2016 Budget: The political reaction

16 Mar 2016

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has responded to the changes announced within Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget speech, commenting that the Budget ‘has unfairness at its core’. 

Responding to the latest economic figures, Mr Corbyn stated: ‘It’s a recovery built on sand and on a Budget of failure.’

He also rebuffed the Chancellor’s statement regarding the creation of more than 150,000 jobs since the Autumn Statement: ‘Low paid jobs do not bring in the tax revenues that the Chancellor needs to balance the books’.

However, the Labour leader voiced his party’s support of the Chancellor’s decision to implement a new sugar levy: ‘If we as a society cannot protect our children from high levels of sugar and all that goes with it with the later crisis of health, cancer and diabetes, then as a House we have failed the nation’.

Furthermore, Liberal Democrat Economics Spokesperson Susan Kramer has labelled Mr Osborne’s Budget ‘sweet and sour’: ‘His sugar tax may seem sweet, but his hidden cuts are sour.'

‘He has missed his targets and is making ordinary people pick up the pieces. Once again his words simply don’t match his actions.’