Reeves missed opportunity to boost economic growth, says Sir Mel Stride

SHADOW Chancellor Sir Mel Stride has said that Rachel Reeves in her Spring Statement has missed an opportunity to lay out a plan for boosting economic growth.

He told GB News: “Well, it’s a massive missed opportunity. We’ve got a very stagnant economy, anaemic growth. We’ve just seen in these forecasts, unemployment revised up for this year, next year and the year after at the same time that growth has been revised down substantially this year.

“She had an opportunity today to come forward with a proper plan to sort that out. We said we need to control spending, particularly welfare spending, getting people off benefits and into work. If you do that, you can both bear down on the deficit and the debt, but also you can reduce taxes, particularly on businesses, because they are the engines of our future growth.”

Asked if the Conservatives bore some blame, Sir Mel said: “We had two major seismic events, of course, that happened during that time. We had Covid that shrank the UK economy by over 10% overnight, and we got us through that, preserving jobs through furlough.

“And we also had very high inflation because of the Ukraine, Russia war, and we got on top of that. In fact, inflation was bang on target on the day of the last general election.

“The story here is a government that’s come in, taxed businesses to the extent that they’ve destroyed a lot of jobs. We’ve got unemployment at a five-year high, particularly for young people. It’s really bad.

“They borrowed and spent huge amounts of money that has stoked inflation, kept interest rates higher for longer as a consequence, and that’s all at the heart of why we’ve got this slow-growing economy. They need to control spending, control the welfare budget, in particular, get people off benefits into work, and get taxes down and get the economy moving.”

On the possible economic effects of the conflict in the Middle East, he said: “We don’t know where this is all going to lead, but if it does lead to much higher energy costs for a significant period of time, that will stoke inflation, it will damage global growth, and of course, it will also mean that borrowing costs will be going up, and we’re already seeing that in the gilt markets.

“Now, if you add all those things up together, that is a big headwind that our economy may now have to face into. And you then have to ask the question, how strong is our economy, or how fragile is our economy? And this government has created a fragile economy that’s going to find those kind of challenges really difficult.”

He added: “They are not responding appropriately to the defence challenge. They should be putting forward a plan to get to 3% of GDP by the end of this Parliament. I think that has to be the minimum position.

“We heard nothing about that whatsoever from the Chancellor today as regards the way in which the government is handling the Iranian situation. Well, the answer is extremely badly.

“They’ve ended up in a position where they are now permitting, which is the right thing, to allow the us to use our bases, but having fallen out entirely with the US president in the meantime, that is our most important relationship, and for that to have soured as dramatically as it has is not good for our country.”