No ideas, no clue, we need change

LISTENING to Jeremy Hunt deliver his Budget yesterday, you’d be forgiven for wondering if he’d missed the last two years.

It was like Liz Truss never happened. Chancellor Hunt insisted the Conservatives were still responsible stewards of the economy who want higher growth and lower taxes.

The only snag with that argument was, well, everything about it.

The tax burden on Brits is at record levels. We’re in our longest period of economic stagnation since 1955. All thanks to the Tories.

Rishi Sunak and his Chancellor would love us to banish all memory of Truss, the inept right-wing ideologue who couldn’t outlast a lettuce but did beat our current PM in a leadership contest.

Her gaga economic policy of unfunded tax cuts trashed the nation’s finances and sent inflation, the cost of borrowing and people’s mortgages spiralling.

Hunt thinks we’ll forget this with a 2p cut in National Insurance that helps the richest the most, and the shocking price rises we were clobbered with in recent years can be forgiven now inflation has come down a bit, he suggests.

Meanwhile, our public services have been decimated by a decade and a half of brutal austerity and poverty has climbed.

Hunt – a David Cameron-era austerity minister – showed zero ambition to make the kind of investment so sorely needed to fix broken Britain. Indeed, even with a general election imminent, this was a limp Budget devoid of ideas.

When two of Hunt’s headline policies – abolishing non-dom tax breaks and extending the North Sea windfall tax – were nicked off Labour, it’s clear this is a knackered Government on its last legs.

And we’ll have our say soon enough – in a general election.

TiMe UP FoR ToRieS – PageS 4,5,6&7