Keir Starmer’s fingerprints will be all over the budget disaster as well - Yorkshire Post Letters

I suspect the planned extra borrowing to cover now abandoned tax cuts was no more than the straw breaking global confidence in the UK as a debtor.

We were already heading for that debacle with the mega borrowing for Furlough, to pay the Covid unemployed 80 per cent of salary rather than the normal job seekers allowance, and that needed to fund Son of Furlough, the price cap or rather subsidy on energy.

Keir Starmer can rightly claim he would never have dreamed of taking less in tax. But he egged on the government to those larger extravagances and, given the chance, would have outdone them in this.

We see the parties bidding, through public borrowing, for the allegiance of voters who have all too willingly embraced the ethos that any financial difficulty of theirs is to be borne by the taxpayer and preferably the future taxpayer.

He tells us that Zach and Rebecca are sick to the back teeth at losing their mortgage offer. They are among the luckiest couples in the country. Had the crisis come later they would have found themselves among those facing unaffordable interest rates and negative equity, and Sir Keir’s fingerprints will be all over this.