This is a Budget for Benefits Street & you’re going to be paying for it! Reeves has broken her promises and hiked taxes by another £26 billion. All to fund more welfare and keep Labour MPs off her back. No one will trust her again.

Britain now faces the WORST inflation in the G7. Why? Labour’s tax hikes & spending sprees have pushed up prices & killed growth. @Conservatives will restore discipline: cut waste, balance the books, bring inflation down & get Britain growing again. My piece in the @Telegraph👇

The summer is drawing to a close. It’s been a good one. The weather has been great – unless, of course, you run a farm. But as the holiday months give way to cooler evenings and longer shadows, the signs are already pointing to an autumn of discontent. In a few weeks, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, will deliver her second (or arguably third) Budget in less than a year. The last two were sold as bold resets, but damaged confidence and worsened the economic outlook. This one is rumoured to bring more tax rises – stealthy and not-so-stealthy taxes that will hit homes, pensions, small businesses and family inheritances. We’ve been here before but the lessons have not been learned. Last November, Reeves told a room full of business leaders at the CBI conference that she would not be “coming back with more borrowing or more taxes”. Now, after a £70bn spending surge, falling tax receipts and a £50bn black hole she dug with her own shovel, she is doing what she said she wouldn’t do – coming back for more taxes. The problem is not just the scale of Labour’s tax plans. It’s the fact that they were avoidable. Britain did not need to become the only G7 country with rising inflation, stalling growth and surging borrowing costs. We got here because Labour stuck to its own ideological instincts – more spending, more government, more tax – without any serious plan for growth. Labour is going wrong because it is following its principles. We went wrong when we failed to follow ours. This is not just a line to take. It’s a reflection on what the last few years have taught us. The Conservative Party is under new management. We know what went wrong, and we have the experience to fix it. We learned the hard way what happens when budgets aren’t balanced, based on hope rather than reality. Sadly, the country is now learning what happens when people with lots of rhetoric, little political understanding and no business experience are given free rein over the economy. We must not make this mistake again. Labour’s instincts have always leaned toward redistribution rather than dynamism. That’s exactly what we’re seeing now. With employer National Insurance hiked, growth contracting and government spending outstripping tax receipts, Reeves’ answer is to raise even more, targeting pensions, homes, and savings. Meanwhile, gilt yields are at their highest in 25 years. Investors are treating Britain as riskier than Italy or Spain. That is the price of her economic mismanagement. I reject the idea that higher taxes are inevitable. Labour is not dealing with a pandemic or a new war in Europe like we did. Its tax rises, whether on family farms or VAT on private schools or family businesses, are a political choice – and they are the wrong one. Conservatives take a different approach. We believe in cutting spending, not raising taxes. We believe the state should live within its means. That means a full review of public spending, a serious commitment to deficit reduction, and a freeze on the constant expansion of government. These are not easy decisions, but they are the responsible ones. We would also resist attempts to raid the wealth of hard-working families. The so-called “death tax”, abolishing the seven-year inheritance rule, is an attack on those who do the right thing. Likewise, taxing the capital gains on main homes, or stripping away pension tax relief, punishes people for saving and planning for the future. Growth won’t return through tax raids and political slogans. It comes through the private sector – through job creation, investment and enterprise. That’s why we would back targeted tax cuts. It’s why we want to make things easier for employers that stimulate growth and investment. It’s why we would cut red tape, reform housing and energy, and remove the barriers stopping Britain from building again.

Labour said Conservatives didn’t negotiate nicely enough with the unions.   So, they gave them a budget-busting 28% pay rise.   One year later…and the strikes are back. Turns out Labour can’t negotiate. Who knew? (We did)   When Labour negotiates Britain loses 👎

Let’s set the record straight. The idea that Conservatives did nothing on grooming gangs is simply false. We set up the 2023 gang taskforce. It found 4,000 new victims and arrested 807 perpetrators last year. These astonishing figures led us to believe only a full national inquiry could join the dots. Before that: - In 2020 we launched investigations in places like Rotherham - In 2018, Sajid Javid forced the collection of ethnicity data for these crimes, while David Lammy now Foreign Secretary smeared him as “pandering to the far-right”. - In 2014, we commissioned the Jay review into Child Sexual Abuse. After that inquiry reported in 2022 we saw the recommendations (like having a cabinet minister for children) did not go far enough hence the 2023 taskforce. Let me be clear, Labour are NOT doing this because they’ve had a change of heart. We have run petitions and campaigns in Labour constituencies every time Labour MPs voted against this inquiry. And now they are all pretending they wanted this all along when just last month these same Labour MPs dismissed this issue as ‘dog whistle’. But this is not a victory for any political party. This has all taken too long and not gone far enough. This is a victory for survivors who deserve justice at last.