Sir Keir Starmer has attacked the budget as “the last desperate act of a party that has failed” as he branded Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak “the Chuckle Brothers of decline”.
The Labour leader criticised the chancellor for presiding over a recession and the highest tax burden in 70 years – and accused Mr Hunt of using the budget to “give with one hand and take even more with the other”.
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The chancellor announced a 2p cut to national insurance and abolished the current tax system for non-doms, which has been a Labour policy for some time.
Sir Keir called the move, which is expected to raise £2.7bn a year, a “short-term, cynical political gimmick” – adding there was not a “more obvious example of a government that is totally bereft of ideas”.
The Labour leader said Mr Hunt was a chancellor who “breezes into this chamber in a recession and tells the working people of this country that everything’s on track”.
“Crisis? What crisis? Or as the captain of the Titanic and the former prime minister herself might have said, iceberg? What iceberg?” he joked.
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“Smiling as the ship goes down, the Chuckle Brothers of decline, dreaming of Santa Monica or maybe just a quiet life in Surrey not having to self-fund his election.”
Sir Keir said Britain deserved better than a “Rishi recession” and claimed the Tories had “maxed out the nation’s credit card”.
And calling for the government to confirm a May general election, he added: “It’s time to break the habit of 14 years – stop the dithering.”
Mr Hunt unveiled his budget – expected to be the last before the general election later this year – after speculation in the media pointed towards a possible cut in income tax to woo voters.
But the chancellor resisted calls from Tory MPs for income tax to be cut and instead stuck to reducing national insurance further from 10% to 8%.
Mr Hunt said that, combined with the reduction in national insurance in the autumn statement last year, the average worker would be £900 better off.
In his statement responding to the budget, Sir Keir said his party would support the cuts to national insurance because it had “campaigned to lower the tax burden on working people for the whole parliament”.
But he accused Mr Sunak of breaking a promise he made when he was chancellor that the basic rate of income tax would be cut from 20 to 19p in 2024.
Elsewhere in his budget, the chancellor earmarked almost £6bn for the NHS with artificial intelligence set to be used to “cut form-filling for doctors” in a digitisation drive – although Labour pointed out that Mr Hunt promised to make the NHS paperless by 2018 when he was health secretary.
Other headline measures include extending the 5p cut to fuel duty for another 12 months and maintaining the price of beer, wine and spirits until February 2025.
The High Income Child Benefit Charge threshold will also increase from £50,000 to £60,000 while the higher capital gains tax rate on property will fall from 28% to 24%.
