BORIS JOHNSON: Rachel Theeves has taken aim at the UK economy and

This Labour Budget has made me so angry that I scarcely know where to begin. But let’s start with the duplicity.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves said time and again before the election that they would not raise taxes on ‘working people’. Indeed, you got the impression – so strenuous were their denials – they were barely intending to raise taxation at all.

At the time we all went to the polls last July, that claim seemed vaguely plausible. We knew that the Tories had tamed inflation, and that we had the fastest growing economy in the G7. After the horrendous expenditure of fighting Covid, and the expansion of the state, this was the ideal moment for reform and retrenchment in the public sector – and it was surely the moment for stimulating private enterprise.

Labour seemed to accept that analysis. Starmer talked about the need to go for ‘growth’. He claimed that he would not spend a penny more on the NHS – unless there was reform. Millions of people believed the Labour promises and voted accordingly.

It is now clear that they were lying through their teeth. They have been through the pathetic pretence of finding an unexpected ‘black hole’ in the public finances — though in so far as there is such a hole, they dug it themselves after the election with their ridiculous and inflation-busting pay increases to public sector workers.

They have now used this flimsy excuse to jack up taxes on ordinary people in the biggest and most sickening raid, in cash terms, since records began. They did not need to do it. Rachel Reeves (or Theeves, as she will doubtless be known) has no mandate for this £40billion tax hike, not least because £25billion is coming from the very people that she and Starmer vowed to protect.

If you whack up employers’ National Insurance contributions, you are hitting working people directly — of course you are. You are making it more expensive for employers to hire them, and that means that across the country millions of firms, large and small, will face a choice. They can put up prices, or cut profits, or cut investment – or just cut their wage bill.

Dictionary Corner

Mazzard: Common English word for head. Cassio in Shakespeare's Othello says: ‘Let me go, sir, or I'll knock you o'er the mazzard!’ 

Kulak: A farmer characterised by Communists as having excessive wealth

I am afraid a huge number will find it easiest to pay Theeves by giving less money to their employees, whether by laying off staff or cutting salaries. Yet Starmer and Co have the bare-faced effrontery to say that this is not a ‘tax on working people’.

After four months of drift, in which the headlines have been mainly dominated by his £2,485 sleaze-funded spectacles, or Taylor Swift’s motorbike outriders, Starmer’s first major political act has been to take aim at the UK economy, and sock it squarely on the mazzard. It is now clear that Labour is not remotely interested in ‘growth’ or ‘enterprise’ – and that is why the markets took fright as soon as the Chancellor sat down.

They can see what is happening, as cost after cost is piled on UK PLC. First came Starmer’s bizarre new employment laws, with the bossy-boots directives on allowing your staff to work from home, and not calling them after hours. Now we have higher taxes on nearly every private enterprise in the country, depressing investment and growth.

On top of it all, Theeves will borrow £140billion extra over the next five years. Looking at what Labour are doing to business, and the prospect of future tax receipts, the markets have understandably been worrying whether the Government will be able to pay it all back. So, they are demanding higher interest rates on the gilts, or loans – which will feed through to higher mortgage rates, and higher costs of borrowing for business, and deliver another kick in the teeth to investment and growth.

What makes it all worse is the sheer cold-eyed malevolence with which Labour have been meting out this punishment. Starmer’s party has obviously concluded that farmers will never vote for them – and so they have clobbered the rural interest, making it much more expensive for farmers to pass on their livelihoods to their children.

Farmers will have to ‘do more with less’, said the Labour agriculture secretary, Steve Reed, after the Budget.

I know Steve Reed. He used to be leader of Lambeth Council when I was Mayor of London. He has no idea about the hardship and uncertainty of farming, and how desperately farmers hope that their children will be able to take on the business. Shame on him for his pathetic acquiescence in this attack on the very sector he is meant to be representing.

This tax on farming is reminiscent in its short-sighted viciousness of Stalin’s attack on the kulaks – and of course it will have the same result: driving people off the land, reducing the amount of food we grow in this country.

I predict that unless they reverse this policy, the new Labour Government will end up figuratively — if not literally — buried up to their necks in farmyard ordure.

Ask yourself, finally, what Theeves is actually proposing to do with all this cash. It is simply going to be water-cannoned at the public services, without any reform, without any productivity improvement, without any guarantee that any of these work-from-home public services will offer a better service to the public.

Britain’s farmers are like every other business in Britain in that they are being asked to do ‘more with less’, while the vast and ever-growing armies of civil servants are asked to do less with more.

With this Budget, Starmer and Co are taking this country abruptly in the wrong direction. They seem determined to bury the British dream in a high-tax, high-spend version of Euro-sclerosis – at the very moment when we should be using our new post-Brexit freedoms to do things differently, to attract investment from around the world, and to do them better (see my memoir Unleashed, available at all good book stores, and still this week’s Sunday Times number one bestseller!).

It is miserably frustrating that Labour now has the majority they do; and though that outcome was of course completely unnecessary (as I said, see Unleashed) there is one consolation. Today the Conservatives will at last have a new leader, and whichever of the two is victorious, I am sure they have it in them to do an outstanding job.

So now is the time, for heaven’s sake, for everyone on the centre-right to get behind that person and give him or her the maximum possible support in holding the Labour Party to account.

For the last four months, politics in the UK has been dominated by an unedifying discussion about Lord Alli’s donations to Starmer and other Labour MPs.

That is because the Labour Party has brought forward no new ideas and no agenda for the country, and because everyone has been holding their breath and waiting for the Budget — to see exactly how Left-wing they were going to be.

Now we know. These aren’t Blairites. They are way to the Left. They have no ideas except the same old tax and spend — and it will end the way it always does.

Let’s back the new Conservative leader in resisting this larceny and bringing it to an end as soon as we possibly can.