, and we must wake up to that reality.
The big picture is that we are in decline. We are getting poorer. There is no £22 billion black hole—that is nonsense. It is £2.7 trillion. Our debt repayments are £90 billion a year, and from all the figures I have seen today, that will be worse in five years’ time than it is today. We need a complete change of culture. We need to start saying that success is a good thing, and making money is a great thing. People becoming rich is something we should encourage. We have to change our culture of work. There is this idea, “Oh yes, work from home, do a four-day week, get your work-life balance right”—well actually, why do we not say to young people that hard work is a good thing? Hard work is the only way that anybody succeeds individually, and the only way that we will have a chance as a country to turn any of this around.
Nigel Farage
No, please sit down—honestly, you’ve had a go.
We are in much deeper trouble than anybody on either Front Bench dares to admit. That is a reality we should all face. We have a Labour party that could not define what a woman is or what a working person is, and after today I am pretty convinced that it cannot define what economic growth is.