There’s so much crazy stuff online these days that you don’t know what to believe. Someone sent me an utterly convincing video clip from what looked like an African village, where a group of villains were about to kidnap a young girl – when a lion comes from nowhere, and jumps on them, and sends them flying.
Hooray. Fantastic. Then there was some CCTV footage of a mugger creeping up on some young woman – it looks like China – and just as he grabs her bag she turns round and pow! Hong Kong Phooey!
She turns out to be a kung fu master, and her handbag is a lethal weapon! Exit the baddie, clutching his head.
Or there is some lovely footage from what appears to be a doorcam in Canada, where a toddler is sitting on the porch and a black bear snuffles up behind the kid – only to be chased away, in a flurry of snarls and howls, by the family Labrador.
It’s all wonderful, heartwarming stuff. But is it real?
I expect there were many who asked the same question this week when they heard that Rachel Reeves had received an utter mauling from the leader of the Opposition.
Did that really happen? Or was it just AI? My friends, I can tell you, having exhaustively reviewed the evidence and having consulted eyewitnesses, that this footage was entirely dinkum. What you saw was what happened.
Kemi demolished that Labour Budget – and she sent Reeves and Starmer limping from the chamber. She exposed the mugging for what it was, while it was in progress. She channelled the rage of the British public, and raised the standard of revolt.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch responding to the Budget in the Commons on Wednesday
She gave us all a sudden, surging hope that one day the misery will end. The reason that Kemi was so authentic and so credible is that she summed up, pretty concisely, what millions of people know instinctively is true. Labour is now in an economic doom loop, a vicious circle of tax rises caused entirely by the incompetence and political cowardice of Reeves and Starmer.
This Budget has again clobbered millions of strivers – small businesses, homeowners, pensioners with modest savings, hard-working people of all kinds. She has put up taxes by another £26 billion or so, on top of and largely because of the unnecessary £40 billion hit in the October 2024 Budget. Taxation as a share of national income has reached a new record – just when unemployment is rising, confidence is falling and when we should be doing all we can to cut taxes and regulation, and stimulate growth and investment.
Reeves and Starmer have flagrantly broken their promises on tax – of course they have. But that is not what drives us crazy.
What hurts and enrages people is that it is all so unnecessary. All this – as Kemi brutally explained – is the result of Labour choices. When Reeves and Starmer came into power, they found inflation at about two per cent and unemployment at record lows. But instead of recognising that post-Covid Britain needed to continue the work of reducing public spending, and especially welfare, Labour lurched in the opposite direction.
They water-cannoned money at their union chums, with zero gains in productivity, and they paid for it all with swingeing new taxes on jobs, of a kind that no one expected. Winded by this punch in the guts, business started to lose confidence, and as everyone can now see, Reeves’s first Budget led to a drop in hiring, a drop in investment and a rise in unemployment.
As the latest figures confirm, we are now seeing a serious brain drain, for the first time since the 1970s, as hundreds of thousands of talented people actually start fleeing Britain. To make matters worse, Reeves and Starmer then rattled the bond markets by their complete spinelessness over public spending.
When they U-turned on reforms to the winter fuel allowance and disability benefits, it dawned on the world’s moneymen that the government in Britain was now controlled by Left-wing Labour backbenchers, and was no longer capable of acting in the national interest. That loss of Reeves’s financial credibility has been disastrous for the entire country.
Confronted with Labour’s weakness in controlling spending, the world’s moneymen have done what they always do. They began to charge us higher interest rates, as the price of lending to Britain. That is ruinous.
Higher interest rates for UK bonds or gilts mean that we are forced to divert more and more cash from public services to servicing our debt, while Reeves has become more and more desperate to reassure our lenders.
Have you ever known a Chancellor who spent so much time talking about tax? Month after month we have heard almost nothing from the Treasury about enterprise, or deregulation, or growth, or the potential of AI to cut government spending.
It has been all about tax, tax, tax, and which particular variety of pain she is going to inflict on the productive parts of the UK economy. Her rhetorical obsession with tax has of course depressed animal spirits, reduced economic activity – and reduced the tax take! See what I mean about doom loop?
Rachel Reeves pictured outside 11 Downing Street with the red box before delivering her Budget
So why does she do it? It’s not because she is some tax-obsessed socialist sadist who hates wealth creators of all kinds (though I suppose it might be, a bit). The reason she endlessly drones on about tax is because Reeves has so badly blown her credibility that she is engaged in a ghastly war of nerves with the markets.
She talks about tax because she constantly has to convince them that she is willing to put taxes up, to pay for Britain’s increases in public spending and borrowing. And when they look at some of those spending commitments in the Budget, people get even angrier.
Reeves is now choosing to spend and borrow more because she wants to appease her backbenchers, and not because she wants to do the right thing for Britain. The welfare bill is already out of control. It is simply indefensible to ask families on low incomes, who are not on benefits, to pay even more for the children of families on benefits.
Lifting the two-child cap is not popular; it is not right; and she is only doing it because she and Starmer genuinely fear that they are at risk of defenestration by their own Left-wing backbenchers.
The whole country is now paying for Labour’s mistakes, and Labour weakness – and the doom loop downward spiral continues.
Kemi got all this over in the Commons, punchily and memorably. As she pummelled the hapless Reeves – who looked positively sick by the end – we suddenly glimpsed a happier future, where we get back to a sensible Conservative tax-cutting, deregulating, enterprise-backing approach to the economy, where a government actually talks about ways of creating wealth and not just confiscating it.
No, folks, it wasn’t a mirage in Parliament this week. It was a leader of the Opposition on fire. She lucidly explained the outrage at Labour’s self-inflicted doom loop, and she painted a brighter future.
That is her job. My advice to all is buy shares in Kemi, and the old blue-chip and massively underpriced stock called the Conservative Party.
