Autumn Budget 2025

Baroness Meyer Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My right honourable friend Kemi Badenoch hit the nail on the head when she described this Budget as one “sold on a lie”. It is a house of cards built on misleading claims about the public finances to justify sweeping tax rises. This is not responsible management; it is politics dressed up as economics.

This Budget does not simply mislead; it takes the country down a dangerous path, drifting towards the very collectivist policies that history warns us against. I say this not only as someone with a background in economics but as someone who, once a fluent Russian speaker, travelled to the Soviet Union many times from 1965. I saw what happens when a Government pursue centralised control, forced redistribution, the stripping away of private property rights and the erosion of individual incentive. It produced stagnation, corruption, loss of freedom, and eventually culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Innovation withered because there was no reward for effort. Bureaucracy flourished because it was the only route to advancement.

While communist elites shopped in secret underground luxury stores filled with western goods, ordinary citizens queued for hours for basic goods. As the old Soviet joke put it, “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us”. With this Budget, no one will even need to pretend to work.

People aspire to wealth for security and a better future for their children. Why else do they buy lottery tickets? It is because they dream of being rich, yet the Government fuel resentment toward the rich—the very people who invest, create jobs and contribute most to HMRC’s revenue. Punishing aspiration has never produced growth; it simply drives ambition and talent away. As has been said before, more than 250,000 people have already left the country, with many more following. Companies are relocating operations overseas. Meanwhile, public spending, borrowing and unemployment are up, productivity is flat, investment and construction are falling and growth forecasts are anaemic.

Milton Friedman put it with typical clarity:

“Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own”.


Yet the Government demand ever more of the public’s money while showing ever less discipline in how they use it. This is not stability, competence, fairness or compassion, and it is certainly not a responsible plan for growth. It contradicts the Government’s own manifesto and ignores the most basic principle of economic growth. It expands the state while shrinking the economy. How can the Government look our citizens in the eye and explain that families on full benefits will receive £18,000 more a year than some working families? I do not mean rich people; I mean hard-working families. The Budget will make families poorer, businesses less competitive and our economy weaker. These policies expose inexperience and an overconfident Administration, guided not by economic reality but by rigid ideology. I ask the Minister, have this Government learned anything from history?