‘Tories have picked country’s pockets’
RACHEL Reeves accused Chancellor Jeremy Hunt of having “picked the pockets” of the entire country by deploying a “raft of stealth taxes” in his autumn statement.
The shadow chancellor said Mr Hunt was attempting to “take the British people for fools” by seeking to claim the Conservatives are not responsible for the “last 12 years of failure”.
Ms Reeves drew upon US soap opera Dallas and The Police’s 1983 hit Every Breath You Take as she criticised the economic record of the Conservatives since 2010.
Responding to the autumn statement, Ms Reeves told the Commons: “In the last hour, the Conservatives have picked the pockets of purses and wallets of the entire country as the Chancellor has deployed a raft of stealth taxes taking billions of pounds from ordinary working people.
“A Conservative double whammy, that sees frozen tax thresholds and double-digit inflation erode the real value of people’s wages. Just one of those freezes, in the personal allowance, will cost an average earner more than £600.”
Ms Reeves earlier said the country had been given an “invoice for the economic carnage” created by the Government following the mini-budget, which was introduced during Liz Truss’s brief time as prime minister before being scaled back amid economic turmoil.
She also said the Government has forced the UK economy into a “doom loop where low growth leads to higher taxes, lower investments and squeezed wages, with the running down of public services”.
She acknowledged the impact of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, but said Britain’s problems started before then.
Ms Reeves said: “The Chancellor and Prime Minister are trying to convince us that Britain faces problems that are nothing to do with them, that the mini-budget which imposed a Tory mortgage premium, put pensions in peril and trashed our reputation around the world - was all just a bad dream.
“It’s their Bobby Ewing strategy. Downing Street as Dallas. Old cast members return as if nothing has happened, with tangled plotlines to keep the audience.
“But the truth is it has lost all credibility and everyone knows it is long past time that this series was cancelled.”
In a nod to The Police, Ms Reeves also told MPS: “It is a familiar tune - every mortgage they raise, every cut they make, every tax they hike, the Conservatives are costing you.”