PM has crashed the economy and left working people to pay the bill

‘The economy is not a laboratory experiment for the maddest scientists of the Conservative Party’

On Thursday night, a young woman addressed the BBC’s Question Time audience close to tears. Her mortgage had been withdrawn. The interest rate had doubled. The audience collectively gasped. The air left the room.

This was the destructive impact of last week’s kamikaze Budget already being felt. Anyone trying to buy a home or coming to the end of their fixed-term mortgage will soon experience similar. Homes will be lost. Pensions are under threat. This is a crisis made in Downing Street, paid for by working people.

I have listened to the ludicrous excuses trotted out by the Prime Minister and her remaining acolytes. The reality is simple and inarguable. They have crashed the economy by handing enormous, unfunded tax cuts to those who least need them.

The reason people are now worried about their homes and their pensions is not because of Putin’s illegal war.

It is because the Chancellor has chosen to gift a totally unfunded £40,000 tax break to those earning £1million a year.

The reason businesses are worrying about spiralling interest rates is not because of necessary action on energy bills. It is because the biggest companies have been handed a totally unfunded £17billion corporation tax cut they were not asking for.

To claim otherwise is nonsense, offensive, a deceit on the British people.

For the vast majority of those who still live in the reality-based community – tethered to gravity and maths – it is clear what has happened. The markets do not believe in the fantasy economics of untrammelled borrowing and unfunded tax cuts any more than the average person in the street does.

They do not believe in the myth of trickle-down economics, where making the richest richer magically benefits everyone else.

Eroding our tax base when there are pressures for spending is not just bad economics or childlike delusion – it is a real and present danger to economic health. It is the gambler chasing good money with bad; the smoker puffing away outside the hospital doors. It is unsustainable.

Rather than force working people to pay, Liz Truss and the Conservative Party must get back to Parliament this week and reverse their disastrous decisions. Permanent damage has been done but the only way to stop the rot is for the hubris and the excuses to end. Waltzing off to their annual conference in Birmingham to congratulate themselves while the country is in turmoil is not an option.

If the Prime Minister continues to bury her head in the sand, it will fall on others to act. Neither the country nor Parliament has had any say on these measures. That is unacceptable. The economy is not a laboratory experiment for the maddest scientists of the Conservative Party. Mortgages, pensions and family finances are not casino chips for a Government intoxicated by dogma. There are many decent Conservative MPs who know this. My message to them is that Labour will work with anyone to ensure some semblance of economic sanity is restored.

But make no mistake: whatever action is taken now, this is the moment the Conservatives forfeited any claim to careful stewardship of the nation’s finances. The pain about to be inflicted on the whole country is the result of a Prime Minister and a Chancellor wedded to a disastrous ideology.

Having seized control of the nation’s wheel over the summer they have proceeded to drive the economy off a cliff. The damage will be felt by the working people of this country for years to come. The next Labour government will do the painstaking work of fixing that wreckage – carefully and deliberately, the party of sound money acting in the interests of the whole country, not just a gilded few.