Rishi Sunak’s final act in the Commons as leader of the opposition was one he clearly enjoyed. The outgoing Conservative leader had what is normally the unenviable task of responding to the Budget just minutes after it had been delivered, before the small print reveals the real story. Rachel Reeves had helped him quite a bit with this, though, by announcing or hinting at a lot of what was to come over the past week or so. Sunak could also dodge the demands of Labour ministers to offer an alternative plan, as he’s off in just a few days and will be replaced by a new leader who will at some point have to answer that question.
So the outgoing leader of the opposition focused his criticism of the Budget on what he claimed were Labour’s ‘broken promises’ and a failure to announce policies that would secure the growth Reeves is pinning all her hopes on.
The Tories will need to push back against the Labour ‘black hole’ narrative about their own legacy
He was very energetic in delivering this critique. ‘On the day that he took office, the Prime Minister said that he wanted to restore trust to British politics with action, not words. Well, today, his actions speak for themselves with a Budget that contains broken promise after broken promise and reveals the simple truth that the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have not been straight with the British people.’ He added that the Conservatives had warned that Labour ‘would tax, borrow and spend far beyond what they were telling the country’, and that this Budget confirmed that warning.
He also accused Labour of ‘fiscal fiddling’, and said the way the Budget would hit businesses meant the growth Reeves was banking on would not materialise. ‘The only way to grow the economy and to create wealth is for people to put in more, so when you create a negative environment for business, when you undermine confidence in our country, when you vilify and penalise people for doing exactly what we need them to do, which to invest, take risks and work hard, you don’t create growth. You hold back growth.’
Depending on who replaces Sunak, the Conservatives will either remain at this reasonably high-level analysis of the Budget, or drill down into more granular detail about the individual policies and spending decisions. But what they will also need to put a great deal of effort into is trying to push back against the Labour ‘black hole’ narrative about their own legacy. A new leader gives the party a chance to move on from that, but Sunak knows well from the amount of time he had to spend answering questions about Liz Truss that it doesn’t guarantee the attacks won’t stick.
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