Latest news with #ToryGovernment
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Embattled Rachel Reeves urges public to be patient with Labour on rescuing economy
Rachel Reeves has urged the public to be patient with Labour on the economy, saying that the change they voted for in last summer's election was 'never going to happen overnight'. The chancellor insisted she was 'impatient' to deliver and said ministers had made a start on turning things around, but there was 'lots more to do' as she blamed the last Tory government for the nation's financial problems. Her comments come just days after the Bank of England warned the public of months of sharp price rises ahead, driven by higher food costs. The central bank said Ms Reeves's national insurance contributions hike and the rise in the minimum wage were helping to push up the cost of the supermarket shop. It also slashed interest rates to 4 per cent, in a bid to boost the UK's stumbling economy. Ms Reeves has also been warned of a £50bn black hole in the government's finances, which leading economists say means she may have to raise taxes, cut public spending, or tear up her fiscal rules in order to fill. The forecasts piled pressure on the chancellor, less than 24 hours after Sir Keir Starmer pledged that this autumn's Budget would make sure 'people feel better off'. But in a piece for the Sunday Mirror, Ms Reeves cautioned that this would take time. She said her 'mission' was to 'end the cycle of decline, tackle the unfairness in our economy, give every community the chance to thrive and to make the lives of every working person better off'. But she warned: 'I'm impatient for the change people voted for to be delivered, but I have always known it was never going to happen overnight.' She hit out at the last Tory government, which Labour has accused of leaving a £22bn black hole, which Ms Reeves had said she had to grapple with when she entered the Treasury last year. She wrote: 'We know whose side we are on – the side of working people who for too long have seen promises made but never delivered, because politicians ducked the big decisions.' She also accused the Tories of presiding over ten years of 'endless spirals of chaos'. The progress that has been made so far includes trade deals with the United States, India and the European Union, she added. Earlier this week, the Bank of England said headline inflation would accelerate to 4 per cent by September, while inflation on food is set to hit 5.5 per cent between now and Christmas – putting a squeeze on household budgets. And Sir Keir Starmer opened the door to increasing tax rises this autumn, declining to explicitly rule out breaking Labour's manifesto pledge not to raise VAT, income tax and corporation tax. It came after the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) – a leading economic think tank – said the chancellor could also look at spending cuts in the autumn Budget as a way to raise the money needed by 2029-30 to remedy a £41.2bn shortfall on her borrowing targets, set out by her self-imposed 'stability rule'. To restore the almost £10bn 'buffer' that the government has maintained since last year's Budget, the chancellor would have to raise a total of £51.1bn, they warned.
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The Independent
3 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
Embattled Rachel Reeves urges public to be patient with Labour on rescuing economy
Rachel Reeves has urged the public to be patient with Labour on the economy, saying that the change they voted for in last summer's election was 'never going to happen overnight'. The chancellor insisted she was 'impatient' to deliver and said ministers had made a start on turning things around, but there was 'lots more to do' as she blamed the last Tory government for the nation's financial problems. Her comments come just days after the Bank of England warned the public of months of sharp price rises ahead, driven by higher food costs. The central bank said Ms Reeves's national insurance contributions hike and the rise in the minimum wage were helping to push up the cost of the supermarket shop. It also slashed interest rates to 4 per cent, in a bid to boost the UK's stumbling economy. Ms Reeves has also been warned of a £50bn black hole in the government's finances, which leading economists say means she may have to raise taxes, cut public spending, or tear up her fiscal rules in order to fill. The forecasts piled pressure on the chancellor, less than 24 hours after Sir Keir Starmer pledged that this autumn's Budget would make sure 'people feel better off'. But in a piece for the Sunday Mirror, Ms Reeves cautioned that this would take time. She said her 'mission' was to 'end the cycle of decline, tackle the unfairness in our economy, give every community the chance to thrive and to make the lives of every working person better off'. But she warned: 'I'm impatient for the change people voted for to be delivered, but I have always known it was never going to happen overnight.' She hit out at the last Tory government, which Labour has accused of leaving a £22bn black hole, which Ms Reeves had said she had to grapple with when she entered the Treasury last year. She wrote: 'We know whose side we are on – the side of working people who for too long have seen promises made but never delivered, because politicians ducked the big decisions.' She also accused the Tories of presiding over ten years of 'endless spirals of chaos'. The progress that has been made so far includes trade deals with the United States, India and the European Union, she added. Earlier this week, the Bank of England said headline inflation would accelerate to 4 per cent by September, while inflation on food is set to hit 5.5 per cent between now and Christmas – putting a squeeze on household budgets. And Sir Keir Starmer opened the door to increasing tax rises this autumn, declining to explicitly rule out breaking Labour's manifesto pledge not to raise VAT, income tax and corporation tax. It came after the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) – a leading economic think tank – said the chancellor could also look at spending cuts in the autumn Budget as a way to raise the money needed by 2029-30 to remedy a £41.2bn shortfall on her borrowing targets, set out by her self-imposed 'stability rule'. To restore the almost £10bn 'buffer' that the government has maintained since last year's Budget, the chancellor would have to raise a total of £51.1bn, they warned.
