Contributions
1,402 recent contributions in Hansard
HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerI thank the hon. Lady for that passionate intervention. The best way to get people out of poverty is through work. To the point made by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerThe right hon. Gentleman is being very generous with his time. Does he accept that on 4 November, the Chancellor knew that there was an upgrade to the state of the public finances…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerI thank the right hon. Member for that observation. I have been cautioned by the Chair as to the language—“misleading”—that I use, but it was clearly misleading for the Chancellor…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerMy right hon. Friend is right. To be more accurate, we can see it even from Pluto. He is also so right about the loss of jobs in hospitality; about 90,000 jobs have been…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerI will take one final intervention, and there is none better than my right hon. Friend.10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerThe hon. Gentleman makes excellent points, and I will come to the issue of the market-moving effects of some of the comments made by the Chancellor. On the point that he rightly…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerI invite the hon. Gentleman to look back a bit further in time, before the triple lock was introduced by the Government of my party, to the time when his party was last in office.…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerMomentarily—I assure the hon. Gentleman that I will come to him. What Labour has done in the meantime with this Budget is to take entirely the wrong decision, which is to tax all…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerThe hon. Lady is absolutely right. There is another change to the inheritance tax regime that will be equally as destructive as the agricultural property relief changes, and that…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerMay I give the hon. Member a basic lesson in economics? In 2010, when my party came into office, we inherited a deficit at over 10% of GDP—as any economist will say, that is the…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerI think I have a jack-in-the-box over there. A jack-in-the-box is great to observe, isn’t it? I am not sure that is the case with the hon. Gentleman, but I might take what is…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerMy right hon. Friend is absolutely right. In her heart, I do not believe that the Chancellor really thinks the right decision was to scrap the two-child benefit cap—I genuinely do…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerThe steps, as the hon. Gentleman terms them, that his party is taking to get the deficit down are to borrow ever larger sums of money—half a trillion more than was laid out in the…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerI will in a moment. It should be pointed out, of course, that that is a fiddled fiscal target. It is not the fiscal target that we were working to—the same definition of debt. It…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerI think the less said about the socks the better, Madam Deputy Speaker.10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerWell, no. The reason there is the obsession with fiscal headroom is that this is the Chancellor who set up too little back in the day, blew it all, had to rebuild it, blew it all,…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerYes, not bad, but I have to say that the tie runs in a close second—that is pretty shocking too. I now turn from the substance of the Budget to the chaotic pantomime that we had…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerThe reality is that back-loading tax-paying and squeezing spending, as the Government are doing, simply pushes off the inevitable. The evidence shows that, despite its huge…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerI just ask the hon. Gentleman what he thinks the effect of increasing taxes on hard-working people does for poverty. Any economist will say it drives poverty up. There is also the…10 Dec 2025HANSARD Conduct of the Chancellor of the ExchequerThree times might be a bit too much—we will come back to the hon. Gentleman later.10 Dec 2025