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  • 26/11/2023
Shadow Chief Secretary Darren Jones claims the Autumn Statement was a "tax raising budget" despite government claims of it being tax cutting. Report by Blairm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn

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00:00 have highlighted is that at the kind of political argument level, the Conservatives are saying that
00:04 this is a tax cutting budget, where in fact is actually a tax raising budget. They've raised a
00:10 lot of extra taxes in the small print in the budget, but also families on average were paying
00:15 more than £4,000 a year in tax under the Conservatives before the cut in national insurance.
00:19 So whilst a couple hundred quid is welcome, you're kind of giving with one hand whilst you've already
00:24 taken away much more with the other. Public services need to be modernised as well. We can't
00:28 just keep throwing money at a broken system. I mean, there are big questions to be answered.
00:33 Let's take the healthcare system, for example. In cash terms, there's been some more money going in
00:38 recently, albeit after years of real terms cuts, and there are more doctors being employed, but
00:43 there are fewer patients being seen, and there's an enormous backlog in the health system. So just
00:48 throwing money at these problems doesn't actually fix them. You've got to roll up your sleeves and
00:52 do the hard work, and that means it will take time. But we're very clear in the Labour Party
00:56 that after 13 years of the Conservatives in government, there are deep structural problems,
01:00 both in the economy and in our public services, that we're going to have to fix if we get the
01:05 chance to serve the country after the next election.

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