The Independent
5 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
The Rushanara Ali scandal exposes Starmer's double standards on sleaze
One of the reasons Keir Starmer won a landslide at the last election was voters' repulsion at the endless sleaze and hypocrisy of the last Tory government. Starmer tore into Boris Johnson time and again over his abuse of power as prime minister and refusal to deal firmly with misconduct by his own ministers. That would all end when Starmer entered No 10, we were told. And we believed him. Starmer may be dull, he may have no great vision and precious few clear policies, we thought. But he was an honest and decent man who would drain the swamp that Westminster had become under the Tories. Addressing Parliament in 2021 at the height of the so-called 'Wallpapergate' affair, when Johnson was caught taking secret loans to refurbish his Downing St flat, Starmer called the prime minister 'Major Sleaze.' Labour MPs cheered as Starmer seized the moral high ground, accusing the Conservatives of being 'mired in sleaze, cronyism and scandal.' If he won power, he would have no truck with such corrupt antics, he said. Barely a year into Starmer's administration, it is depressingly clear that little has changed. We have already had the scandal of his wife taking thousands of pounds worth of free clothes from Labour donor Lord Waheed Alli, while Starmer himself accepted free football tickets, clothes and even spectacles. We have even had a Labour MP forced to resign after being caught punching a constituent outside a pub. But it has reached a new low with the resignation of homelessness minister, Rushanara Ali. The gross double standards that led to her exit from the government – forcing out tenants from a property she owned before whacking up the rent by £700 a month and seeking new tenants when new legislation she is responsible for would outlaw such action – is bad enough. The arrogant manner of her departure – and Starmer's refusal to condemn her in clear terms – is worse. She blithely declares she had 'at all times' followed 'all legal requirements' and had taken her responsibilities 'seriously.' She was resigning to avoid 'being a distraction from the ambitious work of the government.' No mention of an apology. Judging from his ringing denunciation of Johnson you might imagine Starmer would send Ms Ali packing with a stern rebuke. You would be wrong. From a cursory look at his formal reply to her you might think Ali was being promoted not punished. Starmer thanks her for her 'diligent work' at her department, saying it will have 'lasting impact.' How mistaken he is. The only impact Ms Ali's departure from Starmer's government will have is as a reminder to the electorate that when it comes to sleaze, Labour's approach appears little different to their Conservative predecessors. As the saying goes: 'Do as we say, not as we do.'
Telegraph
05-08-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Truss to blame for Tory spending crisis, says Badenoch
Kemi Badenoch has hit back at Liz Truss, saying she was to blame for huge overspending by the last Tory government. At the weekend, Ms Truss accused Mrs Badenoch of failing to tell the truth about the last government's mistakes, including 'profligate Covid spending'. In the latest battle in the war of words between the pair, the Tory leader said Ms Truss must be levelling the criticism at herself as she was prime minister for a brief period. She told ITV Anglia: 'As a former prime minister and a former foreign secretary, she carries quite a lot of that blame. 'The party's now under new leadership. I wasn't in charge during those 14 years, she was. That's a criticism that she's probably levelling at herself.' The row started on Sunday when Mrs Badenoch said in an article for The Telegraph that Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were making 'even bigger mistakes' than Ms Truss and had not learnt the lessons of her mini-Budget. A day later, Ms Truss wrote her own article, accusing the Tory leader of repeating 'spurious narratives' to 'divert from the real failures of 14 years of Conservative government in which her supporters are particularly implicated'. These included failing to repeal Labour's Human Rights Act, draconian Covid lockdowns and allowing a huge increase in immigration. She added: 'The economy was wrecked with profligate Covid spending by [Rishi] Sunak.'Asked about these comments by ITV Anglia, Mrs Badenoch replied: 'Liz Truss reversed her own budget. If it was so great, she would have kept it.' Mrs Badenoch added: 'I'm not having a row with a former Conservative leader. I am saying that Labour has not learnt from her mistakes, from our mistakes. 'That's not a row, that's telling the truth. The important thing we need to understand is what went wrong. 'We need to live within our means. Our country is not living within our means, we're spending too much on debt and debt interest. We're spending more on welfare than we are on defence, that cannot continue.' Previously, the Tory leader had only criticised Ms Truss in private, telling her shadow cabinet in January that it would be helpful if she made fewer interventions. But in her article, she said: 'For all their mocking of Liz Truss, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have not learnt the lessons of the mini-budget and are making even bigger mistakes. 'They continue to borrow more and more, unable and unwilling to make the spending cuts needed to balance the books.' Almost three years after the mini-budget of September 2022, Ms Reeves and Sir Keir still regularly resort to blaming the mini-budget for unpopular decisions on tax and spending.
