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Taking advantage of our Brexit “freedoms” will boost prosperity and counter claims of economic “gloom”, Jeremy Hunt will say in a keynote speech today.
Speaking at Bloomberg’s European headquarters in London at around 9.20 am, the Chancellor is expected to say that the UK “should not shy away from the biggest challenge we face which is our poor productivity”.
The speech is expected to set the scene for the upcoming Spring Budget due on 15 March.
Mr Hunt will say: “Our plan for long-term prosperity tackles that challenge head on. It is a plan necessitated, energised and made possible by Brexit which will succeed if it becomes a catalyst for the bold choices we need to take.
“Our plan for growth is a plan built on the freedoms which Brexit provides. It is a plan to raise productivity.”
It comes as the chancellor is expected to announce new post-Brexit reforms in the coming months which he suggests could unlock £100 billion of private investment in the UK this decade.
The chancellor is set to strike an optimistic tone, saying that “declinism about Britain was wrong in the past — and it is wrong today” and claims of economic “gloom” are based on “statistics that do not reflect the whole picture”.
“Like every G7 country, our growth was slower in the years after the financial crisis than the years before it. But since 2010, the UK has grown faster than France, Japan and Italy. Since the Brexit referendum, we have grown at about the same rate as Germany.
“If we look further ahead, the case for declinism becomes weaker still. The UK is poised to play a leading role in Europe and across the world in the growth sectors which will define this century”.
According to the Daily Mail, the chancellor will also call for a new focus on “four Es” — namely, enterprise, employment, education and “everywhere”. The latter being a code for levelling up.
In the run-up to Mr Hunt’s speech, Andrew Gwynne, Labour’s shadow public health minister, accused the Conservatives of “running down the country” as he rejected the claim that some people are guilty of “talking down the country”.
Asked about Hunt’s suggestion that people should be more optimistic about the UK, Mr Gwynne told Sky News: “It is all fine and well saying that people are talking down the country, I don’t believe that anybody is talking down the country, it is the Tory Government that is running down the country. We have had 13 years of the same messaging.
“Tory chancellor after Tory chancellor has talked about the need for growth, the need for productivity, the need for investment over the long-term, the need for infrastructure, the need for levelling up.”
Mr Hunt is also expected to stress the value of British hard work and graft. He will say: “Our plan for the years that follow is long-term prosperity based on British genius and British hard work. [And] world-beating enterprises to make Britain the world’s next Silicon Valley.”
The speech follows an all-day cabinet summit at Chequers, the prime minister’s Buckinghamshire country house, amid political uproar over Nadhim Zahawi’s tax affairs. The Times hears that the priority stressed at the summit was to bring down inflation and that the Government would continue to take “tough decisions” to do so.
The post Post-Brexit freedoms will boost prosperity, Jeremy Hunt to say in major speech appeared first on Politics.co.uk.
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