Failing Governments often try to use Budgets to get a bounce in the polls.
Rishi Sunak’s latest pitiful Budget has bounced his former Party Deputy Chairman into the right-wing Reform Party and left his polling in continued freefall.
The Tory psychodrama seems never-ending as they battle to define who they now hate most (post-Brexit) just when our country needs a laser-focused administration determined to give our children and grandchildren a brighter future.
Fourteen long years of Tory division and chaos has seen five Prime Ministers, one Lib Dem Deputy PM, £1 billion for the DUP, seven Chancellors and 12 plans for growth. But the UK economy is in recession according to the Office for National Statistics and debt has tripled over the disastrous Tory and Lib Dem period in Government since 2010.
The Tories knocked 4% off our GDP with their disastrous hardline Brexit and then allowed Truss’ experimentation with far-right ideological proposals that hit our economy – and mortgage holders – further. The latest Budget fails to address the substantial damage they have caused and will leave many people unable to trust the Tories with our economy again.
What is frustrating is that the tax burden is at a post-war high, but we experience worsening services and falling standards of living for many in Southwark and beyond.
This need not be the case and Labour’s commitment to invest, stabilise and reform will help deliver not just better opportunities for children, but the biggest housebuilding programme since Attlee, and provide for a National Care Service to work alongside the NHS and help disabled people and carers in particular.
The Tories and their allies like to claim Labour ‘has no policies’ but the Tories have already pinched a windfall tax on energy companies and tackling tax avoidance directly from Labour.
I am certain that cutting NHS waiting times will help thousands of local people in life-changing ways, and building more genuinely affordable homes is desperately needed across the country, but especially in our capital.
Labour’s additional 13,000 police officers would also mean more ‘Dedicated Ward Officers’ to help tackle the most local concerns, crime and antisocial behaviour after years of neglect by Tory Home Secretaries too busy posing for photo opportunities in Rwanda where they have shamefully squandered £400 million for not an iota of difference in the UK.
I recently met with Electrical Safety First to hear from friends of Sofia Duarte who died on the Old Kent Road in a fire caused by a dodgy e-bike charger.
I forced the Government to admit the stats do show a marked rise in deaths from faulty chargers, with 11 deaths last year alone. I am still pushing for law changes to remove dangerous or counterfeit products from online sale. Ministers must stop ignoring this serious, deathly issue and act to better protect British customers from faulty goods.
Sadly, Tory infighting seems to be blocking any attempts to govern properly and I can only hope current Ministers are removed from office soon.