Beware of Budgets Bearing Delusion

We await the budget with anticipation on Wednesday but beware about what Labour might claim. Some Labour MPs are claiming that “only Canada is in a better position” than the United Kingdom. This is simply beyond belief – this year the UK is borrowing more than any other country in the developed world.

The debt racked up by this Government will cost every person in the Thanet £23,000 by 2015 – should not a responsible government try and reduce this burden on every Thanet taxpayer as soon as possible?

Using the credit card analogy, everyone knows that with your credit card debt, the longer you leave it the worse it gets. It’s time government learned the same lesson. Failing to deal with Labour’s debt crisis will cause international investors to lose confidence and force up interest rates. That will increase your mortgage payments and mine. Thanks Gordon! That sounds like something that no home owner in Thanet wants to experience with a quarter of people with mortgages in fear of repossession if the rate increases.

Our borrowing is already the highest on record and almost twice as much as when Denis Healey had to go cap in hand to the international pawnshop. And our debt is still increasing day by day.

Delusion will get us nowhere. What we need is a credible plan to deal with the debt, and a strategy for growth that rebalances the economy. Saving and business investment must replace debt as the foundation of prosperity. Our exports must grow. Jobs must be created in the private sector and we must get value for money from the public sector. We need to free up our small companies by cutting red tape and lowering tax rates, supporting them financially to take on new staff, and breeding a culture of entrepreneurship that will drive forward growth and prosperity. But this Government has done the reverse, hitting our small businesses, including with a new tax on jobs, the increase in National Insurance – our local pubs are being squeezed, post offices have closed, and in Thanet our amusement machine companies are on their knees.

So much more could have been done! For example, no off-shore turbine manufacturer is based in this country, even though Thanet could have really benefited from the jobs that this could have created, and even now our local language schools are under threat from ill thought through legislation.

Rebalancing our economy from debt to sustainable savings and investment, and from the public sector to the private sector is the only answer to our dire economic problems, and with their lamentable track record, there is no way Labour can claim to be the champion of small business. The history of past Labour Governments is that they always leave us up to our eyes in debt – and the Conservatives always have the job to sort it out.