The Sun
04-07-2025
- Politics
- The Sun
Labour are inflicting open borders on us and pretty soon Britain will not be a country any more
A COUNTRY without secure borders and a national identity is not a country at all. It is just a land mass inhabited by disconnected groups, devoid of shared values or even a common language. 2 2 Tragically, that is the path that Britain is now following. Obsessed with cultural diversity, contemptuous of our heritage and seduced by the myth that prosperity can be achieved by the import of cheap labour, the political class opened the floodgates and transformed the fabric of our society, leaving many British citizens feeling like aliens in their own land. Only this week, official statistics revealed that a third of all babies now born in Britain are to foreign mothers. This has been a revolution imposed without any democratic mandate. Miserably inept Neither of the two main parties ever stood on a platform of open borders and immigration anarchy. But that is precisely what the politicians have inflicted upon us. In the Brexit referendum of 2016, the electorate voted decisively to take back control. Instead the number of new arrivals has continued to spiral out of control as the chaos of the immigration system worsens and our rulers remain impotent. The depressing reality of the current shambles was spelt out yesterday in a report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee into the Skilled Worker Visa, expanded by the last Tory government in 2022 to tackle labour shortages. The Committee was scathing about the management of the scheme, which had led to an influx of 1.2million people over the past four years, three times more than the Home Office had anticipated. Vile 'people smuggler' herds migrants onto small boat with a stick as packed dinghy evades French cops AGAIN According to the damning report, this department had failed to gather 'basic information' on whether migrants had left the country when their visas expired. Officials had shown 'little curiosity about how the route was operating' and since 2020 had refused to conduct any analysis of the data they held on this type of visa. The Home Office is clueless about the number of over-stayers here, just as it has no idea how many illegal immigrants there are in Britain. After a wave of immigration scandals in 2006, the tough-minded Home Secretary John Reid famously described his department as 'not fit for purpose'. Those words are even more appropriate, as the department limps from one controversy to another, too gripped by incompetence and dogma to change course. The Labour Government has been just as miserably inept over the small boats crossing the Channel. Starmer's promise Sir Keir Starmer came to power last year promising to 'smash the gangs' of people smugglers, but all he has smashed are the records for the size of the influx. So far 20,000 people have made the journey to England in 2025, a 50 per cent rise on 2024 and easily the highest total for the first half of any year. All Labour's measures — such as ever- greater payments for the French police or the creation of new bureaucratic agencies — have proved predictably futile. Yesterday the BBC was exulting over the action of the French in stopping one dinghy by slashing its hull in shallow waters — which proves that the authorities there can act if they really want to. But at the same time, another five boats made it across the Channel. The shocking dysfunction of the authorities was also highlighted in an investigation by this newspaper into the creation of a secret kitchen, complete with delivery teams, at the taxpayer-funded Cedar Court asylum hotel in Wakefield. This hotel belongs to the Monaco-based EC4 Group, which is set to make an astonishing £2.5billion from the public purse over the next ten years through the provision of accommodation for asylum-seekers. But having received such colossal sums, the hotel is not meant to sublet its premises for burger production or seemingly employ its subsidised residents, who, under current asylum rules, are prohibited from working. Yet the whole creaking immigration structure is riddled with abuses, which is why it is so easy to exploit. Vast burdens The Sun reported this week that a group of migrant delivery riders, staying at the taxpayers' expense at the Thistle City Barbican hotel in London, were arrested in a raid by immigration officers. Yet within 24 hours they were back on their delivery bikes. The unfairness of the system is glaring. Illegal migrants who have broken the law to reach our shores are treated with a lavish, state-organised generosity that is denied to most law-abiding Brits, who have to pay for the whole racket through their taxes, with the costs now standing at £5million a day. This is just part of a massive welfare bill for migration, where it is estimated that almost £1billion a month is spent on Universal Credit for households with at least one foreign national. In addition, there are the vast burdens imposed by uncontrolled migration on the NHS, policing, housing and other parts of our civic infrastructure. But there is little hope of change under Labour. All their political instincts are in favour of free movement. And so the disturbing transformation of our country — for which we never voted — will continue.
