Budget Resolutions

Andrew Rosindell Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Con)]

It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West (Dame Chi Onwurah), but I am afraid that I have to disagree with what she has said this afternoon. I am sorry to say that this Budget will not improve the lives of my constituents in Romford, who are hard-working people who pay their taxes and contribute to society and who do not want the state to take money out of their pockets in the way this Government are doing.

The people of Romford are market traders, small businessmen, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, City workers and company directors. They are the kind of people who will set their alarms early each day to get up for work to earn an honest living to support their families. Yet this Budget will hold my constituents back, stifle growth, increase the burden on hard-working families and demonstrate what seems to be a complete disregard by the Chancellor for supporting the genuine aspirations of the British people.

The Government are taxing people beyond that which is reasonable or sustainable, while showing no serious attempt to reduce the size of the state, cut back the over-bloated public sector or get people off a life of benefits and back to work. This Budget has radically increased taxes on working people and the freezing of the income tax threshold is, I am sorry to say, nothing but an underhand method of taking yet more tax from my constituents. In fact, 800,000 pensioners will be put into the 40% tax bracket. Pensioners in my constituency will be poorer, and I can tell the Minister that they will resent that.

The tax burden is now the highest it has been since the second world war, and my constituents will rightly ask what they are getting in return for this additional payment to the state. The truth is Britain is spending way beyond its means, and our Government appear incapable of making the serious cuts that are essential to restore our finances. The Conservative Government before should have done a lot more as well, but this Government are compounding the problem and making things far worse. If we carry on taxing and spending like this, our economy will continue to fall into a downward spiral. We need a radical change of approach, or I fear Britain will face bankruptcy.

Margaret Thatcher rebuilt our economy in the 1980s based on sound money, living within our means, cutting taxes for hard-working people, reducing the size of Government, reforming the labour market and making it flexible, curtailing the power of the trade unions, abolishing exchange controls, and creating an enterprise culture that generated prosperity and incentivised wealth creators for many years to come. That approach led to decades of economic prosperity, which was inherited by the Governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown only for it to be mucked up by their Labour policies, leaving the Conservatives to start to rebuild the economy once more.

The first woman Prime Minister got it right, and the first woman Chancellor of the Exchequer should now take a leaf out of Mrs Thatcher’s book. It makes no sense whatsoever for the Chancellor to freeze rail fares and give bumper pay rises to the public sector while raising taxes to the highest level in living memory to pay for them. This is economic illiteracy. Then, there are the millions for electric vehicles, representing yet more subsidies for the green agenda and more money thrown at the failed ECOS—employee car ownership schemes—experiment. The British people are no longer willing to fuel the fantasy of net zero to the detriment of our British industry. This is not economic ambition; this is an ideological obsession which now has little support. My constituents of Romford have no time for the net zero agenda any more. They can see that it is only making Britain poorer, with much pain for little gain.

The Government’s social engineering taxes are without doubt what Winston Churchill described as the philosophy of envy. VAT on private schools has added additional pressure to the state sector and has been the cause of the closure of large numbers of private schools. It has been so harmful to children and to the standing and success of our education system at home and abroad. The family farm tax is another example of how the Government’s policies are causing misery and harm to our rural communities and to families who for generations have farmed the land to feed the nation. It should be cancelled, and the Government should apologise to our farmers.

We now have a new wealth tax disguised as a levy on property, which represents a dagger to the heart of private property. This is an attack on the very notion of ownership. The truth is we have a massively bloated welfare state, and I have no confidence that the Labour Government will seriously tackle that issue. It is time to get back to common sense and sound economic management, so let us remember what Margaret Thatcher achieved for our country.