Mel Stride: Really, is that it? All we got was a surrender statement from a spent Chancellor out of ideas

Sir Mel Stride is the Shadow Chancellor and MP for Central Devon.

There are moments in politics when what is not said matters more than what is. Yesterday’s Spring Statement was one of them. The country needed reassurance that there is a plan to fix our economy.

But what did we get? Silence. Shrugged shoulders. A Chancellor who seemed to believe that doing nothing counts as a plan.

Rachel Reeves stood at the despatch box and told the country that her plan is working – and therefore she does not need to do anything.

The trouble is, the facts stubbornly refuse to cooperate with the Chancellor’s narrative. The economy is slowing, businesses are shedding jobs, and households are feeling the squeeze. Yet the Chancellor chose denial over delivery.

Reeves talks endlessly about how she has brought stability. What planet is she on?

Under this Chancellor, we’ve seen tax rises, destroyed growth, vanished headroom, then yet more tax rises, and so it continues. A fiscal twister ripping through our economy.

On growth, her spin collapses entirely. The Bank of England have downgraded their growth forecasts for this year, and now the OBR have done the same. The Chancellor boasts about beating forecasts, yet last year’s growth came in at 1.3 per cent against an original forecast of 2 per cent. By any normal definition, that is failure – not success.

And then there is unemployment. The Chancellor barely mentioned it, perhaps because it now sits at its highest level since the pandemic. Under every Labour government in history, unemployment has risen. This one is no exception. Youth unemployment is now higher than the European average – the first time in a quarter of a century.

The Chancellor says our borrowing costs are falling. But does she not know that Britain’s cost of borrowing remains among the highest in the G7 – higher even than Greece? If debt were a government department, it would be the third biggest in Whitehall. That is money not going to schools, hospitals, or policing, but simply flushed away.

On borrowing itself, the truth is damning. At the election, the forecast for borrowing this year was £77bn. Yesterday the OBR said they now expect it will be £133bn.

And when it comes to bringing that deficit back down again, the numbers underpinning the government’s plans rely on implausible assumptions: deep spending squeezes and yet more tax rises in the run up to the next election, and households absorbing higher energy bills without complaint. Everyone knows it is unrealistic – surely even the Chancellor must privately recognise it. But realism requires backbone, and this government has none.

We have already seen it. Winter fuel payments: U-turn. Welfare reform: U-turn. The two-child benefit cap: U-turn. Farm taxes, family business taxes, pubs – all U-turns. Whenever pressure mounts, this weak government folds.

But despite the evidence of how much damage she has done, we saw no course correction from the Chancellor. Unless, of course, doing nothing is a convenient new way of avoiding the inevitable U-turns further down the line.

The Chancellor insists she is “creating the conditions for growth.” She’s like a dodgy estate agent standing in a crumbling building – roof gone, windows smashed, floors falling away – urging us to “just think of the potential!” But potential means nothing when the foundations have been wrecked by reckless borrowing and runaway spending.

Higher taxes, higher inflation, higher borrowing, higher welfare spending, higher unemployment. That is the record. And still, no apology. No contrition. No plan.

And despite recent events in the Middle East, the Chancellor offered nothing new on how she will fund a move to 3 per cent of GDP on defence spending. She boasts about spending billions on lifting the two child benefit cap – money going on welfare which could have gone towards strengthening our nation’s security.

It does not have to be this way. There is an alternative, as Kemi and I have set out. Control spending, reform welfare to reward work, cut taxes to unleash growth, lower energy costs and get the deficit down. A serious plan for our country.

What we saw yesterday was a government out of ideas, out of their depth, and rapidly running out of road. Britain deserves better – and the longer this Chancellor pretends otherwise, the higher the price we will all pay.

You can see Mel Stride’s response in the House of Commons here