UK worse off than five years ago

This evening, George Osborne will cite new research showing that, for the first time in modern history, national income per person will have fallen over a full Parliament.

When people ask the famous question, ‘are you better off than you were five years ago?’ Gordon Brown is the first Prime Minister in modern British history who has to answer ‘no’. Labour’s 2005 manifesto promised ‘increased prosperity’. That is the biggest broken promise of all. Even through the dark days of the 1970s and the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s the growth of GDP per capita was sustained in every full Parliament.

This shows that the debt-fuelled model of growth that Gordon Brown pursued for the past decade is fundamentally broken. Gordon Brown’s debt is the single biggest threat to our economic future. We need a new economic model built on saving and investment.