DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Budget must put UK's growth first
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With party conferences over, attention has shifted to one of the most important - and dangerous - Budgets of recent years.
Andy Burnham's unmandated leadership has taken the Government and the country in a Marxist direction.
The question now is just how bad will John Healey's first Budget be?
Labour's class-war agitators have made very clear they want to see businesses, the middle classes and prudent savers hit hard.
Their politics of envy dictates that more cash should be squeezed from the better-off in order to hand it out to the indolent, in the form of ever-more generous benefits.
In addition, Burnham needs countless billions to pay for his spendthrift fantasies of renationalisation and his well-intentioned - but vastly expensive - desire to improve elderly care.
By stark contrast, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch used her conference speech to appeal to the overtaxed middle, and has devised a set of policies aimed squarely at easing that burden.
British businesses need urgent relief, too, and the Chancellor should heed the advice set out by the chief executive of Marks & Spencer, Stuart Machin, in today's Daily Mail.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham with his Chancellor John Healey. With party conferences over, attention has shifted to one of the most important - and dangerous - Budgets of recent years
It is almost unprecedented for the head of a leading company to intervene in this way so close to a Budget.
As the boss of one of Britain's greatest brands, Mr Machin knows his stuff.
He pulls no punches in describing Labour's last efforts under Rachel Reeves as 'a disaster', and then sets out a common sense six-point plan to free up investment and growth in the UK's retail sector, which he rightly describes as the 'engine of the everyday economy'.
Elements of Mr Machin's recipe for recovery include addressing the 'disastrous' rise in employers' National Insurance contributions and ditching the 'patently ridiculous' bottle and can return scheme, due to launch next year, that will cost retailers millions to administer.
Meanwhile, City leaders have warned that businesses could pull out of Britain if things don't improve.
Faced with an economy stifled by the incompetent handling of his predecessor, the new Chancellor has vanishingly little room for manoeuvre.
It is absolutely essential that he takes counsel from the giants of British trade and industry as he prepares his Budget speech, now just 18 days away.
Yet this is a Government that values dogma over wisdom - and, depressingly, is likely to rush headlong into making the same ruinous mistakes.
Red flag for Greens
The result of the Holborn and St Pancras by-election shows that voters can still be trusted to reject extremism in all its forms.
Zack Polanski at the Holborn and St Pancras by-election count on Friday morning. Mr Polanski insisted he could defeat Labour as polls closed on Thursday, but he eventually trailed in more than 3,000 votes
Last Sunday's egregious motion passed by the Green Party - which called for Israel to be replaced with a single Palestinian state - is likely to have played a key role in the humiliation of Zack Polanski.
He has been left vulnerable by his own party's sickening excess, and little over a year since taking on the leadership his position is in doubt.
Polanski's Jewish ancestry has been used by some Greens as a defence against allegations of anti-Semitism, but any gentile who succeeded him would have no such alibi.
The party's intolerance would be fully exposed for all to see - which for the sake of British democracy would be no bad thing.
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