UK economy shrinks 0.1% in May in fresh blow to Rachel Reeves

Transcript

00:00Quickly on the economy, shrinking by 0.1% in May. Your reaction?

00:06I'm afraid to say the Labour government, WAC, put through the biggest set of tax rises in a generation,

00:11which took effect in April a couple of months ago.

00:17And what has now happened in the two months after those tax rises?

00:20The economy has shrunk. This is now two months in a row the economy has shrunk.

00:24That's not happened by accident. There's no global recession.

00:26It's happened directly because of the choices Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have made.

00:32They are destroying jobs. Unemployment has gone up every single month of this Labour government.

00:37They're whacking up taxes. I'm afraid they're going to put up taxes even more in October.

00:41And what do tax rises do? They kill the economy. They kill jobs.

00:45And that is why our economy is shrinking.

00:48Now, to get taxes down, we need to control the insane levels of welfare expenditure.

00:52Kemi gave a very good speech on that yesterday about getting welfare bills down.

00:57Very disappointing that Nigel Farage doesn't support that.

00:59Nigel Farage supports higher welfare spending.

01:02He thinks we should get rid of the two-child benefit cap so people can have like six children.

01:06And hard-working taxpayers have to pay for that.

01:08So I'm very disappointed by Nigel's position on the welfare question.

01:12We need to get welfare down in order to be able to control and reduce taxes.

01:16Labour aren't doing that. Taxes going up and the economy, as a consequence, is going down under Labour, sadly.