Debate on the Address

Noah Law Excerpts

Wednesday 13th May 2026 Commons Chamber

[Dave Doogan]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight that issue, which is so important to many people across the UK but especially in the north of England, and in Liverpool in particular. But it is not just that. It is the way Labour rushed during the campaign to stand shoulder to shoulder with WASPI women before abandoning them when they got into office. It is about the family farm tax, which the Labour party expressly said before the election that it would not introduce but then got in and did exactly that. That was a gross betrayal of our agricultural industry and our rural communities.

The change to employer national insurance was self-evidently anti-industry, self-evidently inflationary and self-evidently a tax on jobs. It was going to have one potential outcome. The £25 billion that the Government said that it would bring in was complete fantasy; by the time they had compensated for the public sector, it was down to single figures of billions, and even that did not take into account the drag on the economy and the lower fiscal receipts as a result of that disastrous, self-defeating policy.

[Noah Law (St Austell and Newquay) (Lab)]

What would be the hon. Gentleman’s answer to filling that massive fiscal black hole that we were left with?

[Dave Doogan]

What the hon. Gentleman needs to understand is that countries grow their way out of these issues. Growth comes from economic investment in equipment and people, raising productivity and lowering economic inactivity and all those things that have risen under Labour, because Labour does not understand economics—never has, never will.

Before I move on, I want to focus on the real impact on real people. Unemployment is now at its highest level in five years. Unemployment across the UK is at 5.2%; thankfully, through the economic efforts of our SNP Scottish Government, it is at 4.1% in Scotland, although that is still far too high for our communities. Youth unemployment in the UK is at 15%. That is a catastrophe. The way young people enter the world of work dictates their relationship with employment for the rest of their lives, and that is catastrophically damaging for young people up and down these islands.

Youth unemployment is particularly acute in hospitality. Hospitality is a gateway industry for employment, but the Government are taxing it out of existence. People with a pub, a hotel or a restaurant now feel like unpaid tax collectors for this Labour Government.

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[David Davis (Goole and Pocklington) (Con)]

During the privileges debate, I told the House that I had hoped, a couple of years ago, that the Prime Minister would make a success of his new job. Unfortunately, this House is now debating against the backdrop of a Labour psychodrama, but that psychodrama would not have happened except for the fact that the Government have failed, and failed very clearly. In his now infamous speech, the Prime Minister said that he was going to undertake a reset. I don’t know about the Labour party, but the country certainly needs a reset. What he said, in describing his reset, was that he needed to “explain” things better. That is not a reset; that is a re-spin of what they are doing. We need a proper reset. The hon. Member for Hornsey and Friern Barnet (Catherine West) was exactly right when she said that Labour must be

“judged on actions and not just our words”.

As a number of people have said, including the new leader of the SNP group, the hon. Member for Angus and Perthshire Glens (Dave Doogan), Labour came into office promising that its No. 1 mission was economic growth. It was right to do so, because without growth we do not have the money to do anything else, yet the consequences of its own policies in the last couple of years have been that growth has been suppressed. The IMF has literally just reduced the UK’s growth forecast by half a percentage point. That is the largest reduction in the G7.

It is not just the Opposition who are concerned about growth. I recommend that the House reads the Labour Growth Group report called, “An Honest Day”, which is aimed directly at this problem. While I do not agree with everything in it, there are a lot of good ideas that the Government should have already taken on.

When Labour took over, inflation was bang on 2%—that is something it cannot claim was disguised in any way—and now it is 3.3%. Again, Labour and the Prime Minister will try to blame somebody else, and no doubt at the moment the blame is on the strait of Hormuz. That explains energy costs in the future; it does not explain the increases in food costs in the past, or indeed a number of other costs.

[Noah Law]

Will the right hon. Member give way?

[David Davis]

No, not for the moment.

Neither does it explain the increase in borrowing costs, which are higher than any other G7 country’s and virtually double Japan’s. That is nobody’s fault but the Chancellor’s, and the horrific consequences for our public finances have been laid out already by the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown).

The real brake is Labour’s own policies: high taxes, massively burdensome regulation, high business rates and high energy costs. What on earth do we expect from our businesses when we saddle the country with the most expensive energy in the developed world, or indeed with the national insurance increases that the hon. Member for Angus and Perthshire Glens mentioned?

[Noah Law]

What was the impact of the decision by the right hon. Gentleman’s Government to block onshore wind generation on energy costs?

[David Davis]

It is interesting, because the hon. Member’s Government and his Secretary of State have claimed, “All these green policies are reducing the cost of our energy. Not using oil and gas is reducing the cost of energy.” What is the consequence? The highest energy costs in the world. I will be interested to hear if he can explain that when he makes his speech.

The other issue is that growth, or the loss of growth, has a material impact on the public finances. To give the House a measure of that, a 1% change in the growth rate is £10 billion to £11 billion in the first year and then more money in the consequential years, so when we lose that growth, we lose that amount of money. But even if we imagine that we could get that growth back, it still would not be enough. It would not be enough to pay the bills that we need to pay.

So what can we do? I am afraid that, because of the size of the debt, we have no choice but to cut welfare costs. I am a great believer in our welfare system, but it should be a safety net, not a lifestyle choice. People who can work should work, and the public have little sympathy for those who choose benefits over a job. It is true today, and it has been true since I was a child on a council estate, that the British working class, who Labour used to think of as its own voters, hate it when they see one of their neighbours choosing to sit at home spending the taxes that they have earned. Low growth handicaps our ability to solve our citizens’ problems.

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[Jerome Mayhew]

I will just deliver this point and then give way.

We have the extraordinarily named “regulating for growth Bill”, which I think is oxymoronic—or perhaps just moronic—because it seems to me that the Government’s answer to anaemic growth is more regulation. We will also have “more Europe”, according to the Prime Minister.

[Noah Law]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Jerome Mayhew]

I said I would give way to the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed).

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[Noah Law (St Austell and Newquay) (Lab)]

I welcome the King’s Speech, as we continue to implement our manifesto. I note that we have already delivered more of those manifesto promises than Reform has actual policies.

I welcome the steps to make Britain a land of opportunity, built for all. That opportunity starts at home, with a good home. That is why I support the measures that we are taking to protect social housing stock and incentivise the building of more social homes via the social housing renewable Bill. At the heart of this opportunity must be a hard day’s work, and it must always be our Labour mission to repair the broken link between work and our livelihoods. I welcome the steps that we are taking to deliver a fair deal for working people, but I want targeted fiscal support behind it, to ensure that we have a tax system for growth, and a tax system that ends the carers’ tax trap and the other tax cliff edges that punish working people. We have to work on lowering the cost of employment for young people, and let them get that first crucial step on the ladder. We must let low earners take home more of what they earn, on top of the pay boost that 2.7 million workers have already had via the minimum wage increase delivered by this Labour Government.

I welcome the steps to strengthen and reform the state, and I urge the Government to go even further, faster, to get dynamism back into the apparatus of our British state and to harness its potential as an investor and co-ordinator, as we have done by empowering our public finance institutions. Those same institutions are investing millions of pounds in the Cornish economy and bringing together crucial projects that might not have come to fruition under a pure, narrow-minded, private investor mindset. Sometimes it takes the state to co-ordinate things, and to step up and say, “We are going to deliver in this industry.” This toolkit, and this ambition for the role of the state and its potential for dynamism and for rebuilding our public wealth, is needed to deliver on the ambitions for economic, energy and national security that we have outlined today.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call Jim Shannon.