BORIS JOHNSON: Rachel Theeves took aim at the British economy and – with pure cold-eyed malevolence – set it squarely on the mazzard.

This Labor budget has made me so angry I don't even know where to start. But let's start with duplicity.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves repeatedly said before the election that they would not raise taxes on workers. In fact, it seemed like their denials were so forceful that they had virtually no intention of raising taxes.

By the time we all went to the polls last July, this claim seemed vaguely plausible. We knew the Conservatives had brought inflation under control and that our economy was growing the fastest in the G7. After the appalling expenses of fighting Covid and expanding the state, this was the perfect time to reform and downsize the public sector and surely it was the time to boost private enterprise.

Labor seemed to accept this analysis. Starmer spoke of the need to aim for growth. He said he would not spend a penny more on the NHS unless there was reform. Millions of people believed Labor's promises and voted accordingly.

Rachel Reeves (or Theeves, as she'll probably be called) has no mandate for this $40 billion tax hike

It is now clear that they were lying through their teeth. They pretended to find an unexpected black hole in the public finances, but to the extent that such a hole exists, they dug it themselves after the election with ridiculous, anti-inflationary wage increases for workers in the public sector.

They have now used this flimsy pretext to raise taxes on ordinary people in the biggest and most sickening raid, in monetary terms, since records began. They didn't need to do it. Rachel Reeves (or Theeves, as she will no doubt be called) has no mandate for this 40 billion tax hike, not least because 25 billion comes from the very people she and Starmer are sworn to protect.

If you increase employers' national insurance contributions, you hit workers directly, of course. You're making it more expensive for employers to hire them, which means that, across the country, millions of businesses, large and small, will be faced with a choice. They can raise prices, reduce profits, reduce investments or simply reduce their payroll.

I fear many of them will find it easier to pay Theeves by giving their employees less money, whether by laying off staff or cutting salaries. Yet Starmer and Co have the audacity to say that this is not a tax on workers.

After four months of drifting, during which the headlines were mainly dominated by his 2,485 glasses financed by seed money or by Taylor Swift's bikers, Starmer's first major political act was to target the British economy and to throw it squarely at the mazzard. . It is now clear that Labor is not at all interested in growth or enterprise and that is why the markets took fright as soon as the Chancellor sat down.

They can see what is happening as costs pile up on UK PLC. First came Starmer's bizarre new employment laws, with authoritarian directives allowing your staff to work from home and not calling them out of hours. Today, taxes are higher on almost every private business in the country, hampering investment and growth.

On top of all this, Theeves will borrow another 140 billion over the next five years. Given Labour's impact on business and the prospects for future tax revenues, markets are understandably worried about whether the government will be able to pay it all back. So, they are demanding higher interest rates on joint ventures, or loans that will translate into higher mortgage rates and higher borrowing costs for businesses, and provide a further boost to investment and growth.

What makes the situation worse is the sheer cold-blooded malice with which Labor has meted out this punishment. The Starmers party has obviously concluded that farmers will never vote for them and have therefore stifled rural interests, making it far more costly for farmers to pass on their livelihoods to their children.

Farmers will have to do more with less, Labor Agriculture Secretary Steve Reed said after the budget.

I know Steve Reed. He was Chairman of Lambeth Council when I was Mayor of London. He has no idea of ​​the difficulties and uncertainty of the farming world, or how desperately farmers hope their children can take over the business. Shame on him for his pathetic acquiescence to this attack on the very sector he supposedly represents.

This tax on agriculture is reminiscent in its short-sighted nastiness of Stalin's attack on the kulaks and of course it will have the same result: driving people off the land, reducing the amount of food we grow in this country.

I predict that unless it reverses this policy, the new Labor government will end up, figuratively, if not literally, buried up to its neck in farm rubbish.

Finally, ask yourself what Theeves is really proposing to do with all this money. Public services will simply be water-cannoned, without any reform, without any productivity improvements, without any guarantee that any of these work-from-home utilities will provide a better service to the public.

British farmers are like every other British business in that they are asked to do more with less, while the vast and ever-growing armies of civil servants are asked to do less with more.

With this budget, Starmer and Co are abruptly taking this country in the wrong direction. They seem determined to bury the British dream in a version of high-tax, high-spend Euro-sclerosis just when we should be using our new post-Brexit freedoms to do things differently, to attract investment from around the world. and to do them better (see my memoir Unleashed, available in all good bookstores, and still this week the number one bestseller in the Sunday Times!).

It is terribly frustrating that Labor now has the majority it does; and while this result is of course completely unnecessary (as I said, see Unleashed), there is some consolation. Today, the Conservatives will finally have a new leader, and whoever wins, I am sure they will have the means to do a remarkable job.

So it's time, for heaven's sake, that everyone on the centre-right got behind this person and gave them as much support as possible to hold the Labor Party to account.

For the past four months, British politics has been dominated by unedifying discussion over Lord Allis' donations to Starmer and other Labor MPs.

That's because Labor didn't present any new ideas or programs for the country, and because everyone held their breath and waited for the budget to see exactly how far left they were going to be.

Now we know. They are not Blairites. They are very left-wing. They have no ideas, other than the same old taxes and spending, and it will end as always.

Let's support the new Conservative leader to resist this theft and put an end to it as soon as possible.