Kemi Badenoch has warned the government needs to resolve “serious problems coming our way”. Speaking a day after Rachel Reeves’ Spring Statement, the Conservative party leader has said the UK does not have the “capacity to weather” economic difficulties.
Report by Faragt. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Report by Faragt. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00This is one of the things that we've been worried about for a very long time
00:03and it's why I've been urging the Prime Minister to hurry up with a UK-US trade
00:08deal that would have protected us from these tariffs but it also brings to
00:13light what's come out of the Chancellor's statement yesterday that
00:17she's got no headroom so we don't have the capacity to weather these
00:20sorts of difficulties. That's going to reduce the tax take for the country, it's
00:24going to make manufacturing very difficult and I think that there's
00:29serious serious problems coming our way which the government needs to resolve.
00:33What we've said is that the changes the Chancellor has made yesterday are
00:37because of mistakes that she made in October so this is an error of her own
00:42making. Of course we need to reform welfare, we had plans to reform welfare
00:47which we started saving five billion pounds over the Parliament but we
00:52also had in our manifesto going even further. The number of people who are
00:56out of work is unsustainable, the levels of economic activity since the pandemic
01:00really really need to be dealt with and that's going to require tough decisions.
01:04We said that we'll support them where they're making tough decisions but
01:07actually they haven't really started yet. She is doing this in a rushed manner now
01:10because of mistakes she made briefly, you look at the way the announcements
01:13came out and even the OBR has not scored what they have done the way that they
01:18thought they would be scored so they're getting less out of it given all the
01:22upheaval. This is a government that has not thought through what it's doing and
01:26it's just reacting to circumstances. We need a proper plan and we need something
01:30that's going to get business delivering growth. It's not government that creates
01:34the growth it's all of the businesses out there and they're making life
01:37harder for them. They've put up loads of business taxes, people are not paying
01:41more in wages so families are feeling the brunt of it, their wages aren't going
01:45up, they're losing their jobs, businesses are closing. That's why the budget was
01:48so terrible.