ALEX BRUMMER: An utterly dismal economic picture ...
and Reeves has only herself to blame By ALEX BRUMMER FOR THE DAILY MAIL Published: 23:00, 19 December 2024 | Updated: 23:00, 19 December 2024 e-mail 2 View comments How deceitful, how stale, Labour’s election pledges look now. They promised the country change, growth and no tax increases for ‘working people’, however slippery that term was. Instead, in six short months, the only ‘change’ this Left-wing administration has delivered is a stagnating economy and yet more inflation .
Notoriously, Rachel Reeves hiked taxes by £40 billion in her first Budget, thanks to a vicious increase in employers’ National Insurance – a move that is having a baleful effect on the very ‘working people’ she and her colleagues mendaciously promised to protect. Redundancies are zipping up, job vacancies are vanishing and higher prices are already hitting the shops. At the very least – after the Tories returned consumer price inflation to its 2 per cent target – homeowners and businesses might have looked forward to lower mortgages and cheaper borrowing.
Yet now the brakes have been applied by the Bank of England . But in almost every other Western nation, the cost of borrowing is coming down. During the election campaign, Labour made hay with claims that the Tories had ‘crashed the economy’.
Rachel Reeves (pictured) hiked taxes by £40 billion in her first Budget, thanks to a vicious increase in employers’ National Insu.
