Unemployment is rising at a deeply worrying pace.

Here, in our constituency, we’ve seen a 28 percent increase in young people claiming unemployment benefits this year. In the last 12 months, 180,000 jobs across the UK have been lost. Thirty-two thousand went in the last month alone, which now puts unemployment up to 5 percent. Excluding the pandemic, that takes us back to mid-2016, years into the recovery of the labour market after the 2000s.

These numbers are staggering and the damage to the British economy shows no sign of slowing.

It is easy to lose sight of the people behind such statistics – the Rev David Uffindell recently made that point powerfully at Farnham’s Remembrance Sunday service. This is not just about productivity or economic output. It is a social and emotional crisis for the growing number of people who now find themselves without work.

Ahead of the looming doomsday Budget, the reason is increasingly clear. This Government fundamentally misunderstands how the economy, and the country, function. It is not unique to Keir Starmer – every Labour government has left office with unemployment higher than when they entered power, including the 2.5 million people out of work in 2010.

The new rules that Labour is imposing on employment add nearly £1,000 to the cost of hiring a worker. When I visit some of the eateries at The Shed in Bordon, independent shops in central Farnham, the many farms across our villages, or our pubs in Haslemere and Liphook, it is obvious that this is not a cost any of them can absorb forever. And that figure does not include the higher minimum wage, which I know is actively discouraging local employers from taking on younger applicants who now cost the same as more experienced adults.

It does not have to be this way. This is not the result of the last Government or the series of increasingly bizarrely far-fetched explanations the Chancellor keeps asserting – it is ideology, pure and simple.

The Conservatives have announced clear proposals to support businesses by cutting tax and reviving the weakening job market by reversing the Employment Rights Bill. But the mindset matters as much as the policies. Britain needs a government that believes in enterprise and understands that growth comes from backing those who create jobs, not penalising them.

Labour’s response to falling growth and stagnating tax receipts is to raise taxes on anyone outside its increasingly narrow definition of ‘working people’, as well as on small and family businesses, farms, pensioners, tradespeople and landlords. It is an approach rooted in a misguided socialist belief that prosperity can be taxed into existence.

A government that refuses to trust business or encourage growth will only hold Britain back. The result is a country where opportunity shrinks and communities suffer, including ours in Surrey and Hampshire. We need a different path, one that fundamentally supports the hard-working and aspirational people who generate wealth and employment across directly in our area.