The last few years have been tough. No one can pretend otherwise. We have weathered Covid, and we continue to deal with the instability caused by war in Ukraine and in the Middle East. But with a firm hand on the tiller, and after holding our collective nerve, we are entering calmer seas with a fair wind in our sails.
We’re making swift progress locally, with over £1bn of investment flooding into this constituency including the £108m Project Gigabit Hyperfast Broadband project, the £19m Community Diagnostic Centre, the £23m Towns Fund for Workington, the £11.5 Future High Street Fund for Maryport, and the £10m Levelling Up Fund for the Workington Gateway.
Tens, if not hundreds, of £millions will be used to upgrade the Cumbrian Coast Railway Line as part of HS2 reallocations, while hundreds of £millions has been given to our councils to bring back bus routes, resurface hundreds of miles of roads, fill thousands of potholes and upgrade junctions and transport infrastructure across the county.
The employment rate in the Workington Constituency has continued to rise, with the claimant rate remaining lower than the national average.
Nationally, inflation has fallen from 11.1 per cent to 2.3 per cent is the lowest it has been in over two and a half years. Meanwhile, wages are rising faster than inflation.
Since January, National Insurance has been cut for 27 million workers from 12 per cent to 8 per cent, saving the average worker over £900 a year.
This year alone, the Government increased the National Living Wage from £10.42 to £11.44 an hour, boosting full-time pay on the minimum wage by £1,800/yr. Meanwhile, the average weekly pay across the constituency has increased by 23% since 2019 alone.
Doomsters like nothing better than to talk Britain down. They would have us all believe that Brexit was a bad thing. But the evidence says otherwise. Not least in our ability to react much more quickly to external forces such as the pandemic.
Since 2010, the UK has grown faster than Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. Our exports are now worth over £850 billion, up 20% in real terms on 2016, the year of the referendum. The UK has grown faster than Germany. The IMF has predicted that between 2024 to 2028 the UK will outgrow the G7 economies of France, Germany, Italy, and Japan.
In just a few years, we’ve negotiated more free trade agreements than any other independent country in the world. We are the number one destination in Europe for foreign direct investment.
After being saddled with a record deficit by the last Labour Government, Conservatives stabilised the economy through careful management of public finances. Difficult decisions taken by this Government gave us the breathing space we needed to respond to Covid and rising energy prices. We now have the second lowest gross debt as a share of GDP in the G7.
The State pension increased by 8.5 per cent in April or £900 a year. Thanks to the triple lock, introduced by the Conservatives, the state pension has increased by £3,700 since 2010, helping to lift 250,000 pensioners out of poverty.
We are seeing real progress and the economy has turned a corner.
But locally, we’ve been hit by the greed and financial incompetence of Cumberland Council under a Labour administration.
This council had almost a year as a shadow authority to plan to realise projected savings of £30m. Instead their latest budget report shows they intend to borrow £66m just for day-to-day spending, meaning they expect 15% of their entire revenue budget will go on debt repayment and management.
They ramped up council tax by some of the highest rates in England, while doubling their own allowances. They used the pretext of Adult Social Care, despite Government providing £millions more for adult social care between creation and adoption of the report.
They’re telling government we need no more money for school places in Workington and Whitehaven, while dozens of children can’t get a place in their local school.
Despite record levels of Government funding, and real-terms budgets higher than ever, they’re at real risk of bankruptcy like a number of mismanaged Labour councils across the country. They’re taking us for fools.
Naturally, one hopes HMS Cumberland will make safe harbour – and that the leaky hull is not as rotten as it appears to be from the outside.
But a worrying internal report on PayPal transactions, and the launch of a possible criminal investigation around the council’s finances does not fill me with confidence.
Internal auditors found a lack of information around 790 PayPal payments to 199 unverified individuals, totalling £107,000, meaning that the council could not be confident that the payments were legitimate. These allegations emerged against a background of murkiness around the award of council contracts to companies connected to senior councillors.
If there’s found to be no corruption, then it is clearly financial mismanagement at the highest level.
Returning to the national picture, the plan is working, and we need to stick to it. The grim alternative is Captain Hindsight at the helm. A man who finds answering basic questions such as “What is a woman?” challenging. Imagine how he would respond to large-scale challenges – or how he would protect our economy in the face of global headwinds. It is bad enough that we have failing Labour council (even filling potholes when government is paying is beyond their limited capabilities): a Labour Government would be infinitely worse. Keir Starmer doesn’t have a plan.
His unfunded £28bn a year spending spree will mean higher taxes, higher interest rates and a weaker economy. And this week one of their frontbenchers told us of a further £82bn gap in their plans.
Labour would drag us back to square one and undo all the progress we have made: we must not let them.
