ALEX BRUMMER: An utterly dismal economic picture ...and Reeves has only herself to blame
How deceitful, how stale, Labour’s election pledges look now. 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. 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. Rachel Reeves hiked taxes by £40 billion in her first Budget, thanks to a vicious increase in employers’ National Insurance Blurred image of office workers crossing the London bridge in early morning on the way to the City of London So it is truly remarkable that Keir Starmer’s Government is now more distrusted by the bond markets than Britain was at the height of Liz Truss’s tax-cutting Budget in autumn 2022. The return of ‘stagflation’, that miserable combination of negligible growth and a rising cost of living, must – I am sorry to say – be placed firmly at the door of the Chancellor Reeves.
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