Welfare’s not only obstacle to growth
CHANCELLOR Rachel Reeves talks a good game on growth.
And who could argue with the common-sense policy of driving youngsters off benefits and into work?
But the British economy is flatlining because of the throttling she herself administered in her £40billion tax bomb budget.
Worse will come when employers are hammered by the National Insurance hikes due to hit next month.
Is it any wonder the nation’s finances are stalling when any signs of growth have been so ruthlessly stamped on?
Rachel Reeves is right to make the moral case for facing down hand-wringing rebels over Labour’s £5billion welfare cuts.
But to create real growth she needs to remove all the shackles that are needlessly holding us back.
The proposals for 60,000 new apprentices by 2029 are a start.
But they need to be massively turbocharged.
The Home Builders Federation says we need 300,000 more construction workers to get close to the Government’s ambitious target of 1.5million new houses.
Meanwhile, the financial squeeze on employers must be curbed, as should new laws that will impose crazy and costly workers’ rights.
Ed Miliband’s delusional Net Zero folly — which is set to cost us countless billions — must also go straight in the bin.
Only then will the Chancellor stand any chance of putting some real fuel back in our tanking economy.
Outage outrage
THE catalogue of blunders over the Heathrow Airport substation meltdown is worthy of a West End farce.
As we reveal today, a report based on National Grid statistics gave the North Hyde substation a 99.999605% reliability rating as recently as December.
An outage lasting an hour was also said to be likely only once every 346 YEARS.
Yet we were left the laughing stock of the world on Friday after the failed substation went up in flames, causing the cancellation of more than a thousand flights which disrupted almost 300,000 passengers.
Now it emerges Heathrow itself was warned ten years ago that the airport was overly reliant on limited power sources.
On the evidence of Friday’s chaos, it seems nothing was done.
Heads must roll for this disaster.
And Sir Keir Starmer must order an urgent inquiry into the sustainability of the rest of our grid.
Before another key part of our infrastructure blows up in our faces.
