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Legislative Programme and Budget Statement (Wales)

No, I am going to make some progress. Tories, using the Lib Dems for cover, accept that unemployment is a price worth paying. Listen to their new independent Office for Budget Responsibility, which projects that, as a result of this Budget, employment will be down by 100,000 and that there will be lower growth this year and next. The scandalous abolition of the future jobs fund means that 11,000 unemployed Welsh young people who have already benefited, and a further 6,000 who were due to benefit, will be back on the dole. The former Monetary Policy Committee member, David Blanchflower, predicts 250,000 extra young people on the dole across Britain following cuts in the future jobs fund and other Budget measures. That suggests up to 20,000 Welsh 18 to 24-year-olds condemned—as were young people in Wales hit during the Tory 1980s and 1990s—to generational joblessness. Many tens of thousands of Welsh jobs will be lost in both public and private sectors—50,000 being one estimate. That could well prove to be a huge underestimate according to the Treasury assessment of 1.3 million jobs lost over the next five years, as reported in The Guardian. To reduce Government borrowing, Labour chose to raise national insurance contributions rather than increase VAT. Now we have both. Only weeks ago, the Tories said that the national insurance rise was a jobs tax. Last week, we found that they are increasing the tax on employees and they have put up VAT to 20%. Only weeks ago, the Prime Minister said that the latter was a tax rise that we would not see, and the Liberal Democrats condemned the prospect as a dire, draconian tax bombshell. Now they will try to force it on to the statute book—a fundamental breach of trust with voters. This is the third time in a row that a new Tory Administration have raised VAT, despite denying any plans to do so before the election: Margaret Thatcher did it in 1979, John Major in 1991 and the present Prime Minister in 2010. What a sorry hat trick.