Jon Trickett MP: Tories to blame for economic crisis

Jon Trickett MP writes: The global economy is sneezing. But it’s only in Britain where the economy is going down with pneumonia.

The Tory government’s Finance Bill was brought to the Commons this week.

They have tried to blame external forces for our economic problems.

The Covid pandemic and Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine – two cruel and unexpected crises – have affected every country in the world.

Britain’s situation, however, is worse than anyone – and caused by the Conservative’s embrace of a particularly vicious form of capitalism.

We never completely shed ourselves of the Thatcher government’s structures: free market, neo-liberal economics.

The Tories have been in power for 12 long years.

We’ve had austerity from the Tory/Lib Dem coalition under David Cameron and Nick Clegg; followed by a chaotic Tory Brexit under Theresa May – turning an opportunity into a shambles; Boris Johnson’s mishandling of Covid contracts and the failed ‘levelling up’ agenda; and most recently the crazed interlude of Liz Truss’s free-market fundamentalism.

Living standards have essentially stagnated at best since the Tories came to power in 2010.

Now, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has warned that with inflation soaring to a 40-year high, living standards will drop by 7 per cent over the next two years – the biggest such fall on record.

It’s time the Tories finally took some responsibility for Britain’s weak economic growth and declining prosperity.

Instead, they remain totally wedded to the deregulated free-for-all model of free-market economics.

It should have been buried after it caused the 2008 financial crash, but it has lived on in zombie form creating a lost generation of working class families in the process.

Now these same families will be hit hardest by the coming recession, which is likely to last well over a year.

Unemployment is forecast to hit 5 per cent next year, but we’ve heard nothing from the Tories about how they will support jobless workers to provide for themselves.

Instead we hear the same old rhetoric blaming the unemployed for their own predicament.

It doesn’t need to be this way.

We don’t need to accept that economic decline is just a fact of life.

We don’t need to accept that living standards must fall with each generation. It’s time for a change.

When I speak to people in our community it is clear they understand that our structural economic problems require bold solutions.

This means policies which preserve family living standards, rebuild public services and shift wealth and power away from the elite.

Investment in held back regions like ours, tax reform so that the richest pay their fair share and devolution so that communities can shape their own destinies.

That is what I’m fighting for as the MP for Hemsworth.