SHADOW Chancellor Sir Mel Stride has said that Rachel Reeves should resign for misleading people and breaking manifesto commitments.
He told the Camilla Tominey Show on GB News: “I don’t think you should run around constantly asking for everybody to resign over everything. But I think if we’ve reached the point where this government in opposition made a lot of very clear commitments, including in their manifesto, then promptly junked a lot of them and did different things in office, and has now arrived at a point where, once again, we are led to believe they will be putting up taxes on hard working people, which is something that they said they wouldn’t do. Then, yeah, I think it’s time for her to step aside, I’m afraid.”
Asked when she should resign and who should replace her, he said: “I’ll leave that for others to think about. But I think a position does finally become untenable if you go into a general election saying that you’re not going to put up taxes on hard working people that you then do that, because that’s what National Insurance on employers actually did back in October of last year.
“Then you have an emergency budget in the spring, in March, and you say, ‘that’s it, end of, we’re not going to be coming back for more’ and so on, not putting up taxes on hard working people and then another six months later, that appears to be exactly what you’re going to do. I’m afraid there is a limit, I think, to everybody’s patience in those circumstances.
“I’ll leave that to others. I mean, the Prime Minister is still in his position. When all this happens, if it happens, then it’ll be for whoever is Prime Minister at that time to take that decision.
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“I am absolutely solid on the fact that it could be a man or a woman. It makes no difference. This isn’t a question of gender. It’s a question of economic competence. I think all this mansplaining business is a bit of chaff. It’s a bit of a distraction to try and get away from the basic facts, which we’ve got unemployment at a five-year high, we’ve got anaemic, flatlining growth, we got inflation that’s almost double the level it was under us, and we’ve got an economy that’s in a very bad position, saddled up with debt.
“We’re paying 100 billion a year just on servicing that debt at the moment, and yet this government’s going out and borrowing more money and spending more money and driving up inflation and putting us in a very precarious situation.”
He added: “Rachel Reeves has been the author of her own misfortune. She put it was her who chose to load a load a load of taxes on businesses and kill growth. They talked down the economy. They borrowed and spent a lot of money, which has driven up inflation and interest rates. And it’s therefore no surprise we’ve ended up in this parlous situation.
“The situation during the last few years of the last Conservative administration were that we had Covid which shrank the UK economy by over 10% overnight. You’d have to go back to the Great Frost of 1714 to have had any sign of that kind of shock hitting our economy. And of course, we had the Ukraine, Russia war that put up inflation at the back end of 2022 to over 11% and we had to bring that down.
“So nobody at that time was suggesting we shouldn’t have been spending the money we were on supporting millions of jobs and households up and down the country. We did that, and we did it, Camilla, on the back of our previous record of having got the deficit down since 2010 when we took over from Labour. So we did it because we had a stronger economy that was able to do that.”
