The Daily Telegraph, 9 March, Sir Rocco Forte
The Budget represented a last chance for the Conservative Party, which I used to support as a donor, to shift the dial ahead of the next general election. Sadly, we can now see that strategic vision about where we are going as a country is entirely lacking.
With the tax burden heading for a 70-year high, what we saw from the Chancellor was mere tinkering. People are not stupid and they can tell that while he may be giving a bit with one hand, he’s taking away more with the other. The tax cuts are more than cancelled out by the stealth tax raid.
GDP per capita will fall yet again this year. The ridiculous Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that growth will pick up to 1.7 per cent by 2028, but that’s simply not good enough. We have had these levels of anaemic growth in this country now for years. For at least the past two decades, we’ve been following a failed Treasury orthodoxy that prevents any radical thinking. We need to do something dramatic to change things.
The economy faces a number of headwinds. One of these is monetary policy, which is tight as we seek to bring inflation down. But now inflation looks like returning to 2 per cent soon, it’s time for the Bank of England to start lowering rates.
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